I met Susan Carter through a collaboration with her oboe studio during which I had the opportunity to write her a duet for oboe and English horn. I quickly learned that she was a fan of Stan Getz’s jazz samba style and she requested that I find a way to combine her love for that music with the North African sounds that I was immersed in while living in Morocco.
The piece begins with sounds evocative of the rhaita (the Moroccan cousin of the western oboe, with a distinctive piercing sound) then quickly transitions to a samba rhythm paired with an Arab-inflected melody that is exchanged between the two players and varied over a harmonic backdrop inspired by Getz’s most popular hit “The Girl from Ipanema”.
