Geovane P. Santos was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, picked up the guitar at eleven, and began studying music seriously at fifteen — classical guitar, harmony and counterpoint, choir conducting, and jazz history. After completing his bachelor’s degree in Brazil and playing in bands and orchestras there, a meeting with New Orleans guitarist Carl LeBlanc convinced him to cross the equator: in 2015 he moved to New Orleans for graduate study in jazz at the University of New Orleans, earning a master’s in Music Composition under Steve Masakowski and Brian Seeger. In 2017 he received the Louis Armstrong Jazz Composition Award through the ASCAP Foundation, and he is now pursuing a PhD in Latin American Studies at Tulane, reading the music of Brazil through history, race studies, and music theory.
As a player, Santos works the 7-string and classical guitars as a soloist, accompanist, and bandleader, moving between bossa nova, MPB, samba, and straight-ahead jazz with original compositions of his own. His debut album, Jobim (2019), reimagined the songbook of Antônio Carlos Jobim with a quartet; Purple House (2021) paired him in duets with his mentor LeBlanc; and Ciranda (2023), his first album of all-original music, drew praise from OffBeat as “a tour-de-force for a young artist fully inhabiting his new home.”
On the bandstand he leads the Geovane Santos Trio — most often with Nick Benoit on bass and Fernando Lima on drums — a working group with regular nights at Salon Salon on Carondelet Street, plus appearances at Snug Harbor and a longtime presence at the Spotted Cat. He brings a scholar’s depth to the gig, too, folding notes on bossa nova’s political history into sets of classic melodies and New Orleans-inspired originals.
