Carnival has already started in Brazil. The internationally most famous carnival celebration is the parade of samba schools in Rio, but two equally strong carnival traditions thrive in Salvador (Bahia) and Recife/Olinda (Pernambuco) – democratic, street carnival in both cases. What the samba school is for carnival in Rio (and a few other places, like…

Ok, so today is my birthday (yes, somehow every year it coincides with Valentine's day), and most of it will be spent packing and then in the car, driving to the mountains. So not exactly the best birthday ever, but with a nice reward to come after: a week of vacation. (So no BMoF next…

Yesterday (February 6th) would have been Bob Marley’s 69th birthday. As it so happens, I spent a huge portion of my adolescence and early adulthood listening to Bob Marley. In fact, it is difficult to express how much his music has always been and still is an integral part of my life. Reggae in general,…

There have been quite a few musically relevant events this week. Most important of all, Pete Seeger left this world. But on a more down-to-earth dimension, the Grammy earlier this week had a few memorable moments, including the Daft Punk-Stevie Wonder performance of ‘Get lucky’. At the same Grammy, but receiving much less publicity, a…

Rolling Stone Brasil announced their ‘Best of 2013’ lists. Topping the list of best Brazilian songs of the year, a curious item: ‘Problema seu’, by Felipe Cordeiro, a singer from the northern state of Pará. In Pará, the genre ‘brega’ (initially a pejorative word, something like tacky/distasteful/cheap, originating from a term for 'brothel') is particularly…

Big pile of exams to mark here today, so this will be a short post. I’m going with an unchallenged classic: ‘Fé cega, faca amolada’, from Milton Nascimento’s 1975 album Minas (one of the albums I listened to over and over again as a child), in a duo with Beto Guedes. Besides the awesomeness of…

This week, a friend reminded me on FB of this song from Marisa Monte's second album, Mais (1991), which I listened to a lot back in the day. (It has some other great songs, like 'Ainda lembro' and 'Ensaboa'.) The song itself is beautiful (and beautifully sung), but what makes it really cool is the accompanying…

I’m still waiting for Rolling Stone Brasil to publish their ‘Best of 2013’ lists, which often give me good ideas of music to post here at BMoF. But for now, let me post a 2013 song by one of the most experimental of all experimental musicians in Brazil, Tom Zé. He is relatively well known…

A few weeks ago I posted ‘Sua estupidez’, sung by Gal Costa but composed by Roberto Carlos and Erasmo Carlos. Roberto Carlos is known in Brazil as ‘The King’, that is the king of folk music, and is immensely popular especially among the less economically favored segments of the population. He is known in particular…

This week’s post is again not entirely Brazilian, technically speaking: today we have Cape Verdian young singer Mayra Andrade, who some of my friends have been raving about for a while (Jeroen and Rafa, that's you!). What justifies her inclusion among the BMoF guests is not only the fact that most of her songs are…