Last week I had a post on Michel Teló’s ‘Ai se eu te pego’, a huge success in Brazil which then got exported to large portions of the world (reminds me of what a friend used to say: Brazil retaliates for colonialism by exporting cultural product of dubious quality, such as soap-operas). But there are also a number of Brazilian artists who have built their whole careers abroad, and are little if at all known in Brazil. A good example is Lilian Vieira, the singer of the Dutch band Zuco 103, which has considerable success in the Dutch alternative scene and in the world music scene more generally. Their music can essentially be described as electronic music, but the songs are almost invariably sung in Portuguese by Lilian; they are a nice example of the kind of fusion that Brazilian matrices allow for. Not all of their stuff is truly good, but I like quite a few of their songs. I’ve seen them live once, and at a different occasion I saw Lilian Vieira performing at the Bimhuis (one of the best places for jazz in Amsterdam) with jazz musicians (not her Zuco 103 companions) – I must say that I liked the latter better than the former… Anyway, just to say that she is a versatile singer worth paying attention to.
Here are two of my favorite Zuco 103 songs, ‘Treasure’ (2002), one of their biggest hits, and ‘Nunca mais’ (2008) -- you'll have to follow the link for the original version, as embedding for the video has been disabled; here below a live version. (‘Nunca mais’ sounds much more ‘Brazilian’ than ‘Treasure’, btw.)
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