Navegar

A native Carioca tutored by Wanda Sá and long immersed in Brazilian music, João Selva spent much of his early career touring the world in a capoeira ensemble before settling in France and mashing up traditional Brazilian rhythms and electronic sounds with tropical bass pioneer Maga Bo. While the odd electro-frisson runs through Navegar, it largely breezes along on a fairly standard set of classic Rio funk, jazz and samba-soul influences with the occasional detour to Cape Verde. The album comes billed as an upbeat antidote to Brazil’s seemingly endless winter of political and pandemic discontent, but perhaps the truly catastrophic situation in Selva’s homeland might have inspired something slightly more profound. That said, with traces of Marcos Valle, Luis Carlos Vinhas and even Chico Hamilton at their most spectral, the genuinely atmospheric jazz-psych-baroque of ‘Se Você’ makes for a suitably haunting parting shot.

The call-and-response samba-funk of opener and title-track is, by contrast, Selva in full-on party mode, even if it is influenced by academic Paul Gilroy’s classic text on Africa’s oceanic diaspora, The Black Atlantic. He convincingly reaches across that sea for the funaná and analogue synth influences of ‘Camarà’, even more so when throwing full-tilt late 70s Jorge Ben into the mix on ‘Devagar’. Though, and ultimately, as with so much contemporary music, much of this is easy to like, less likely to last.