Encantações

Brazilian music has shown for some time a spectacular porousness and a seeming ease in introducing traditional forms to modern practices. If you think of Marisa Monte's work, she addressed her samba roots alongside an experimental song approach. If you listen to mangue beat, you hear Pernambuco's rhythms, maracatu and frevo, melding with rock and hip-hop and sprouting a new musical form.

Also from Pernambuco, Renata Rosa quickly became a national sensation with the release of her brilliant debut album, Zunido da Mata (2002), on which she looked beneath the surface to come up with an original repertoire as luminous as it was embedded in tradition. An actress as well as a singer-songwriter, she is not one to hurry into the studio and Encantações is only her third album. This carefully-judged output does not mean she is short of ideas. In the marvellous album opener, ‘Jurema’, she's already sunk deep in Pernambuco folklore, but she anoints it with the kind of subtle harmonic twist that we’ve grown accustomed to hearing from Tom Zé. And everything else just falls into this same place of sounding both old and new, ancestral and bewildering fresh – be it the indigenous intonations of ‘Imbarabaô’ or the quasi-jazz-standard of ‘Amei Demais’.

Such is her genius: Renata Rosa soaks herself in tradition and creates new material that not only pays tribute to roots music, but also brings a sparkling vitality to it.