Person · Male

Guilherme Franco

From
São Paulo, Brazil
Active
1946–2016
Releases
2
  • jazz

About

Guilherme Franco (November 25, 1946 – November 12, 2016, in São Paulo, Brazil) was a percussionist in the jazz and world fusion music genres.

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Franco performed on the albums of many notable jazz musicians such as McCoy Tyner, Lonnie Liston Smith, Don Pullen and Woody Shaw. Between 1971 and 1976 he was an occasional additional member of Keith Jarrett's "American Quartet", and was also a member of Paul Winter's Consort.
In 1981 he started a samba school in New York City and a power samba group called "Pe De Boi" (a Brazilian slang term for a good musician, literally meaning "foot of the bull"). As a result, he began playing many gigs in the New York City underground scene of the 1980s with the likes of David Byrne and David Johansen among many others.
He was said to practice music 14 hours a day.
Franco suffered a stroke in March 2015 and was cared for at the Hospital Arnaldo Pezzuti Cavalcanti in Mogi das Cruzes, São Paulo where he died in November 2016.

From Guilherme Franco on Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Member of

Discography

Albums 2

Links

Tags

  • percussionist

Identifiers

ISNI
0000000055195336

Data from MusicBrainz, saved 8 Nov 2026. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, covers from the Cover Art Archive and Apple Music.