Velha Guarda da Portela

They've just released a new album "Tudo Azul", featuring Marisa Monte, Paulinho da Viola, Cristina Buarque and Moreno Veloso.

Please Visit Echoes of the Land aStore

Virginia Rodrigues

Kevin L. Carter reviews Virginia Rodrigues' performance in Philadelphia.

Brazilian singer Virginia Rodrigues began her gentle, subtle performance at Penn's Annenberg Center on Friday night offstage, with the lights off, singing to her pai or father, her orixà, her personally designated guide deity, Ogum, the god of iron.

In her sweet, strong quasi-operatic contralto, she chanted in her a cappella mixture of Portuguese and Nagô (liturgical Yoruba) - "Coia, coia, coia." The song laid the path for the rest of her uneven but ultimately satisfying two-hour show.

For vastly different reasons, the 43-year-old Rodrigues' presence evokes that of two other iconic Lusophone African women - the Afro-Brazilian folkloric singer Clementina de Jesus, and the Cape Verdean legend Cesária Évora.

Like the late, great de Jesus, Rodrigues is the embodiment of the spiritually anointed baiana, the black woman who knows and protects all of Brazil's religious and cultural secrets. Like Évora, Rodrigues is small, round and preternaturally dignified, a shy, unpretentious diva whose impact on the world's popular culture belies her working-class roots.

Sans her trademark braids, her hair simple and natural, Rodrigues was surrounded by a trio of admiring, protective musicians - Raul Mascarenhas on soprano sax and flute, percussionist Marcos Lobo and guitarist Fernando Mauricio. With songs from composers such as Baden Powell, Caetano Veloso and Vinicius de Moraes, the four Brazilians wove a gentle, multitextured tapestry of African-Brazilian popular and cultural music.

Rodrigues seemed affected by the cool fall weather, and she sometimes had problems hitting her highest notes and controlling her rich vocal timbre. After several songs, the show's momentum seemed to wane. But it was the samba that revived her. Throughout the evening she had showed hints of her ability to move, throwing in short circular sambas as she sang.

During "Adeus," as appropriate a despedida (farewell) as anyone from Brazil could have, Rodrigues turned up the heat both with her voice and her feet, moving briskly and expertly across and around the Philadelphia stage.

Please Visit Echoes of the Land aStore

Orquestra Imperial - Interview

Will Hodgkinson interviews Orquestra Imperial.

There are some things that only Brazilians can do. One is to lie on a tiny mat on the beach all day without getting a grain of sand on it. Another is to play samba. Born in the working-class provinces of Rio at the turn of the 20th century, this blend of African rhythms and American jazz developed in dancehalls and carnivals of the 1930s and 1940s to become the epitome of the Brazilian way of life: as languid as a summer breeze but with a touch of melancholy, too. Samba fell into the realms of kitsch by the 1980s, but a loose-knit group made up of young Rio-based musicians and a few ageing legends called Orquestra Imperial have revived the form to spectacular success.

“The whole thing started in a panic,” says the avant-garde musician and producer Kassin, who had the idea for Orquestra Imperial in 2002. “I had been running an experimental club when I was approached by the manager of an old Rio concert hall called Ballroom to do a series of shows. Ballroom held 2,000 people and I didn’t think our experimental music would fill the place, so I had the idea of forming a samba orchestra.”

With only a few days to organise the first concert, Kassin called up all the musicians he knew and told them of his plans. This included the singer and actress Thalma De Freitas, his regular collaborator Moreno Veloso and the 75-year-old drummer Wilson Das Neves. The idea was to perform anything – from the classic songs that Brazilians grew up with to modern advertising jingles – in a big-band samba style.

“I had the idea on Thursday and the first concert was on Monday,” recalls Kassin. “We had 15 people on stage and nine people in the audience.” Among the 40 people that attended the third concert was a reviewer from the Rio newspaper O Globo, who went on to announce that Orquestra Imperial was the best new band he had seen in a decade. By the fourth night it was a sell-out. Since then the band have backed the Brazilian superstars Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso, sold out the Barbican in London and completed their first album. “Since Orquestra Imperial there has been a huge revival in samba,” says Amarante.

It might seem strange that a new generation has embraced the music of their grandparents, but De Freitas explains: “In Brazil we have an amazing legacy of popular songs that everyone grows up with. I think that’s why Orquestra Imperial has worked. We have a lot of fun on stage, but we are paying homage to what has gone before us. We keep the songs alive.”

Please Visit Echoes of the Land aStore

Howard Male reviews Bebel Giberto's performance at the Roundhouse, London.

If I died tomorrow, rather than have the burnished baritone boom of a James Earl Jones God welcome me to through the pearly gates, I'd opt for the everything's-okay-really-it-is purr of a Bebel Gilberto God. Maybe this gives us a clue as to the secret of this Brazilian singer's huge success (her debut Tanto Tempo was the biggest Brazilian album ever in the USA.) It's a comfort thing: she's never in-your-face, just softly in your ear; she doesn't grab her material by the throat, she sidles up to it, throws an arm around its neck, and takes it for a stroll along the beach. But surely being carried on stage and carefully lowered onto a chaise longue is taking the whole laid-back thing a bit too far.

But before we get to the seduction by stealth methods of Ms Gilberto, a few necessary words about the support band, Kassin + 2. Playing tracks from their bold new album Futurismo they produced a constantly surprising and playfully original post-rock-meets-tropicalia sound. As soon as you felt you had them figured out, they'd shoot off on another tangent altogether. A hard act to follow. Read More

Please Visit Echoes of the Land aStore

Ernest Barteldes reviews Bebel Gilberto's Momento.

On her third release, Momento, Brazilian-bred singer Bebel Gilberto seems to have found a comfort zone between her bossa nova roots and the electronic sounds that have been part of her music since her 2000 debut, Tanto Tempo. “Caçada,” a track at the heart of the disc, was written in the ’70s by her uncle, Chico Buarque, one of Brazil’s best-loved popular composers. Gilberto reworks it as a forró, a Brazilian folk style that’s a world apart from the sophisticated music that’s made by Rio de Janeiro’s music-school-educated composers. Forró is built on completely organic sounds—hand-held bass drum, accordion, wooden flutes, and other rustic instruments—and its syncopated beat is made for dancing. Gilberto, whose origins are rather lofty—she grew up in New York and Rio and is the daughter of bossa nova prime mover João Gilberto—embraces the genre and sounds at home with it. But she’s just as comfortable on her cover of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” which receives a ’50s bossa nova treatment, and “Bring Back the Love,” an uplifting tune written by longtime collaborators Didi Gutman and Sabina Sciubba of the Brazilian Girls, which boasts a samba-inflected dance beat. Momento evokes the cities where it was recorded: Rio, New York, and London. The bilingual “Os Novo Yorkinos” addresses the residents of New York (who “do not need to sleep/Because we are in a living dream,” she sings in Portuguese), featuring a backbeat of capoeira handclaps and a chorus singing “farofa”—roughly, Portuguese for “melting pot.” She also nods to her Latin music influences on “Tranquilo,” a laid-back mambo-inflected tune. By first making a name for herself outside of Brazil—thus avoiding the “daughter of bossa nova” stigma that would have certainly damaged her career—Gilberto has managed to do what few Brazilian singer-songwriters have done. Instead of following what was going on in the market, she created her own sound, in the process influencing younger artists like Six Degrees labelmates Céu and Cibelle. Some Brazilian critics might turn their noses up at her music, which is easygoing and accessible; in fact, she’s more popular in the U.S. and Europe than she is in Brazil, where critics also take issue with her singing in English. It is exactly those points, though, that distinguish her as an artist. Momento is refreshingly personal and unpretentious and a welcome addition to the Brazilian-fusion genre.

Please Visit Echoes of the Land aStore

Paul de Barros previews CéU's concert in Seattle.

Forget Bebel Gilberto.

There's a new Brazilian voice in town, and her name is CéU.

A 2005 Latin Grammy nominee with a strong indie debut in Brazil, this stunning new chanteuse debuts Sunday at the Triple Door.

As the French say, she is something amazing — smart, cheeky, sexy, upbeat and with a voice like a soft bell ringing through the humid air.

Raised in a big, middle-class family in São Paulo by songwriter/maestro Edgard Poças (her full name is Maria do Céu Whitaker Poças), this 26-year-old singer/songwriter grew up knowing famous composers such as Pixinguinha, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Baden Powell. Enamored of North American funk and Jamaican rock steady (and dub), CéU (pronounced say-OO) also became a connoisseur of the traditional sambas and marchinhas played by the carnival samba schools.

"I was always asking musical things to him," she recalled of her dad, in a phone interview from Philadelphia. CéU speaks English fairly well, but her songs are almost all in Portuguese. "He was my teacher," she continued. "He's a Brazilian old-school music researcher."

He is also well-connected, and got her gigs singing backup with Brazilian veteran Johnny Alf and for studio jingles.

At 18, she struck out for New York and, by a crazy coincidence, while working at a restaurant met Brazilian film composer Antonio Pinto ("Central Station," "City of God"), who was down on his luck. She took him in and discovered he was a distant cousin.

Back in São Paulo, Pinto would later return the favor, working with the brilliant producer Beto Villares on CéU's self-named debut album. The result, picked up in the States last year by Six Degrees, is a delight.

Like the Brazilian landscape itself, CéU's sound has a pastel softness while maintaining a rich body and sharp edge. Her lyrics aren't bad, either.

Please Visit Echoes of the Land aStore

Review: Futurismo by Kassin +2

Robin Denselow reviews Futurismo.

Alexandre Kassin, Moreno Veloso and Domenico Lancellotti are three of the coolest players on the new Rio de Janeiro music scene. As the +2 band, they have each taken it in turn to dominate recordings and they have also found time to enliven the latest samba revival with Orquestra Imperial, an often-changing project that has included the likes of Seu Jorge. On this excursion, Kassin leads his colleagues through what sounds like an unexpectedly easy collision between an experimental rock band and old-style Brazilian bossa nova. So there are easy-going, melodic ballads that show off the fine singing of Moreno (the son of Caetano Veloso), and these are suddenly dissected with playful electronic effects and wild or sturdy guitar riffs from Kassin. The final tracks are in English and feature Sean O'Hagan, and John McEntire of Tortoise. It's an intriguing set, but they are even better playing live.

Please Visit Echoes of the Land aStore

Review: Brazil Classics volume 7

David Byrne has done it again. Ever since the former Talking Head released the first of his Brazil Classics series, Beleza Tropical, in 1989, he has provided fine primers in some of that country's best music. With this seventh volume, the focus is on the exciting sound, hailed by some as the most significant Brazilian musical movement since Tropicália, that has emerged from the north-east.

Pernambuco is a neglected, swampy, poverty-stricken area; its capital, Recife, was named the "fourth worst city in the world to live in" by an American research institute in the 1980s. But local artists responded to their situation by drawing up a manifesto. Calling their music "mangue bit" ("mangue" from the mangroves of the region's swamplands and "bit" in a nod to the computers that help produce the electronic element of their sound), they fused traditional Brazilian rhythms with electronica, hip-hop, punk and folk. It's a hybrid that is as startling as it is subversive.

Read More

Please Visit Echoes of the Land aStore

Seed Newsvine

Caetano Veloso's biography at World Music Central


Please Visit Echoes of the Land aStore

Ivan Lins

Brazilian superstar Ivan Lins occupies a strange twilight zone when he travels to the United States.

While he's never attained the level of recognition enjoyed here by his illustrious countrymen Caetano Veloso , Milton Nascimento , and Gilberto Gil , his music is much more firmly entrenched. Beloved by jazz musicians and embraced by pop icons, Lins has somehow flown under the American pop cultural radar, despite the fact that over the past quarter century, no living Brazilian composer's music has been more widely heard or recorded in the United States.

Nothing better captures the nature of his crossover appeal than the 2000 Telarc album celebrating his music, "A Love Affair, " and a related Carnegie Hall extravaganza the same year that featured a disparate cast including Sting, Chaka Khan, Grover Washington Jr., Dianne Reeves, and Vanessa Williams. A riveting performer himself with a smoky tenor, pure falsetto, and strongly jazz-influenced keyboard style, Lins opens a two-night run at the Regattabar on Thursday with his working quartet, featuring percussionist Teo Lima , bassist Nema Antunes, and keyboardist Marco Brito .

"Gil and Caetano, they go much more on the pop side, and they can reach a larger number of regular people," says Brazilian jazz guitarist Romero Lubambo , a frequent collaborator with Lins whose playing is featured throughout "A Love Affair."

"Ivan thinks about MPB," Lubambo continues, using the common initials for the stylistically diverse current of Brazilian pop music known as música popular brasileira . "But he composes with gorgeous harmonies and takes some different routes with chord sequences that you don't normally hear. The effect is incredible, and that makes it very suitable for jazz musicians."

Read More

Please Visit Echoes of the Land aStore

Infinito Particular by Marisa Monte (Brazil)

New York Times' review of Marisa Montes' Infinito Particular

Simple beauty isn’t enough for Marisa Monte, the Brazilian singer and songwriter who finished her United States tour on Tuesday night at the Beacon Theater. Her music was exquisite and thoughtful, as usual; her staging was arty and often distracting.

Ms. Monte has a voice that caresses every note she sings and an ear for melody, whether it’s in an old samba or a Motown-flavored rock tune. Her aspirations are large. She started her concert with the title song of one of two albums she has released simultaneously, “Infinito Particular” (Metro Blue/EMI), cooing, “Don’t get lost when you enter my private infinity” as the music glimmered serenely. She sang in darkness, with just one spotlight illuminating her face for a few moments.

Through a career that began in the late 1980s, Ms. Monte has become a star in Brazil while her music has drawn closer to home. On her early albums she looked toward jazz and soul from the United States, drawing songs from Gershwin and Marvin Gaye as well as bossa nova, and mixing rock rhythms with Brazilian ones. “Tribalistas,” her 2002 collaboration with the songwriters Carlinhos Brown and Arnaldo Antunes that became a major hit album in Brazil, often leaned toward rock.

But on “Infinito Particular” and its companion album, “Universo ao Meu Redor” (Metro Blue/EMI), Ms. Monte personalizes the Brazilian ballad, surrounding gentle tunes in untraditional yet felicitous arrangements. Her band onstage included bassoon, flugelhorn, cello and harmonica along with the traditional small samba guitar, the cavaquinho, and enough guitars and percussion for intricate picking and subtle rhythms. “Universo ao Meu Redor,” which means “Universe Around Me,” is steeped in samba, featuring Ms. Monte’s songs alongside some older tunes, like “Meu Canário,” that have been known around Rio de Janeiro, but not previously recorded. It’s an album of delicate, small-scale samba with songs about private longings, not the booming samba of Carnival.

Read More
Please Visit Echoes of the Land aStore

Chico Buarque - Brazil

Chico Buarque was born in 1944 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
He passes his youth between Brazil and Italy. Influenced by the friends of his father, the historian Sergio Buarque de Holanda, he falls in love with music and more particularly with Bossa Nova. At 21 years of age, his career starts to take off. He records the single Pedro Pedreiro then written for the play Roda Viva which is prohibited by the dictatorship in Brazil in 1968. Chico Buarque makes a short stay in prison then leaves for Italy, where he stays for a year. On his return to Brazil, he signs, in 1971, the album Construcao of which two-thirds are censured. He records then Quando o Carnaval Chegar (1972), Chico Canta (1973) and Chico Buarque & Maria Bethania (1975). Chico Buarque meets Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and plays with them in the mid Seventies. In 1980, he signs Vida. After that, and amongst others, Brazil A Banda (1993), Nao Vai (1996), Chico 50 Anos (1997), As Cidades (1998) and Carioca (2006).
Please Visit Echoes of the Land aStore

Sergio Mendes - Timeless

The fusion of hip-hop and bossa nova is certainly not new.

DJ trio Bossacucanova combined dance beats and Brazil's jazz-imbued retro sound on 1999's "Revisited Classics" - to snazzy, sizzling effect.

"Timeless," bossa nova king Sergio Mendes' first album in 10 years, carries on this burgeoning tradition of urban renewal splashed with elements of Brazilian '60s pop.

It's not necessarily timeless, but it works, and well.

You can find the article here