Pop Music

Brazilian jazz guitarist Laurindo Almeida begins a three-week run tonight at Elario’s nightclub, atop the Summerhouse Inn in La Jolla.

Almeida was introduced to U.S. audiences as a member of legendary band leader Stan Kenton’s second orchestra in the late 1940s. Later, he hooked up with multi-reedman (and fellow Kenton alumnus) Bud Shank, with whom he pioneered Latin-American and jazz fusion in the middle 1950s--years before Stan Getz’s ground-breaking “Jazz Samba” album.

Since then, Almeida has toured and recorded with Argentine tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri and pursued a productive solo career that’s earned him 10 Grammy Awards.