Music Video: Tribalistas - Passe em casa

I have only been to Brazil once.  I got a wicked sunburn, and I was mugged by a gang of knife-wielding kids.  Fortunately, though, I was still able to come home with some beautiful photographs and a CD that I picked up in the Rio de Janiero airport by the "blink and you might have missed them" Brazilian group Tribalistas.

Coming out way back in 2002, Tribalistas' one and only album was a wonderful blend of Latin-influenced guitars and percussion matched to velvety smooth Portuguese-language vocals.  Their song Passe em casa is a perfect sample of what this album has to offer.

Music Video: Seu Jorge - Suffragette City

This past weekend, my wife and I were enjoying some tapas at a restaurant in Georgetown, when she stopped the conversation and asked me if I could recognize the song playing on the sound system.  It took me a few moments to wrap my mind around what I was hearing.  Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: "That's David Bowie's Suffragette City!!!"

Well, not exactly.  It was actually Brazilian singer Seu Jorge providing his take on David Bowie's Suffragette City.  This one is beautifully rendered on acoustic guitar, and in Portuguese.  In my opinion, it takes what is already a really good rock tune, and turns it into something even greater and more sublime. 

All that, and the Arroz Meloso al Azafrán con Gambas was pretty good too.

Music Video: AfroReggae - Tempo Sem Medida

AfroReggae is one of those bands that, as a non-Portuguese speaker, you would come to think of as being a pleasant enough purveyor of fairly traditional reggae from Brazil.  Dig a little below the surface, though, and you find that AfroReggae is a very political group of young artists striving for bottom up social and political change.  Formed by former drug trafficker Anderson Sá as Grupo Cultural AfroReggae, the band AfroReggae is a project to wean the poor children of the Brazilian favelas away from the deadly world of drugs and gangsterism through education - particularly music education.  As you can hear from the track Tempo Sem Medida, AfroReggae can lay down a pretty solid groove, while also serving to educate the world about life in some of the world's most dangerous slums.