Episode 118: Rain in Rio

I am once again adjusting the musical barometer to match the season, putting us in the right frame of mind for shorter days and colder nights. Fall is a good time for moody music, and moody music is what I have been playing on many of my shows over the past couple months. Today I am turning to Brazil for some moody fall music, specifically to the realm of samba, looking for sad sambas, slow sambas, and mysterious sambas. This will be mostly samba music from the 70s, I would call that the golden age for Brazilian samba. Some songs will be firmly in the samba cancao camp, that cafe crooner variety of samba. Gringos probably associate that sound most firmly with the great singer-songwriter Cartola. And we’ll hear some soulful, street-real samba from famous Rio neighborhoods like Mangueira and Imperio. We will also hear some samba pop fusion from the era when samba was being produced as hit records with relatively elaborate studio production. And we’ll hear some samba showing its roots in Afro-Brazilian religious music.