Dispatch from São Paulo

São Paulo is South America’s most exciting city – where Portuguese America migrates to and meets itself, and I have been away for too long. As the plane dips towards its landing, I feel a tingle of adrenaline. But it isn’t just eager anticipation this time. I am nervous of what I’ll find.

Samba and capoeira, maracatu and Carnaval, mangue beat and Marielle Franco – all were born from Afro-Indigenous Brazil. But since Jair Bolsonaro came to power they have been under constant attack. Black people, he said, are “not even good for procreation.” Cultural institutions are starved of funds, paramilitary groups and loggers murder with impunity: Marielle Franco and now Bruno Pereira are gone, together with one of the international journalists who championed them – Dom Phillips.

But as Luedji Luna (who Songlines profiled in April 2021, #166) has shown, all is not crushed. Luna is at the crest of a cultural wave that is mounting most strongly in São Paulo. With general elections looming later this year, I am in the city to search out artists who I had heard were championing African-Brazilian and Indigenous culture in their work.

Aline de Lima used to sing bossa. Songlines reviewed her sweetly-sung first album Arrebol (2007). But now she has changed. Radically. I catch up with her at her favourite cake shop in Saude. The singer made her name in France, but when Bolsonaro came to power she no longer felt comfortable playing bossa nova in Parisian clubs. “In Europe I wasn’t permitted to show my true musical identity. I was shaped by my French label. They wanted bossa nova – that most whitened of Brazilian musical styles. Bossa was created as part of an idealised Brazil by a white elite in the 1960s – just like Brasília, built at the cost of many poor north-eastern Brazilian lives.” So she came home and began to make the music she really loved, under her real name, Alliye. “My new album, Rosa e Azul, is a statement of my true identity. It is my creation, made for a modern audience.”

The album was released in May. It is heartfelt, poignant and beautifully crafted, mixing contemporary electronica with samba-funk, the rhythms of her native Maranhão and delicate acoustic guitar. The melodies are sweet and infectious, but they are underpinned by Afro-Brazilian rhythms and scored with lyrics that are a mix of biting social commentary and a hope-filled call for change.

It’s hard to understand why Xênia França is not well-known in Europe. She’s the most exciting new female singer-songwriter to come out of Brazil in decades, something of a female Seu Jorge who has worked her way through São Paulo’s clubs, earned a passionate following on the internet and wowed New York with her sharp, sophisticated, self-penned virtuoso songs and her effortlessly cool contemporary Afro-Brazilian image.

França’s breathtaking first album was a statement of identity – brimming with Afro-Brazilian rhythms, rich with lilting melodies. And like Alliye she has just released a stunning new album – in the year Bolsonaro runs for re-election. Em Nome da Estrela is reflective, redolent with the sounds of Afro-Brazilian ceremonies. Ritual prayers intoned by Candomblé holy women interlace with trancy beats, soaring vocals, and sweetly seductive melodies that swing and sweep-off in harmonic directions which are always surprising and novel.

We meet in a bar in the fashionable university district – decked out like a chic beach shack in Trancoso. França sips an icy energy drink and looks as cool as Naomi Campbell in Chanel sunglasses. She tells me about axé and the orixas. The words are Yoruba terms, and herald from the Afro-Brazilian spirit religions of Candomblé and Umbanda. Axé, she explains, is the force of life itself, of creativity, of sexuality, of connection with nature and with others, and the orixás are the ancestral, primal forces that guide this energy. “The power of the music of this new Brazilian generation is that it can inspire us all to remember our axé in the midst of this theatre show we call life. Including you. Including your readers. And that’s what I am doing with my songs. Inspiring, awakening. I’m not trying to defeat anyone, to be anything. My music is the work of being myself, of expressing who I am, guided by the orixás I follow – Oxum, the spirit of fresh water, and Exu, the opener of the path – so that other people can do the same.”

Bolsonaro would be disappointed. Rather than disappearing as he would wish, Black artists seem to be getting ever more popular and ever more powerful. Luedji Luna, Xênia França and Alliye are references for a new generation, that strives to have us share in the power of African and Indigenous Brazil, find its beauty in our own hearts and lives.

This article originally appeared in the August/September 2022 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today