Marcos Valle JID003

More than half a century after recording the seminal Samba ’68 album for Verve, Marcos Valle’s love affair with black American music remains undimmed. For Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad and hip-hop producer Adrian Younge, the feeling is mutual, with this project for their Brazil-centric revivalist label, Jazz is Dead, emerging out of a meeting in Rio in 2019. Hard to believe that Valle will soon be nudging 80; he looks younger, still has a flowing mane and isn’t showing signs of slowing down, even if his voice inevitably isn’t quite the left-field force of nature it once was.

There’s something of a septuagenarian Serge Gainsbourg in the low key exhalations and extenuated phrasing of ‘Isso É Que Eu Sei’, ‘Não Saia Da Praça’ and the psyche-squelching closer, ‘A Gente Volte Amanhã’, though the years have done little to blunt his syncopated delivery. Valle’s wife, Patricia Alvi, joins him for a classic boy-girl bossa on ‘Viajando Por Aí’, but it’s on the English-language ballad, ‘Gotta Love Again’ that Valle’s syllabic soul seeps in deepest. Sonically, the album is 70s bossa-Brazz-jazz-funk-fusion to the core, with fleshy bass and eddying electric piano front and centre, and it wouldn’t be a Valle album without the odd detour into spaced-out synth. The elements meld most effectively on the aforementioned ‘Isso É Que Eu Sei’, swelling on a quasi-psychedelic funk groove and affirming life in a way that only Valle can, even in the very late autumn of his years.