Mario Caribe: The ace of bass

BACK IN the mid-1970s, a young teenager is being driven home from school in Sao Paulo, Brazil, when on his father's car radio he hears for the first time Weather Report's classic number, Birdland. Mario Caribe had been playing a bit of bossa nova guitar, but Jaco Pastorius's maverick fretless bass work on Birdland took his breath away and turned his life around. Thirty-odd years on from that first, seminal encounter with innovative jazz bass playing and a world away from his Brazilian home town,

Since arriving in Scotland in 1996 with his wife, Dlia Lee, and their two (now three) children, Caribe has become an eclectically creative and much-requested presence in this country's bubbling jazz scene. That ubiquity will be reflected tomorrow when, in the filling shed of Islay's Bunnahabhain distillery, the atmosphere laced with expectancy, not to mention the delectable aroma of used casks, the bassist will kick off solo, gradually being joined by other musicians with whom he has played over the years. Eventually, there will be ten on stage, marking a decade of this gloriously idiosyncratic festival, at which top jazzers from home and abroad can be found playing in such unlikely venues as malt distilleries, village halls, a Gaelic college and even an RSPB visitor centre (Birdland, again).

Caribe may have chalked up ten years of taking the Islay ferry out of West Loch Tarbert, but a glance at his gig list over the past few years shows not only a player much in demand, but one clearly disdainful of musical boundaries, playing straight-ahead jazz with such powerful home-grown talent as trumpeter Ryan Quigley, pianist Brian Kellock, saxophonists Tommy Smith, Phil Bancroft or Paul Towndrow and the exuberant folk-jazz excursions of Colin Steel's Stramash big band, or teaming up with such notable transatlantic visitors as tenor sax man Jimmy Greene (with whom he plays this weekend) or Brooklyn pianist David Berkman (with whom he plans to cut an album early next year). Then again, you might find him in Shanghai accompanying the legendary Scots jazz singer Carol Kidd, returning to his Latin American roots with his band Tangolano or on the road with fusionists as diverse as Moishe's Bagel and Salsa Celtica.

Caribe has never been one to allow labels to stand in his way. "Jaco was my first bass hero," he recalls, "and I'm still completely enthralled by him." But as he shifted to acoustic rather than electric bass, the young Caribe's listening expanded to take in such innovative players as Eberhardt Weber and Charlie Haden, as well as powerful mainstream giants such as Ray Brown, Charlie Mingus and Paul Chambers.

He gave up gigging for a while to study composition at university in Sao Paulo – "My colleagues were, like... why are you doing this? What is this classical music thing? But I've always been interested in music as a whole." While still in Brazil he was playing everything from Duke Ellington to Afro-Cuban music.

In 1996, he and his wife Dlia Lee were thinking about a change of scene and, partly through a family Scottish connection, Caribe arrived here with a view to doing a master's, perhaps at Edinburgh University. Visiting the Glasgow Jazz Festival, he came across a flyer for the now defunct National Jazz Institute initiated by Tommy Smith and became the recipient of its first scholarship, while Tommy got him his first teaching appointment, at Strathclyde University. Another jamming acquaintance, trumpeter Eddie Severn, was musician in residence at Edinburgh's Napier University, where Caribe ended up both teaching bass and studying composition. He still teaches, and has been invited to join the new jazz faculty being set up by smith at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

Today living with his family in West Lothian, he regards Scotland as home, and a place that has given him much musically: "It's a confluence. When I came here I was very well received – I suppose I was one of the few Latin American musicians living here and my influences were appreciated. To be received so well is a blessing to anyone moving to a new country.

"The Scottish jazz scene is small but so vibrant and I got to know most of the people and really found it fertile ground." Also, he has been involved in projects with traditional musicians, further broadening his appreciation and experience . His quintet album, Bacuris, of five years ago was an eloquent statement, all bounding Latin rhythms and rich tonal colour, which had one London broadsheet hailing him as "a promising new leader from a scene bristling with them," and his forthcoming studio collaboration with New Yorker Berkman and Scottish jazzers Laura MacDonald, Kevin MacKenzie and Tom Gordon should be well worth waiting for.

In the meantime, however, tomorrow's exercise at Bunnahabhain will see him joined, gradually, by old collaborators such as Phil Harrison, sax player Phil Bancroft and trumpeters Quigley and Steele, as well as New York saxophonist Jimmy Greene. Also appearing will be his Latin jazz outfit Sexteto del Fuego, as well as vocals from Islay's own Sheena Swanson, and he promises to dispatch his audience back outside (to breathtaking views of Jura) with Let The Good Times Roll. "The Islay Festival is special because it's so small, and because audiences and musicians all have to take the ferry to the island, and it uses a bunch of places that aren't usually music venues. It's a fantastic atmosphere, with everyone coming together to make things happen."

Among those making things happen over the next three days are Tommy Smith with visiting Swedish pianist Jacob Karlzon, Colin Steele's jazz-funk outfit Melting Pot with singer Subie Coleman, Sheena Swanson combining with Stephen Duffy, pianist Paul Harrison and the ubiquitous Caribe in a programme of Billie Holiday numbers, while American Jimmy Greene teams up with the home brass of Chris Grieve and Ryan Quigley for some classic Blue Note sounds.

The Black Bottle Islay Jazz festival runs from this evening until Sunday. See www.islayjazzfestival.co.uk