80 Anos

It’s not every day you get semi-legendary Beastie Boys producer/collaborator Mario Caldato Jr digging up a long-lost Afro-Brazilian ensemble from the 1940s and dragging their sole remaining member back into the studio. The result is striking, a big band Braz-jazz voodoo with Atlantis-deep baritone vocals so out of place, space and time they might be Paul Robeson reincarnated as a Candomblé priest. The singer – and sole survivor – in question is Carlos Negreiros, who played percussion on the group’s self-titled last release, way back in 1968. The band’s 1957 debut album Obaluayê! has also been reissued pretty much simultaneously with this latest release by Day Dreamer, whose in-house studio and vintage equipment happily saves 80 Anos from the often dead hand of modern recording.

To the music then, and the impeccable and imperious massed horns of ‘Agô’, which could easily be soundtracking the opening scenes of some Congo-set, jazz-era Hollywood epic, with Negreiros as exiled king. While many of the tracks are barely three minutes long, epic closer, ‘Lembarenganga’, finds him lost in ominous supplication, wailing wordlessly, mesmerisingly into the void over cadaverous repinique and agogô. It’s wonderfully eerie stuff, and a world away from much of the rest of the album, where he dusts down the compositions of the group’s founder and leader, Abigail Moura, most beguilingly on the Afro-lounge swing of ‘Canto Para Omolu-Obaluayê’. Still, Negreiros has more than enough talent for an album’s worth of his own material – let’s hope it’s not another 50 years!