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.