Fonte: New York Times

“Red Hot + Rio 2” flashed back to the 1970s at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday night. Fresh-faced young singers took turns backed by a full band and horn section in songs from Brazil’s era of “samba soul”: mostly hits by Jorge Ben Jor, along with songs from Tim Maia and Gilberto Gil that aligned the deep, strutting beat of samba with soul, reggae and rock. The singers were among Brazil’s leading younger musicians — Curumin, Céu, Otto, Moreno Veloso and Bebel Gilberto — along with José González, an Argentine Swede.

Follow up:

The songs are still irresistible. They celebrate love, nature, music and history in catchy singalong phrases, whether bemoaning a painful breakup in breezy samba-pop, as Ms. Gilberto did in “Que Pena,” or singing about a slave who became a powerful woman in the reggae of “Xica da Silva,” performed by Curumin.

Brazilian music is, and has always been, cunningly porous, absorbing possibilities from all over the vicinity. Among them were the fuzz-toned guitar riff and folk-rock harmonies in “A Minha Menina” and the scrubbing disco rhythm guitar (akin to the role of the cavaquinho, the small guitar in a samba) in “Os Alquimistas Estão Chegando.” The band, directed by Alexandre Kassin and featuring the drumming of João Parahyba — who created subtle, fluttering cross-rhythms with brisk strokes of his brushes — more or less recreated the arrangements of the old recordings.

Unlike, say, Rascal Flatts singing the Eagles, the younger generation performed its elders’ songs with a knowing flair. Curumin, Mr. González and Mr. Veloso applied wryly earnest tenor voices to their songs; Céu brought supple sweetness to hers. Following through on Mr. Ben Jor’s own freewheeling vocal style, Otto, from Pernambuco, cackled and growled at times; he also jumped around the stage, stripped off his jacket and one of two shirts, and sang part of “Taj Mahal” — the Jorge Ben Jor song from which Rod Stewart took the melody of “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” — while out in the audience. By the finale, when singers shared rockers like “Ponta de Lança Africano (Umbabarauma), a song about soccer, and “Aquele Abraço,” a song about Rio de Janeiro with the Harlem Samba drummers joining the band, Ms. Gilberto was doing bouncy go-go dance moves.

It was a jubilant show, but it was also a missed opportunity. In their own careers the performers on the bill extend the Brazilian mix even further. Mr. Veloso’s and Mr. Kassin’s shared group, the +2s, toys with electronics and structural convolutions; Otto and Curumin draw idiosyncratically on hip-hop; Céu has infusions of blues and electronica. And those performers rarely get an American showcase like the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Wonderful as the oldies were in their 1970s versions, it would have been a treat to hear how this next generation could transform them.