Joyce was one female Brazilian singer who dared to write her own songs. There were no women song writers at all in Brazilian music, so the first, very first time when I appeared on stage, I was booed off stage. That was 1967, I was 19 years old, and...
In 1966, the co-winner of the TV Record Festival was Chico Buarque, who became an instant star with A Banda. Buarque was praised by traditionalists as the heir to the great samba cancao writers of the 1930s, who would become a symbol of resistance to...
Sergio Mendes ensured that the international image of Brazil was still that of an easy-going, exotic paradise. But back in Brazil, the reality was rather different. Life was not easy. The soldiers had inherited serious economic problems, but the earl...
Mas que Nada became a top ten hit, the first Portuguese language success in American pop history. -That song, Mas que Nada, is magical. I told Jorge Ben the other day I saw him in LA. And I thank him for writing that song because there's not many son...
Modern samba was born in the poorer areas of Rio, and left-wing singers were inspired by the new samba do morro, samba from the hills, that dealt with the harsh realities of life in communities where there were few facilities to cope with the newcome...
(The) military strike in '64 was...the worst thing that ever could happen to this country, because until today, we have never recovered from that. It was bad times. It was bad times. But at the same time, I think that the opposite of that was, that /...
Brazil's history has been expressed through its national passion for music. Samba, the country's dominant musical style, was used by politicians in the '30s in an attempt to create unity and a sense of national identity in this vast multi-racial stat...