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Brasil

Belo Horizonte, a musicians' commune

Milton Nascimento & Lô Borges

Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges grew up two doors apart in Belo Horizonte's musicians' quarter. In November 1971 they took that whole circle (Beto Guedes, Wagner Tiso, Toninho Horta, and lyricists Márcio Borges and Fernando Brant) to a beach house in Niterói and recorded a double album named after their old street-corner hangout, Clube da Esquina. When it came out in 1972, Brazilian critics called it minor and confusing. It took decades to win them back. By 2007 Rolling Stone Brasil ranked it the seventh-greatest Brazilian album ever made, and a 2022 critics' poll put it at number one.

Exiled to London, 1969

Caetano Veloso

Weeks after Brazil's military government suspended due process in December 1968, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were arrested. They were held for two months, kept under house arrest for four more, then exiled, and ended up in London with their wives for two and a half years. The self-titled English-language album he made there in 1970 is full of that exile: homesickness, set to string arrangements on a Beatles scale.

A chicken coop for a studio, 1972

Novos Baianos

Novos Baianos got their name from a festival MC who introduced them, offhand, as "new Bahians." By 1972 the whole band, including Moraes Moreira, guitarist Pepeu Gomes, singer Baby Consuelo and drummer Paulinho Boca, was living communally on a farm outside Rio and recording Acabou Chorare in a converted chicken coop wired with parts salvaged from old televisions. João Gilberto, of bossa nova fame, mentored them through the sessions, and his young daughter Bebel's request that everyone "stop crying" gave the album its title. It sold some 150,000 copies and became Rolling Stone Brasil's number-one Brazilian album of all time. Not bad for a record built from spare parts.

Writing past the censors, 1971

Chico Buarque

Chico Buarque came home from a self-imposed exile in Italy to a Brazil run by censors, and he learned to write right past them. His songs told ordinary stories on the surface. Underneath, they went after the human cost of the dictatorship's "economic miracle," and they were subtle enough to get through uncut. The album he released in 1971, shortly after his return, is still counted among the high points of Brazilian songwriting.

Minas Gerais, from Clube da Esquina

Beto Guedes

Beto Guedes grew up in Montes Claros, Minas Gerais. By eighteen he was already competing in Brazil's national song festivals with songs co-written with Fernando Brant, and he later settled into the Clube da Esquina circle around Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges as a singer, songwriter and guitarist. His solo career took off almost by accident, when 1977's A Página do Relâmpago Elétrico turned into an unexpected commercial success.

A voice of Tropicália, 1968

Gal Costa

Gal Costa sang alongside Caetano Veloso on Tropicália: ou Panis et Circenses, the 1968 various-artists album that gave the whole movement its name. A year later came her self-titled solo debut, with Veloso sticking around for the harmonies. It was the start of a career that made her one of the main voices of Tropicália.

Recife, 1975 — nearly lost to a flood

Lula Côrtes & Zé Ramalho

Lula Côrtes was a fixture of Recife's psychedelic underground. Zé Ramalho was a Paraíba-born singer who had dropped out of medical school for music. Together they spent 1974 in the studio making Paêbirú, a double album that pushes Northeastern forró and berimbau through psychedelia on the scale of the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, with song titles taken from earth and water deities. It was pressed in 1975 on the tiny Rozenblit label, and most of the original copies were reportedly destroyed in a flood soon after. So a record almost nobody heard became one of the most sought-after rarities in Brazilian psych. A 2005 German reissue, and then a UK one, finally got it the audience the flood had washed away.

Salvador, replacing Nara Leão, 1965

Maria Bethânia

Maria Bethânia was eighteen when she joined Opinião, a Rio de Janeiro stage show, replacing an ailing Nara Leão on one day's notice in February 1965. It was her first performance outside Bahia, and she was a sensation overnight. Two years later she teamed up with songwriter Edu Lobo for the duo album Edu e Bethânia. The deep, dramatic voice on it had been developed on stage, as an actress, before she ever sang professionally, and it went on to make her one of Brazil's best-selling and most-awarded recording artists.

The Collection