+samba

Sharply dressed and sporting a modest knot of dreads, Aleh Ferreira is a singer-songwriter firmly in the Seu Jorge mould who’s been splitting his talent between old¬school funk and even older school samba (as well as more experimental material) for much of the last decade. Just to make sure we know how impeccable his references are, the CD booklet flaunts a strategically placed close-up of Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man. Though there’s no blaxploitation here, there is ‘Ciber Cabaret’, a bluesy contribution to the soundtrack of recent Tribeca film festival entrant Elvis and Madonna. It’s left to Banda Black Rio’s William Magalhães, however, to really give Aleh’s soul-man ambitions a shot in the arm, co-writing what are easily two of the album’s best tracks: ‘Sexta-feira Carioca’ sprinkles a burnt-sugar vocal into a melody as buoyant as a hot air balloon, while the disco-meets-maracatu (with a bit of batucada) groove of ‘Herói Nago’ outshines most of the material on the recent BBR album, building around super¬clipped rhythm guitar and cowbell to a staccato-snapping chorus. Left to his own devices, Aleh smoulders through the samba cangao of ‘O Sonhador’ and the choro -tinged, soprano sax wails of ‘Samba da Rainha’. More compelling though – and offering a tantalising hint of his background in classical composition – are the deft, dense arrangements of ‘Nava’, blending elements of bossa nova, samba and Cape Verdean morna, and extracting oblique signatures and exquisite cadences from piano, seven-string guitar and the thinnest shavings of ghostly cuica.