The Rough Guide to Brazilian Jazz

It's fair to say Brazilian music has been in intimate dialogue with jazz almost from the genre's 19th-century inception – right up to the current wave of heavily Afrocentric big bands that form the meat of this compilation. If you have even half an ear cocked on Brazil, you’ll likely already be familiar with the likes of Bixiga 70's ‘7 Pancadas’, Nomade Orquestra's ‘Samurai’ and Iconili's ‘O Rei de Tupanga’, an Afro-soul-jazz mashup with a film score-esque coda. Fans of Metà-Metà may or may not be familiar with singer Juçara Marçal's ‘Pena Mais Que Perfeita’, a brilliantly jarring chamber ballad with an austere vocal, atonal electric guitar and rabeca (violin). The same band's resident stylistic polymath, Thiago França, turns up in both a solo capacity and as Space Charanga, whose eight-minute ‘Abdu’ is a wonderfully subtle, funky trip into 21st-century modal jazz: it's a highlight of his R.A.N. album.

Whether the same fans will appreciate Braz-jazz oldies such as Victor Assis Brazil and Dom Salvador in quite the same way is a moot point but this is nonetheless an important, possibly overdue compilation that reaffirms jazz as Brazilian music's most vital and enduring common currency.