Jambú: E Os Míticos Sons Da Amazônia

These are the songs that seduced Dona Onete – the 80-year-old siren of the Amazon – when she was young enough to dance to dress-swirling carimbó and siriá in the cobbled streets of Belém. These two traditional Brazilian dances – sometimes referred to as the samba de roda of the Amazon – were born of a fusion of rhythms brought by enslaved Africans to the sugar-cane plantations around Belém and local indigenous ceremonial dances when Brazil was a Portuguese colony. They're as Brazilian as Pelé. But in the post-tropicália 1970s – when Brazilian music went electric – these rhythms were fused with Caribbean and Hispanic American styles, which filtered in from Guyanese and Venezuelan radio stations. The result was a uniquely Amazonian musical cocktail whose moment in the world spotlight was in the short-lived lambada craze in the late 1980s.

These early recordings – lovingly rescued and repackaged by Analog Africa – are a delight, from the calypso spring of ‘Vamos Farrear’ to the feverish jig of ‘Lambada da Baleia’, but they are hampered by the poor, muffled quality of the original recordings. They're a promise only of what used to be that leaves you thinking “if only I'd been around at the time, drinking cachaça in the streets and dancing the night away with Dona Onete and her friends.”