Adam Dunning is an Australian singer / songwriter with an international music career between Rio de Janeiro, Melbourne, LA, and Tokyo. With a solid following across Japan (P-Vine Records / Watanabe), Brazil, Australia, Canada, and now Europe, his original songs have gained recognition internationally as “summer jazz” or "Bossa Cool". With Bossa Nova ever-present in his style, his original songs often denote a sense of the environment and humanity co-existing with the natural world.
As a jazz vocalist, Adam moved from life as a media lawyer in London in 2006 to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Over the next 5 years, his life as a composer flourished, where he began working closely with some of the great 1960s Bossa Nova composers and Carioca artists in Rio. Living in a small part of Rio, Leblon bordering Ipanema Beach, Adam developed his Bossa guitar, playing around Rio, earning the name "Australioca" – the blood of an Australian / the soul of the Carioca.
In 2009 he recorded many of his own compositions in his album Sunset Monkeys in Jardim Botanico, a small borough of Rio on the edge of Rio’s great Tijuca Rainforest. He collaborated his songwriting with the 60’s renowned Bossa Nova pioneers, Roberto Menescal, Joao Donato, Lysias Enio, and Carlos Lyra, and wrote the first-ever English versions of some of Brazil’s Bossa classics. He recorded the first-ever English version of Lyra’s "Voce e Eu", as well as writing the first ever English versions to Menescal’s "Nos e o Mar" ("We and the Sea"), and Donato / Enio’s "Flor do Mato" ("Jungle Flower"), their classic "Amazonas" ("The Amazonas"), and more. He also wrote the first ever French version of the Gershwin classic "'S Wonderful" with co-writer Manuel Guignard in Paris, the version subsequently approved by Warner Bros LA. In the Monkeys recordings, the original Bossa greats joined Adam as special guests on the new English versions of their own songs.
Sunset Monkeys was released in November 2010, and was especially successful in Japan, Turkey, Australia and Western Europe. The title track "Sunset Monkeys" includes the voice of world renowned environmentalist David Suzuki, the dramatic "Green" shakes the world’s conscience, and songs "Leblon" and "Mount Eliza" pay homage to his respective Brazilian and Australian homes.
In 2011, Adam returned to Rio yet again to record his second album “Glass Bottom Boat”, the new album appealing to humanity's conscience, imagining a world where humanity co-exists in harmony with nature where the moon, oceans, romance, and eroticism are all naturally interlinked characters. It includes Dunning’s first English version of “Amazonas” (Donato/Enio), and his “Happy New Year” - written as a get well card to Japan after the 2011 earthquake which Dunning himself was caught in. The album is deemed one of Dunning’s best works, at a point where his writings are becoming fully recognized on the world stage.
Singing in Portuguese, English, and Italian, he has recorded duets with great contemporary artists between Australia and Brazil including Cris Delanno, Bossacucanova's Alex Moreira and Rodrigo Sha, Barbara Mendes, Tash Parker, Daniela Procopio, David Feldman, Rafael Barata, Eugenio Dale, and many others.
