Isabella Mendes Connects Music, Community, And Culture

“I’m so excited! Our spring recital is tomorrow!” said Isabella Mendes — the Hamden-based musician, songwriter, and staple of the New Haven jazz scene whose work is rooted in Brazilian jazz and bossa nova — referring to the culmination of her music studio’s recent semester and the kick-off of a season’s worth of musical happenings. They are set to make the summer of 2019 one that could be referred to as the summer of Isabella Mendes.

Trained in classical piano since the age of six, Mendes began performing and participating in master classes and competitions in Sao Paulo, Brazil, until the age of 15, when she moved to Hamden with her family.

“Once I started high school and joined the band and orchestra, that’s when I became a little more exposed to jazz,” said Mendes. ​“One of my jazz teachers from ECA was excited about that fact that I was from Brazil and said ​‘Oh you must know Brazilian music,’ so then I started exploring more.”

“So really when I moved here my world opened up, it was like ​‘new country, new possibilities and excitement,’” she added. ​“I started playing jazz, started studying more about my culture and bossa nova music, and also started singing.”

Mendes continued to perform in high school with the band and orchestra and was also a writer. She had already written piano compositions back in Brazil, but when she moved here, ​“that’s when I really began writing songs with lyrics.”

“At ECA it was also a great opportunity for me to open up to and learn about collaboration with other departments like theater and dance and writing. It was a really amazing experience” she said.

ECA continued to be a part of her life even after she graduated. ​“Jeff Fuller from ECA came to me after I graduated from college” — where she studied engineering and also received her MBA — ​“and asked if I would like to join a band with him and work together doing some Brazilian music with both him and Joe Carter, and I thought that would be so exciting, So I started working with them, learning more about Brazilian music and about jazz and we started doing a lot of performances.”

That band, Sambeleza, continues to perform throughout the New Haven area, with shows coming up July 26 at Best Video, August 2 at the Yale-New Haven Hospital Notes at Noon and Aug. 4 at the Whitney Center in Hamden. The trio performs Brazilian jazz — ​“we do sambas, bossa novas, and we do it with a little bit of a jazz twist,” said Mendes.

Mendes also added bandleader to her resume a couple of years ago.

“What I wanted to do was work a little bit more with some of the Brazilian musicians from New York because I felt like I really wanted to understand a little more in depth about Brazilian culture” said Mendes. ​“History, culture, and music in the Brazilian world is very connected, and so I wanted to learn more about that from Brazilian people who had just come from Brazil two to three years ago, very recently. So I immersed myself in that world and started the Bossa Nova Project.”

Mendes’s goal with that project was very specific, ​“to replicate what happened in Brazil in the ​‘60s,” she said. ​“The ​‘60s was known as the Golden Era of Brazil, and everything was going really well — musically, politically, socially — it was a very happy place and it was the birth of bossa nova. The whole idea with that is through bossa nova, they brought people together. Bossa nova I see as more of a combination of samba, which is the roots of Brazilian music that came from Africa, and classical music, that came from Europe, and then a little bit of jazz from the U.S…. It’s three things, everything coming together, so it’s very relatable to all different people.”

“I really enjoy that, and I enjoy the idea of not just having one band with set band members, but collaborating with different musicians,” Mendes added. ​“I always try to play with different people from New York, so I’ll call a different bass player and I’ll call a different drummer. It’s still my project, but there are always different people playing together. And that was the whole idea of it, because I felt like I could grow so much by playing with other people and having different experiences.”

About two years ago the project performed its first major gig in Milford. ​“We had a great concert and it was completely sold out. We got people from New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, from all over the place. There was a recording of it and video. It was the first big show and I thought ​‘This is gonna be a good thing.’”

The Bossa Nova Project continues to perform regular monthly gigs at Elm City Market’ Sunday Jazz Brunch as a trio — July 15 and August 25 are the next shows — as well as at Solun Restaurant, Bar, and Tapas in Woodbridge as a duo, consisting of her and her husband, bassist Flavio Lira.

Mendes has also begun writing music for the Bossa Nova Project. ​“It’s interesting because if you listen to my album that was released in 2015, it was completely different than this project. It’s more of a pop-jazz-independent mix of styles. Now that I’ve dove into the whole world of bossa nova and Brazilian samba, I’m starting to write a little bit more along those lines. I feel like before I didn’t have the complete language to be able to write it, and now with all this exposure and all my work with Bossa Nova Project I can now have the materials and the language to write a bit more.”

Mendes added that she was planning on premiering an original song at ​“the big show in Westport” on July 21.

“When I did a concert celebrating women in jazz through Jazz Haven in 2015, that’s when I released that album and did that concert, so now moving forward I want to celebrate a little bit more about women.”

The show in Westport at Levitt Pavilion is one of two this July — the other being a show at Cav a Vin in New Haven on July 13 — that focus on women in jazz, a topic that Mendes has become passionate about in recent years.

“At first I wanted to explore bossa nova and the world of Brazilian music, and then I realized how overflowing with men that world was,” she said. ​“I wanted to get in touch more with the feminine side in the music and collaborate with other female artists. This concert on July 21 is very important to me. I’m bringing some of the top Brazilian instrumentalists and vocalists from New York and bringing it all together. My idea was to really bring women into this concert because I feel like with any field, whether it’s engineering or business or others, women tend to be a little bit undervalued…. In many cases women also tend to be known more as vocalists, but there are a lot of women who are multi-instrumentalists. The women that are playing with me play guitar and flute and percussion and they also sing. I think it will be nice to bring that all together.”

“Really I feel like that’s been a journey to getting to know myself a little bit, coming to a new country and then finding out a little bit about my culture because before I only played classical music” Mendes added. ​“I wasn’t until I left Brazil that I started connecting with my culture…. It’s really about finding my own identity: what that means to me, what music represents to me, and how I can share that with everybody else. I’m a person that enjoys connecting with people a lot. I feel like through this journey of finding out who I am, I can connect with other people.”

The other way Mendes is connecting with others is through IM Music, her music studio where she teaches private voice and piano lessons to children and adults.

“My goal is to open a private music school, to expand upon the studio, not only giving private lessons but giving group lessons and going to the schools and connecting with the music teachers at schools and using it as complementary,” said Mendes. ​“I want to be able to collaborate with them in different ways, teaching them how to sing Brazilian music and collaborating with some local artists.”

Mendes has already conducted workshops, one at Ridge Hill Elementary School where she brought Brazilian music to the students, including teaching them how to sing in Portuguese. She collaborated with local musician Luke Rodney for another workshop at the same school and taught some of his original music. She also presented a workshop about Brazilian music in a synagogue in Danbury.

“I want to officially have it as a business and really make that into my own, because that’s always been my dream, to connect with music and find the role of music in my life. I always knew it was there, but I’m still learning what music means to me,” Mendes said. ​“It’s a risk, figuring out how you can you make it your own and still do the practical things in our life that we all need, but music is my priority. I’m following my dream.”

Mendes is also beginning to write music again. ​“I kind of stopped for a little bit, and now I’m starting to get back into it,” she said.“I definitely want to be able to put all this that I’m working through into writing because I have so many ideas right now.”

One of those ideas is for a book for children. ​“I have compositions that I wrote when I was younger and I want to make that into a book for my kids to learn the songs that I wrote.”

And then there are all of those performances coming up. ​“While I built my studio I focused mostly on that and teaching and stopped a little bit with the gigs…. Now I want to go back to the performance a little bit while continuing the education part of it.”

She is just as excited about the performers she will be working with as she is about her own performances. ​“The artists I’m working with in Westport — which include Liz Rosa, Denise Reis, and Anggie Obin — are fantastic,” said Mendes. She is also looking forward to her first time playing with Fernanda Franco — a vocalist, pianist, and percussionist from New Haven — at the July 13 Women in Jazz show at Cave a Vin on State Street as part of the Jazz Block Party as well as playing with Jocelyn Pleasant of The Lost Tribe when she joins Sambeleza at the Yale-New Haven Notes at Noon show on August 2.

“I think it’s inspiring to work with other talented musicians and really bring that all together,” said Mendes. ​“It’s an all-around amazing experience because I look up to them a lot … they went through their own path. I took a little break, I kept going, but now that I’m switching my focus more to music, seeing other women doing what I want to do is really inspiring to me.”

More information about any of Mendes’ upcoming shows or IM Music can be found on her website