At the height of Tim Maia's soaring fame, he joined a radical, extraterrestrial-obsessed cult and created two plus albums of some of Brazil's-and the globe's-best funk and soul music. This book explores the career of the man often hailed as the Jame…
1976, Rio de Janeiro. Revered Brazilian pop musician Jorge Ben Jor, known for his 'samba-rock' fusions and hits such as 'Pais Tropical' and 'Mas que Nada', picks up the electric guitar and records the album Africa Brasil. With grooves structured aro…
In 1997 the rap group Racionais MCs (the 'Rational' MCs) recorded the album Sobrevivendo no Inferno (Surviving in Hell), subsequently changing the hip-hop scene in Sao Paulo and firmly establishing itself as the point of reference for youth across B…
More than simply a paragon of Brazilian samba, Dona (Lady) Ivone Lara's 1981 Sorriso Negro (translated to Black Smile) is an album deeply embedded in the political and social tensions of its time. Released less than two years after the Brazilian mil…
The berimbau, a one-stringed musical instrument that looks like a bow from a bow-and-arrow, is customarily strung with the wire found within a car tire. When Afro-Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos set out to build his own, however, he strung…
Most die-hard Brazilian music fans would argue that Getz/Gilberto, the iconic 1964 album featuring "The Girl from Ipanema," is not the best bossa nova record. Yet we've all heard "The Girl from Ipanema" as background music in a thousand anodyne sett…
What makes a song sound foreign? What makes it sound "American," or Brazilian? Caetano Veloso's 2004 American songbook album, A Foreign Sound, is a meditation on these questions-but in truth, they were questions he'd been asking throughout his caree…
