Modern Brazil - s/d

they normally sound like this, "Even though this isn't our favorite of [so and so]'s album, we still think it's great and you should buy it"

Never ever trust a Dusty Groove review 'cuz they refer to free jazz as "hippy dippy."

but i thought that was obvious

Pretty spot on, Jason except you forgot the obigatory exclamation point!

Does anyone else find this extremely annoying!

Yes but

You're right, above, about Dusty Groove and their reviews, although the store itself in Chicago is kinda nice and they do have good stuff if you're into classic '60s Brazilian pop and suchlike...

i actually have a song by Otto ona comp, it's an intensely moody tribute to Bob Marley and it really rolls, i've liked it for years.

Jason, you should definitely check out Chico Science – I think he was brilliant and his death seemed like the end of era and maybe death of mangue (friends of mine in Brazil who work with music were devastated when he died). The scene seems to be going strong tho and his old band Nacao Zumbi is still putting stuff out. I’d recommend checking out Chico first and then if you like him going for NZ. Start with “Afrociberdelia” as it should give you a sense of whether you want to go further or not.

Lately I’ve been enjoying DJ Dolores & Orchestra Santa Massa, which has traditional fiddle, etc over various beats. I don’t love the entire entire album but the first couple of tracks get me grinning ear-to-ear whenever I listen to ‘em. The DJ approach to mangue.

Zuco 103 takes a different approach to mixing electronica with Brazilian. It is more clubbeats oriented as opposed to mangue etc. and live at least Zuco are huge amounts of fun. Their new album has gotten pretty good reviews , but their first “Outro Lado” had only about 4 songs I really liked with the rest being ‘eh’ so I’m waiting for a free copy.

Lenine’s album “Na Prassao” is great. Samba mixed with rock and electronica is a v. basic description. Most people I know who are more knowledgeable about the contemp. scene than me are are big fans.

Others I like if not blown away - Pedro Luis A Parade (again mixing electronica/brazilian but from a more rock perspective) Suba (pretty strightforward samba & bossa nova over loops, “Sao Paulo Confessions” is his big work – he also produced, among others, Bebel’s "Tanto Tempo")

Seen Max de Castro but have no memory of his performance (generally not a positive sign)

From the second generation of Brazilians, as mentioned above, Bebel is doing good stuff. Only heard one track by Moreno Veloso so can’t really comment on him tho that one track was v. funky. (incidentally, one of the biggest Brazilian labels Trama (who I think put out Otto) is run by the son of Elis Regina)

All I can think of for now, will post later if brain comes back online.

anyone heard either and have comments? they sound pretty cool from the amg and amazon reviews.

i recently picked up Rita Lee's first album "Build Up" and have been really digging it. it was produced by one of the guys from the Mutantes, so it is still a little wacky, but has more of a big band orchestration thing going on for the beginning of the album at least (near the end it gets a bit more rocking). but i swear, the more recent album of hers i bought (from the mid to late 90s) was the pits. her charming puns would be totally lost on me since i don't speak Portuguese.

any word on those two artists i just mentioned upthread?

the marquee and amabis discs are nice enough. nice being the word to watch.

anybody listening to the new Ceu album?

I'm curious about it, but have not heard it yet. Not that I was wowed by her prior one, but it wasn't bad.

Yeah I only felt the need to download one of the tracks from the last album. I'm 11 tracks into this one (out of 13), and it's pretty good!

Nobody here into Curumin?

i am now!

i actually have a song by Otto ona comp, it's an intensely moody tribute to Bob Marley and it really rolls, i've liked it for years.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Wednesday, March 12, 2003 12:10 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark

^^^^
Listening to this great track, "Bob", right now: I have it on a comp too, What's Happening in Pernambuco, which is great throughout -- but I don't think this was out in 2003, so what comp do you have it on?

I had no idea it was about Marley.

I believe Curumin is still to make his best album, but I really like the other two

Curumin was appearing in Central Park (summerstage) NYC with Juana Molina Wednesday night. Alas, I'm in DC and no gig here

Has anyone listened to the new Céu album? Sounds to me like a dub version of a Brightblack Morning Light record with some Brazilian textures - obviously. I think sometimes her music lacks punch, but it's a good album overall.

ed mottas that bad?

No, but I can't say he does outstanding work.

You're so 2 weeks ago, Shin

hahaha, I really am.

this guy in NYT wrote nice things about her
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/music/23ceu.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=c%C3%A9u&st=cse

Orquestra Contemporânea de Olinda,from Northeast Brazil is touring the US now with its rock meets frevo(Brazilian brass band) meets ska sound

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/arts/music/03atrium.html

,Apr 1 2010 8:00P
LINCOLN CENTER - NEW YORK New York, New York
Apr 3 2010 10:00P
SOB´S - NEW YORK NEW YORK, New York
Apr 5 2010 6:00P
KENNEDY CENTER - WASHINGTON Washington, Washington
Apr 6 2010 8:00P
RUMBA - CHICAGO Chicago, Illinois
Apr 7 2010 8:00P
PERCUSSION AND BRASS WORKSHOP IN NEW ORLEANS New Orleans, Louisiana
Apr 8 2010 8:00P
workshop Maciel Salú, Tiné and SHOW in New Orleans New Orleans, Louisiana
Apr 9 2010 8:00P
HEINEKEN TRANSATLANTIC Miami, Florida
Apr 16 2010 9:00P
AUDITÓRIO IBIRAPUERA - SP São Paulo, São Paulo
Apr 17 2010 9:00P
Teatro - OI FUTURO IPANEMA Rio de janeiro, Rio de Janeiro
Apr 18 2010 8:00P
Teatro - OI FUTURO IPANEMA Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro

Here's a youtube of 'em. The Washington DC show Monday night is actually from 6 to 7 and is free.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXMj4VQ3-_E

I'm looking forward to seeing them tonight.

http://festivalbrazil.southbankcentre.co.uk/

Anybody see anything in this fest?

I want to again mention that Maria Rita is great. I don't quite get the neglect. Maybe she's too simple? Anyway, she's certainly not in the tropicalia vein, and she's not doing crazy electronic/metal/atonal mashups, so that may contribute to a lack of interest.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/arts/music/06latin.html?ref=music

I confess that I have never previously heard of Ivete Sangalo, Brazil's biggest pop star, who just sold out a show at Madison Square Garden in NYC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PMRrt8Wwbw&feature=fvsr

I'm trusting the word of Jon Pareles, from the NY Times, that she's the biggest current Brazilian pop star.

The encore part must have been great.

I liked that more than I expected to. Why haven't any of our local Brazilian experts mentioned this person before (or have they)?

Sangalo is definitely "not my beach" as they say in Brazil. Her tinny rhythms and shrill voice used to get right on my nerves when I was over there.

I still need to listen to more acts mentioned on that Brazilbeat blog

Roge “Curyman” album made the Mojo list and was just nominated for ilx list ballot . Yay!

It's in my top 10 for sure!

thoroughly enjoyable record, my kinda revivalism

woop

Roge with a drummer doing a 1 hour free show at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPRPM8r_ZNE

I nominated it! That style of music is so rich and beautiful, it shouldn't need to be revived; and he's really adept at it.

he didn't really 'revived' anything, folks. he's a regular guy doing regular MPB by any measure! it's good, but it's weird to see such laurels, idk...

otm

not much available in the anglosphere about mpb between the 80's and now tbf, and even some of the brazilian sources I've read don't stray outside that timeframe, boomer hegemony I guess

by revivalism I meant that the mpb sound on his album has a "retro" tinge to my ears, just listen to the strings

there's probably a good/boring explanation (apart from the quality of the material) for why this particular record is getting so much exposure

I've enjoyed the album but my immediate thought was how close it sounds to Clube da Esquina and how much it relies on arrangements when I rather expect a strong vocal personality and some kind of messing-up with the formula from modern MPB. So my uneducated guess is that it gets exposure from precisely not following the program.

Roge's music definitely harks back to some sort of golden period of MPB/samba, but to me it goes back further than Clube da Esquina. I feel it sounds more like late 60s albums'Travessia' or 'Milton Nascimento'. I hear bits of 60s Caetano and Chico Buarque in there too.

Roge album is produced by Thomas Brenneck , best known for playing guitar with retro soul Sharon Jones and producing for Daptone. Plus Arthur Verocai did string arrangements and he’s best known for his 1970s work.

I'm a dummy when it comes to hearing about recent MPB so I'm just the target for the Roge album crossover, I guess.

xp i will admit that that's compelling evidence for calling this a "retro" project, and i certainly don't mind anyone thinking of it that way

but for whatever reason i think of this basically as excellent MPB (so my 'otm' above was really more about the first part of fpsa's post)

Seeing good reviews for film documentary "They Shot the Piano Player" about the life of and disappearance of Brazilian samba/ bossa nova/ jazz pianist Francisco Tenorio Jr on tour in Argentina in 1976 at age 34. Some big name Brazilian musicians are heard in this doc talking about him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQwajCDIwcg

yeah, keep meaning to see that

https://fabianodonascimento.bandcamp.com/album/ohayou

very chill, not too brazilian vibe tbh, might also work in Ambient/post/nu/new-age jazz - S/D

Yeah, he's amazing, got to see him live last year, played solo with some pedals and loopers and such... really beautiful music...

not modern but i just got served something by the algo and for once i was v pleased

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU9YOiDCKi8

new roge tracks with menahan street band are good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg2rFlo0u_g

Thanks for sharing. It appears the Menahan St connection had already been established on the Curyman album which, as Curmudgeon said above, was produced by Thomas Brenneck.

Old-school samba and bossa singer/songwriter/guitarist Joao Bosco, who is now 77, has a new album out and is doing a small US tour with a Miami gig May 31, a DC gig June 1, and then some NYC ones. There may be more.

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/music/joao-bosco-miami-beach-concert-19987764

Nothing new but I'm discovering Luedji Luna, who is from Salvador de Bahia, through her first album (Um Corpo No Mundo, 2017) and it's exceedingly nice.

saw her in concert last year, was very good

Amaro Freitas "Y'Y" didn't wow me on first listen but those into avante- minimalist classical music, Shabaka Hutchings on flute and other jazz folks plus a bit of Brazilian rhythms may like it more than I did.

paulo cesar pinheiro is a heavy hitter and has been doing it since the '70s, but i was recently hipped to his 2010 record "Capoeira De Besouro"

holy shit man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlfCeNgzT4Q

not sure if fpsa is still around, but curious if they or anyone else has a recommendation of where to start in his catalogue. as far as i can tell he's mostly a songwriter and does a lot of collaborations.

oh and i should add that rogê covered one of his compositions on the "curyman" LP from last year

https://g1.globo.com/pop-arte/musica/blog/mauro-ferreira/post/2019/04/28/paulo-cesar-pinheiro-festeja-70-anos-de-vida-com-uma-das-maiores-obras-da-musica-brasileira.ghtml

This article lists 70 songs of his that they think folks should know. He's known for his poetic lyrics

His allmusic bio is interesting too

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/paulo-c%C3%A9sar-pinheiro-mn0000028375#biography

xp holy shit is right. you've hit paulo cesar's juice with that one, really. cdb's an anthology if i ever heard one

beeing obvious now, from there maybe try his collab w baden os cantores da lapinha, much more samba than capoeira, mind you

thanks y'all

i've been so incredibly busy but hope to have time to share what i've discovered at some point

for now: the baden powell collab from '70 is great. my fav discovery so far though is the s/t from 1974.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXSzHpKbZtU

^ "pesadelo"

Anitta’s 2025 GRAMMYs submissions:

• “Funk Generation” — Album of the Year, Best Latin Pop Album
• “Mil Veces” — Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Pop Solo Performance, Best Music Video
• “BELLAKEO” — Record of the Year
• “Bota Niña” — Best Global Music Performance, Best Music Video

critic Joshua Minsoo Kim who writes for the Wire, Pitchfork, & Tone Glow submitted as his number 1 album to The Wire-

Caxtrinho - "Queda Livre" which is Brazilian samba and out there /avante-garde jazz

Doh! I discovered vocalist Luiza Brina album -Prece too late to nominate for ilx poll. Classic samba mostly with some idiosyncratic touches though

That Milton Nascimento w/ Esperanza Spaulding album is more abrasive and out there than I expected

And no one else on this board thought of adding Luiza Brina to the 2024 list . Hmmm. She was on Lars G of NPR’s best of list

Luiza Brina got a B + on this just released list of top 2024 Brazilian albums. I need to check out more of the A ones

https://brazilbeatblog.wordpress.com/2025/02/12/favorite-albums-of-2024/

Best of 2024 Brazil albums just posted

One of the A albums on the list —Thalin, Cravinhos & VCR Slim, Maria Esmeralda (A)

Doesn’t quite wow me as much as a B+ one Luiza Brina - Prece. Admittedly her album is more retro traditional than the other one but I still like it better.

I skimmed this thread from the start, and back in 2002-2006 I'd have said Cordel do Fogo Encantado were by far my favourite current Brazilian band. I still love the first three albums, but the 2018 reunion one didn't grab my attention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xYpDxi4s_g

That video has some wild elements- the rolling fireball and the carnival animal. The carnival chanted vocals and percussion are good enough there. Reminds me of a little of what I heard on my one visit to Brazil when we went to carnival in both Bahia/ Salvador and Rio de Janeiro

I'd say their music takes inspiration from coco (which, like samba, has afro-indigenous roots, but is distinct from the music you'd hear in Bahia or Rio), but they are very much their own thing. They also draw from "cordel" literature (folk lit hanging on a line in a street market). You can hear that type of music during carnival in the Northeast, but I think the video depicts one of their many other folk/religious festivities.

This song specifically is about the rain after a long drought: "The thrush of backlands moves me when it sings / For three months it goes on singing, but without singing it goes for nine / because it has the duty only to sing when it rains".

"My folks, don't depart on the Itapemirim ["narrow stone path" in Tupi-Guarani] / Because even nearing the end, there is improvement in our backlands / The skies are silent now, but there will be such thunder / that shakes clumps off a mud hut"

"When it rains in the backlands, the sun lies down and the water rolls on / the toad coughs up foam / wherever it treads, the cow gets bogged down / and abundance hides the bag that hunger begs with"

And it ends like this:

"Mr Drover, it rained over here / Mr Drover, it rained over here / it rained to pelt us down / it was so much water my ox swam"

The thrush of *the backlands

Literatura de cordel is the equivalent of pulp, in spirit if not in actual means of production, right?

no, cordel is not the equivalent of pulp

Cordel is a much more direct descendent of early modern European chapbooks, both in terms of format and themes - you find poetry, songs, stories about folk heroes and religious figures, etc. Think Lampião and his band of bandits, Padre Cícero, Antônio Conselheiro and the War of Canudos, or other archetypical characters in the popular imagination

https://i0.wp.com/memoriasdapoesiapopular.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/o-fazendeiro-que-castrou-o-rapaz-porque-namorou-a-sua-filha.jpg?ssl=1

"The farmer who castrated the young man because he went out with his daughter" - not sure a translation conveys how specific and grounded in a very specific time and place this sounds. It's quite funny if you're familiar with it.

Live, Cordel do Fogo Encantado would often recite verses from this tradition between songs. I remember getting a kick out of a story about a small town's yearly re-enactment of the Passion of Christ - one particularly year, one of the guys playing a centurion had a little too much to drink and got carried away. Jesus kept trying to tell him to take it easy with the whipping, but that only encouraged him. "What sort of Jesus is this, who cries in front of everyone? I didn't know Christ was such a wimp!" Jesus ended up dropping the cross and charging him with kicks and punches, which quickly turned into a brawl with all sorts of biblical characters. The sheriff eventually intervened, and that was the first time Jesus went to jail instead of being crucified. The original verses in Portuguese are of course much funnier than this recap.

The music was also great live, very intense, very theatrical. I've lived in the UK for a very long time now, so I've had the chance to see most living artists I love several times, and Cordel do Fogo Encantado are still up there in the top 5-10 performances I've ever seen.

that's hilarious, and also so interesting

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/03/g-s1-2528/8-tracks-brazil-luiza-brina-milton-nascimento-esperanza-spalding

Lars Gotrich of NPR was writing about vocalist Luiza Brina last year, and other Brazilian albums last year . There's a Brina video on the link also