Shaping up to be one of our most played albums this spring, Gabriel da Rosa made his full-length debut in February with É O Que A Casa Oferece, courtesy of Stones Throw Records. Sounding like a lost seventies samba album, from the likes of Paulinho da Viola or Martinho da Vila, da Rosa makes his Lagniappe debut via a pair of Brazilian staples: Geraldo Pereira and Tom Jobim with Vinícius de Moraes.
Category: Brazil
Os Tincoãs :: Canto Coral Afrobrasileiro
In the 1970s, Os Tincoãs released three of the most revered and unique records of Brazilian music, which crystallized translucid vocal melodies on top of the polyrhythmic percussion patterns of Afro-Brazilian ritualistic music. Now, more than forty years after their last album, Sanzala Cultural has just released Canto Coral Afrobrasileiro, a collection of the trio’s recordings from 1982/83.
Gabriel da Rosa :: É O Que A Casa Oferece
Gabriel da Rosa’s debut album, É o que a casa oferece, arrives at an auspicious time as Brazilian music is becoming more ubiquitous, cresting a wave of popularity that has been building over the better part of a century. The last 90 years have seen Carmen Miranda’s polyrhythmic schtick in the thirties and forties, the smooth and sophisticated bossa nova craze of the early sixties, and in the seventies Flora Purim, Airto Moreira, and Milton Nascimento championed an adventurous style of Brazilian jazz. Now, a new Brazilian tide is rising, building off the previous waves’ continued relevance, and it’s washing ashore along the Southern California coast.
Sessão de Verão 1: Subterrâneo
There’s a certain pulse in São Paulo, unlike any city I’ve visited. The noise from traffic, helicopters, work crews, and vendors is constant and polyrhythmic. São Paulo often sounds and feels like it’s bursting at the seams. With roughly 12 million people in the city proper and 22 million in the metropolitan region, the megalopolis is loud – one of the loudest places I’ve visited – and this from someone who lived in lower Manhattan for over a dozen years.
Rubinho E Mauro Assumpção :: Perfeitamente, Justamente Quando Cheguei
In line with the late records of Jovem Guarda, such as Erasmo Carlos’ 1970-1972 trilogy of later-revered proto-indie, as well as with Os Mutantes’ flavorful Brazilian psychedelia, Rubinho & Mauro Assumpção’s only ever release wanders through daring and often humorous experimentations. With bare instrumentation and lo-fi timbres blowing against the grain of the recording, it soon came to be a coveted rarity among collectors. Mr. Bongo’s recent reissue offers a great chance to reexamine this piece of soft-noise MPB.
Chico Lessa :: S/T
Chico Lessa’s debut record, a post-Tropicalia jazz-funk private press release from 1982, has just been reissued by the Madrid-based label Vampisoul. It retains influences from the popular Brazilian funk of the early 1980s, from the then-somewhat-defunct Clube da Esquina scene (whose conductor Wagner Tiso is a center feature of the record), as well as from the exploratory and dissonant MPB of Boca Livre (whose mastermind Maurício Maestro signs the arrangements here). A bright little gem in an otherwise uneventful career that, much like the recent rediscoveries of José Mauro or Hareton Salvanini, makes us wonder what Brazilian music could have been — or what we are still to find out it was.
Erasmo Carlos :: 1941-2022
Yesterday, legendary Brazilian musician Erasmo Carlos passed away at 81. Simultaneously proto-Tropicalia and post-Tropicalia, his trilogy of releases from 1970 to 1972 embody an indie aesthetic of twangling guitars and cosmic laid-backness that, rather than merely mimicking (and being subsumed by) American trends, may fit completely in an admirable tradition of obscure para-country balladeers, with Robert Lester Folsom, F.J. McMahon, and others.
Gabriel da Rosa :: Jasmim Parte 1
“Jasmim Parte 1” is the debut single from Gabriel da Rosa. Raised in rural southern Brazil with a radio DJ father, Gabriel was exposed to all manner of sounds from his native country, but it wasn’t until he moved to Los Angeles that he began to truly explore the music, collecting Brazilian records. It was through this exploration that he bonded with Stones Throw Records’ founder Peanut Butter Wolf over their shared love of Brazilian music, and began writing his own bossa with collaborator Pedro Dom (Seu Jorge, Rodrigo Amarante and Latin Grammy Award winner Ian Ramil).
Fantasma do Cerrado :: Catanduva
As Fantasma do Cerrado, Rafael Stan Molina creates sound mosaics that oscillate between pop song forms and exploratory ambient recordings. Nowhere is this dialectic more explicit than in “Catanduva”, where suave folk is suddenly broken by an explosion of strange shapes, and simple melodies alternate with wild and sparse modulations reminiscent of the the unexpected turns of Jim O’Rourke’s compositions
Hidden Waters: Strange And Sublime Sounds Of Rio de Janeiro
Hidden Waters, the recent vinyl compilation of new Brazilian music by Sounds & Colours, offers a dreamscape view of the alternative music scene that has recently bloomed around the Audio Rebel studio in Rio de Janeiro. From established icons of ‘nova MPB’ like Kassin and Letrux to up-and-coming artists like Raquel Dimantas and Os Ritmistas, and from the serene soul pop of Jonas Sá and Marcello Callado to the abrasive noise experimentalism of Cadu Tenório & Juçara Marçal and Ava Rocha.
The Lagniappe Sessions :: Tim Bernardes
São Paulo’s Tim Bernardes swept us off our feet earlier this month with his new album, Mil Coisas Invisíveis. Across fifteen tracks sung in beautiful, tender Portuguese, he mines love, loss, and change with equal splendor bringing his diaristic existentialism to vibrant sonic life. For his inaugural Lagniappe Session, Bernardes keeps the flame aglow, tackling one from fellow countryman Gilberto Gil’s 1971 self-titled album, the Dirty Projectors’ knotty, Tropicália-tinged art rock, and one of The Beatles’ most spiritually mystic moments.
Tetê Da Bahia :: Duplo Sentido
A simmering rendition of Gilberto Gil’s “Duplo Sentido”. The first of only four sides recorded by Brazil’s Tetê Da Bahia, between 1974-75, finds the chanteuse throwing the drifting, folky hue of Gil’s original out the window of a speeding car before heading into a dimly lit tunnel of dream logic and psychic dislocation.
Sessa :: Estrela Acesa
A celestial nocturne, Estrela Acesa is the sophomore stunner from Sessa. It’s been three years since the São Paulo-born singer-songwriter dropped his perennially stellar debut, Grandeza—a jubilant, sun-dappled LP embodying a confluence of Brazil’s rich past and musical traditions. But where Grandeza was an ode to temporal pleasures, Estrela Acesa is a humble meditation on the nature of love, eternity, and the point of intersection between music and spirit.
Sá & Guarabyra :: As Canções Que Eu Faço
During the 1970s, Brazilian luminaires Sá, Rodrix & Guarabyra invented what they called “rural rock” as a mixture of anglophone folk rock and música caipira (an umbrella term for the Iberian-descending, acoustic-guitar-based musics from the countryside of Brazil). In 1974, Rodrix dropped the band and Sá & Guarabyra continued as a duo, detaching themselves even further from conventional MPB and going simultaneously more regional, towards genres like sertanejo de raiz and xote, and more pop, towards the esoteric country ballads of Van Morrison or JJ Cale.
Wagner Tiso :: A Igreja Majestosa
Legendary composer and arranger Wagner Tiso is one of the most underrated figures in Brazilian music history. Tiso led the Clube da Esquina scene in the 1970s, and although his name is scarcely mentioned in international guides to the movement, his maximalist aesthetics and chamber music influences are deeply engraved in all of Clube da Esquina releases.