Brazilian-American musician Beto Gonzalez was too young to understand the country around him when his family returned to Brazil in the 1970s. It was only as he grew older, after coming back to the ...

The banner on the back wall of the old dance hall says in Portuguese: “While there is dance, we still have hope.” There’s plenty of that as the crowd of Cariocas (Rio locals) shake hips and move their ...

The characters in her new novel, The Air You Breathe, start as two little girls thrown together on a sugar plantation in Brazil who become musical partners in an adventure that takes them through the ...

The continually evolving relationship between American jazz and Brazilian music is firm proof that the power of influence often travels in two directions. Todd Barkan's liner notes for Jive Samba ...

There was one more throw of the dice left for old-fashioned jazz lyricism before the Beatles et al changed the musical landscape, and ensured that jazz would never return to its pre-eminent place in ...

Groups such as Samba Que Elas Querem, whose rewrite of a samba classic prompted a legal tussle, are taking on the patriarchy It was a typical Friday night at the Beco do Rato, a samba club tucked down ...

Nothing captures the sound, the mood or the languor of summer quite like the bossa nova. Invented along the beaches of Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s, the quietly swaying Brazilian music became a ...

Percussionist Kody Roberts has been drumming with the band since he was 7 A young drummer who started leading a samba band at the age of 14 has said he wants more young people to enjoy the carnival ...

If samba is the soul of Rio, its heart is Lapa, a rough-and-tumble district on the edge of downtown that is home to dozens of old-fashioned samba clubs and music-filled bars. Few cities are as deeply ...