I left Brazil in 1999, and naturally it has been much harder to keep up with the newest developments in Brazilian music since then. But I go to Brazil regularly, and do my best to stay more or less on top of things. Now, it seems to me that one of the most interesting singers/songwriters to have emerged in the 2000s is Vanessa da Mata. She has released four albums so far (2002, 2004, 2007. 2010), with songs which often hit the singles charts. Her music is pop music alright, but of the imaginative and original sort. Two of her main hits so far are ‘Ai, ai, ai’ (2004) and her duo with Ben Harper, ‘Boa sorte / Good luck’ (2007). I very much like the latter; I used to be a big Ben Harper fan in the 1990s, and the Vanessa da Mata / Ben Harper mix of styles worked out very well.
But rather than posting ‘Boa sorte / Good luck’ today (which was my original idea), I decided to post a drum ‘n’ bass remix of a song from Vanessa’s first album, ‘Não me deixe só’, to illustrate the presence of electronic music in Brazilian contemporary music. One of the main exponents of the mix of Brazilian rhythms with electronic music is Bebel Gilbert (I should post a song by her too at some point) --incidentally the daughter of João Gilberto, one of the founding fathers of Bossa Nova. Bebel recorded a seminal album in the late 1990s, Tanto Tempo, produced by the now legendary Suba. Suba was a Serbian who emigrated to Brazil in the 1990s when he fell in love with Brazilian music. He then became one of the most influential music producers in Brazil until his tragic death in 1999, when his studio caught fire and he died while trying to rescue some newly recorded material. It doesn’t get more emblematic than this… Suba is often seen as the main responsible for the introduction of electronic music into Brazilian music.
The mixture of samba and drum ‘n’ bass now even has its own name, Sambass, and four compilation albums (Sambass, vol. 1 to 4) have been released. This remix of ‘Não me deixe só’ is in vol. 3, and what I like about it is that the song, in its original version, has a fantastic samba-rock guitar riff, which mixed perfectly with the drum ‘n’ bass beat. The different genres of Brazilian pop music often emerge as creative and original reinterpretations of foreign styles from the perspective of Brazilian traditional rhythms, and Sambass is once again a good example.
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