Latin | Brazil Vinyl 519 Items

Brian Jackson dives into the world of Alfonso Lovo

Legendary musician Brian Jackson, known for his pioneering work in neo-soul and modern hip hop, has lent his extraordinary talents to retouch two tracks from Alfonso Lovo's remarkable album "Terremoto Richter 6:25 Managua.”

As one-half of the influential duo Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson, Brian began his career at an early age, having recorded nine albums by his 27th birthday. He is widely celebrated as a musical innovator, with New Yorker Magazine recently hailing him as “a musical pioneer” in a 2022 article.

Alfonso Noel Lovo, moved by the devastating earthquake that struck Managua on December 23, 1972, recorded his first album in New Orleans the following year. "Terremoto Richter 6:25 Managua" stands as a testament to resilience and artistic fusion, featuring a stunning blend of psychedelic rock, mazurka, jazz, Louisiana blues, and African folk.

One of the rarest and most enigmatic LPs in the Brazilian discography, Prá Quem Sabe das Coisas is a collective album that gathered a group of students from São Paulo Law School, supported by the organist/pianist Renato Mendes, one of Samba-Jazz's most important names. Released in 1973 by the label Ebrau, finally has a refined reissue and its mysteries revealed, exactly half a century later, considering that it was recorded in 1971 but put in the market as LP only two years later. This reissue comes with an original insert replica with lyrics and an extra insert with unseen photos and an exclusive interview that the journalist and researcher Marcelo Pinheiro did with CAU Pimentel adding even more to the richness of this workpiece, composed by many writers and performers in 1971.

Tokyo's Explorations crew drops a jazzy housed up remix of the classic Brazilian Love Affair. Lush keys, a lovely songstress and natural live- drumming falling right into place on this raw rework. 100 copies of this limited one-sider. On colored vinyl. Don't miss out.

Super heavy mix of descarga, salsa and boogaloo by accordion virtuoso Aníbal Velásquez, done in the "salsa con acordeón" style, featuring hot piano and timbales, yet played with a uniquely Colombian flavor.Recorded with fantastic production quality, this replica LP contains 8 hard-hitting dance floor bangers plus 2 bonus cuts including the 1972 version of 'Mambo loco', making this an essential addition to your Discos Fuentes collection.First time reissue. 180g LP.Aníbal "Sensación" Velásquez is one of Colombia's most innovative and prolific Costeño musicians, known as "El Mago del Acordeón" and "El Rey de La Guaracha". Velásquez grew up hearing Cuban music as well as the local rhythms of his region, and this led him to tinker with and transform the beats and melodies of the regional music encountered in his home city of Barranquilla during the 1950s and 60s.By 1960, after being a sideman in several groups, Velásquez formed his own conjunto with his elder brother Juan, a talented musician in his own right, and his younger sibling José."Aníbal Velásquez en tremenda salsa" is a perfect example of the musician's wanderlust and restless creative spirit. A pioneer of the adventuresome mixing of rhythms, genres and styles that was happening at the time in Barranquilla and the rest of coastal Colombia, in retrospect one can say that Velásquez was quite daring in combining the music and instrumentation of his native country with other Caribbean forms. In 1968, when he made this album, very few Colombians were attempting to record an accordion-led session of descarga, guaracha, boogaloo, guajira, guaguancó and mambo, and for that we should recognize Velásquez as a forerunner of various other records by Lisandro Meza y su Combo, Los Corraleros de Majagual, Los Caporales del Magdalena and Chico Cervantes y su Conjunto Internacional.The album kicks off with an intense and mesmerizing descarga featuring the guaguancó bass line, hot Cuban style piano and a heavy timbales solo, reminding one o...

We are celebrating the 100th release in the Brazil45 series with a massive track. The enticing and exotic samba 'Redondo Sambão' is pure Brazilian fire. With beautiful female vocal-group arrangements, floating flutes and vibrating rhythms, this song oozes charm. Its only downside being that it is over far too soon. Originally released in 1967 on a compact 7" on the Som Maior imprint, to our knowledge, the group sadly only had a couple of releases.

'Brasileiro' is taken from Jorginho Telles' self-titled 1971 album and also featured on a 7", both released on Copacabana Records. The track switches between a hoarse male vocal crooner and a rough and raw psych-guitar, RnB dancer: totally magic!

Global pointing Brazilian jazz trio will release a new album Agôra, that sparkles with electric funk and Herbie-esque eclecticism. It features a myriad of guest vocalists and musicians including Brazilians Xênia França and Zé Leônidas, Jembaa Groove's Ghanaian singer Eric Owusu and South African artists Bongani Givethanks & Mpho Nkuzo Re-wiring the concept of 'fusion' for 2023, Agôra is Brazilian trio Caixa Cubo’s resurgent new record with the title referring to 'now', based upon the intuitive and fluid nature of the trio’s method, and this inspired recording. With shoots to black music culture, from Brazil to Brooklyn, Ghana and South Africa, Agôra is the group’s ninth album yet is their first where they’ve invited guests, mainly singers, onto each track and follows their last, Angela from 2020, released on Heavenly Records, which won a BBC 6 Music Album of the Year (Huey Morgan’s selection) granting them much deserved international recognition.

The core musical elements of Caixa Cubo are Henrique Gomide (keys), João Fideles (drums) and Noa Stroeter (bass), all from São Paulo, Brazil and where they met as teenagers and would continue their friendship and musical bond at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Netherlands. Now all in their mid thirties, João and Noa live back in the city where it all started but Henrique has settled in Cologne, Germany where the recording of Agôra took place, over the course of 3 days, at the home cum studio of Chris ‘Dusty’ Doepke, their friend and owner of the label they signed to, Jazz & Milk.

In line with all their creations where flow and energy provide the magic, allowing what the moment provides, the album shines not only for its virtuosity but for its minimalism, the depth of space, and for the first time, the ability to figure in and outside of the jazz fold, as the trio decided, for the first time, to bring in singers and add a new aesthetic to their sound.

“Agôra is a wake-up call to reality, a reminder that the infinite possibilities of technological progress should not disconnect us from the earth, from eye-to-eye relationships, and from moments lived in person” the band are keen to point out. “And that we must not be consumed by greed, for all we truly possess.... is the NOW.”

Turning hope and metaphor into music, the debut single Sábado, an electrified future- jazz-fizz reflects perfectly the spontaneity that permeated the entire recording of the album. “When we got to the studio, we had no idea what we were going to record. We started playing a groove, kind of inspired by Gilberto Gil's 80s albums, and our drummer João started singing this funny song 'Sábado Barrigudão' (Big Belly Saturday) alongside the bass groove and that was that”. Inspired by their city of birth, São Paulo, it features long time collaborator and vocalist Zé Leônidas, with cuicas, tamborim, agogo and shakers providing the most obvious Brazilian affect from the album.

Currently based in Berlin, Pedro Ricardo has been releasing music for the past eight years under different aliases via labels such as Wolf Music and his own imprint Hear, Sense and Feel. An eclectic DJ and selector, he hosts a radio show on South London’s radio Balamii, guested on Mafalda’s NTS show and can be found playing in clubs across all Europe. Stylistically, Ricardo became entranced with jazz from an early age, while also becoming enamoured with folk music – rooted in his Portugal childhood, now encompassing sounds from Cape Verde, Brazil, and Spain along the way. He intertwines these instrumental influences with field recordings, and electronics, on Soprem Bons Ventos. “The album translates to ‘Good Winds Blow’, shares Ricardo. “This idea of good winds blowing is intertwined with the feeling of missing something, and sadness. On a positive note, there is still an overarching sense that happiness also lies ahead. Soprem Bons Ventos represents an ode to the past, to those who came before me, connecting with my present and imagining the future.”

As the 1950s drew to a close a group of students at Caracas’ Universidad Central de Venezuela caught the tropical music bug and decided to form an orchestra. With the majority of the students coming from the engineering faculty, they were duly christened Conjunto Ingeniería (The Engineering Group) and from the offset, they were ahead of the game. Tropical music, or música bailable (danceable music), was slowly making its way to Venezuela, but Conjunto Ingeniería had a secret weapon as one of their fellow students was studying in New York and every July he’d return with the latest Latin big band sounds: Tito Puente, Machito, they heard it first. And they wasted no time in making a name for themselves: nine young male musicians playing the hippest sounds around, they were the obvious band to play high-society quinceañeras (15th birthday celebrations to mark a “girl’s journey into womanhood”), which their original bass player, Juan Marquez, says they did at least 80 times in their heyday, as well as playing countless times at the university, on TV, at weddings, and at carnival, where on one occasion they accompanied Celia Cruz. “We played on all the TV channels”, says Marquez, “we were the first group to play at the launch party for ‘salsa’, a term that was established by the [Venezuelan] announcer Phidias Danilo Escalona… in Barquisimeto we were considered the best orchestra”, he remembers. On record their eclecticism and musical chops belied their age. In 1961 they released their self-titled debut album, which tackled mambo, guaracha, cha-cha-cha and charanga, veering from the Les Baxter-esque exotica of “Mambo Silbando” with its kitsch whistling, through the horn-and-percussion heavy stomp of “La Bola” (complete with bolero bridge) and on to “Amorcito”, their cover of The Diamond’s “Little Darlin’”, which was arguably the first rock ‘n’ roll song recorded in Venezuela. They followed it up with Aqui Esta El Conjunto Ingenieria, their second album in 1962, in which they showed once more that rock could easily sit next to Latin on tracks like “Mambo Rock”. Their last album, Boogaloo Con Ingenieria, arrived in 1967, and made clear the influence of New York in their sound, with the group adopting the boogaloo of Pete Rodriguez, Tito Puente and Ricardo Ray. Tracks like “Dame Boogaloo” and “La Boa” were the epitome of this, but they also took that sound into new places, as on the staccato groove of “Intermission Riff” which left plenty of space for the musicians to flex their muscles, or on the ominous “Aefo” with its unsettling vocals and dramatic Henry Mancini-esque melody. Conjunto Ingeniería came to an end at the beginning of the 70s, by which time many of their original members had left after graduating, but there can be no doubt they had made their mark. Though their recording output was nowhere near as prolific as their contemporaries Billo’s Caracas Boys or Los Melódicos, if you were turning on the TV, going to carnival or, especially, attending a quinceañera, in Caracas in the 1960s, then you would no doubt of come across Conjunto Ingeniería and their rock ‘n’roll-embellished New York-meets-Venezuela big band sound. On this compilation, simply titled Conjunto Ingeniería, El Palmas Music have cherrypicked a glorious selection of tracks from across the group’s career, capturing all the creativity and youthful excitement that made them one of the first titans of Venezuela’s tropical music history.