BRAZILIAN WAX IS...
JOE OSBORNE
A.K.A j yettram
My arrival to Brazilian music didn't really begin with my mum's mum, Mouman, who was born and brought up in Recife. Nor was it with my dad's cousins in Porto Alegre. My love for Brazilian music arose when I was 11 at Camden's Roundhouse, seeing Seu Jorge on his América Brasil O Disco tour. The album - which my dad had brought home earlier that year - was the soundtrack to countless FIFA 08 career mode binges, and journeys home from futebol de salão. From early on, Brazil was where my two young passions - music and football - interlinked.
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Getting older, Brazil became where my musical interests - jazz, punk, 60s and 70s rock - all blended. Asking for Jorge Ben's Samba Esquema Novo one christmas and getting some mind-bending Tropicália compilations instead was definitely a turning point. Tropicália had punk's political narrative and aggression, while retaining the sixties' and seventies' sonic explorations; it was perfect. Meanwhile, nights spent rifling through the parents' jazz collection led me to the inevitable bossa nova obsession. Then came Novos Baianos - recommended by a Brazilian couple at the Camden Ballroom and changing everything...
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More recently, it's been the modern Brazil that has excited me: Metá Metá and Teto Preto, Gop Tun DJs and the beautiful Romulo Froes, Ava Rocha's art-rock and the carioca duo, Balako.
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- Summer 2019
HENRY WEEKES
My mum is a Paulista so you'd think I would have been well-versed in Brazil's musical production since a young age. But growing up, she seemed to be more into Dire Straits than Djavan. It was through jazz that I arrived at Brazilian music in the broadest sense. I play the saxophone (and currently play in a Brazil-by-way-of-Leeds band, Tempo Feliz) so it was Stan Getz really that I listened to a lot at first.
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The Getz/Gilberto albums were hugely important to me when I was 17 or so. And obviously you can't ever grow out of such unreal albums. That's how Joe and I became friends - he had a framed print-out of the Olga Albizu painting from Getz/Gilberto in his room. There was a whole bossa nova wave in jazz so interests in Joe Henderson and Dizzy Gillespie also opened doors for me with bossa nova.
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Through the radio shows we'd been doing together, I got to realise my mum actually did listen to a lot of great stuff and acquired herself a pretty decent little collection of classics - from Elis to Gilberto Gil and Tim Maia etc.
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Apart from sharing love for the likes of Novos Baianos and Metá Metá, I can't ever get enough of my samba - getting dancefloors going to a mad batucada groove will always get me smiling.
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- Summer 2019
