Blue Brazil — Various Artists (1994)
A Blue Note record with no Blue Note on it, and a London DJ who had already heard everything.
By Rafi Mercer
The fruit arrives first. Oranges, grapes, a crown of pineapple leaves, piled so high on a woman's head that the lettering has to push its way through. Red lips. One eye half closed. It's a sleeve made to be seen from across a shop floor, and in the London racks of the mid-nineties, that's where it lived.
I can't tell you the day I bought it. I was buying jazz for Virgin in London then, and somewhere in that stretch this one came home with me. Both discs. They're still here.
The corner of the sleeve says Blue Note. Almost nothing else does.
There isn't a single Blue Note session on the record. Blue Note in Britain sat inside EMI, and EMI owned Odeon, the Brazilian label that had recorded much of the country's best music through the sixties and seventies. So the label went next door, into its sister company's vaults, and came back with tapes made between 1965 and 1980. One track came from Italy. The rest came from Rio and São Paulo, by way of Swindon, where the discs were pressed.
The man sent into those vaults was Joe Davis. In 1984, fifteen and fresh from an afternoon's ice skating, he walked into a pub in Richmond called the Belvedere Arms and heard Marcos Valle. His friends weren't interested. He was. Two years later he was on a plane to São Paulo, seventeen, without a word of Portuguese, sitting for weeks above a record shop called Eric's Discos with cigarettes and a can of guaraná, working through thousands of records. By the time Blue Note called, he felt he'd heard nearly everything Brazil had to offer.
You can hear that in the sequencing. It never moves in a straight line.
Luiz Arruda Paez's big band takes Edu Lobo's 'Upa Neguinho' and leans the brass forward until the whole arrangement tilts. Then the floor drops away into trio bossa, piano cutting through the rhythm in quick bright figures. The Bossa 3 turn 'Não Me Diga Adeus' into a steaming samba, drums skipping under the piano. Mandrake Som's 'Berimbau' swings around a single bowed string. Joyce arrives, and the temperature changes. Lô Borges' 'Tudo Que Você Podia Ser' carries the record out of bossa and into the open country of MPB.
Bossa. Samba. Big band. Funk.
None of it announces itself. It simply occupies the room.
This was a record made by DJs, for rooms full of people. The sleeve thanks Gilles Peterson, Patrick Forge and Kevin Beadle, and that list is a map of a very small part of London. On Monday nights Gilles and James Lavelle ran That's How It Is at Bar Rumba on Shaftesbury Avenue, a basement where a rave record and a New York house record and a bossa from 1966 could all belong to the same night. I remember Bar Rumba. What I remember most is the freedom. Nobody asked what a record was meant to be.
That freedom is the reason this compilation still matters in a listening room. It asks for nothing except attention. Put side A on and the music does what it did in 1966: it fills the space and trusts you to stay.
The afterlife was bigger than the sleeve suggests. Blue Brazil was the first of three volumes, and America didn't get it until several years later. Davis founded Far Out Recordings in 1996 and spent the next three decades giving Azymuth, Joyce and Marcos Valle second careers. Compilations like this one became blueprints, and a generation of producers, Jazzanova, Trüby Trio and De-Phazz among them, built careers on samba rhythms set against electronics.
Thirty years on the shelf. The fruit hasn't ripened. The lips are still red.
And side D still plays three songs the CD never had.
Quick Questions
Who compiled Blue Brazil?
Joe Davis, a London DJ and collector who had been buying records in Brazil since the mid-eighties. He founded Far Out Recordings in 1996.
Are the tracks on Blue Brazil Blue Note recordings?
No. The recordings come from EMI-Odeon Brazil, apart from Mandrake Som's 'Berimbau', which came from EMI Italiana. Blue Note UK released the compilation through EMI in 1994.
Is the vinyl edition different from the CD?
Yes. The double LP has three vinyl-only bonus tracks on side D. It was also the first of three Blue Brazil volumes.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
