Azymuth — Jazz Carnival
Light As a Feather · 1979
Label: Milestone · Genre: Jazz / Samba-Jazz / Jazz-Funk · Country: Brazil · From: Rio de Janeiro, South America
Azymuth were three Rio studio musicians who had spent the early 1970s as session players for everyone from Jorge Ben to Elis Regina. When they recorded as a trio, they invented samba-jazz — acoustic bossa nova rhythms colliding with funk bass and electric keyboards. Light As a Feather arrived in 1979 and became their international breakthrough. Jazz Carnival opens the album on a samba rhythm that doubles as a funk groove, a synthesis Brazilian musicians had been building toward since the 1960s.
Did you know: Jazz Carnival became one of Brazil’s most internationally recognised instrumental exports, licensed for films, adverts, and compilations across Europe and Japan. Azymuth recorded it in a single afternoon in Rio, inspired by a carnival procession passing outside the studio window. The trio — José Roberto Bertrami, Alex Malheiros, and Ivan Conti — kept playing together for over forty years, until Bertrami’s death in 2012.
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