BLOG 11/01/2021
The Jan Diaries — From London to Brazil via Far Out Recordings
Jan Kinčl opened 2021 with the kind of year-in-review nobody especially wanted to write. Most of 2020, he concedes, will not be remembered as thrilling — but the release schedule was another matter, and three records from a single London label did more than their share to lift the year’s score. All three came out on Far Out Recordings, and all three lead back, one way or another, to Brazil.
What the piece covers
Far Out has been Joe Davis’ life’s work since 1994, a British independent built almost entirely around Brazilian music: Marcos Valle, Azymuth, Joyce, Arthur Verocai, The Ipanemas and Milton Nascimento all sit in the catalogue, alongside a smaller non-Brazilian contingent that includes Kirk Degiorgio, Daniela Maunika and 4hero. Jneiro Jarel — Omar Jarel Gilyard, from Brooklyn — belongs to that second group, and Kinčl’s point is that nothing in the music gives it away. After A Thousand Years, finished in 2018 after sessions in New York, New Orleans, Miami and Costa Rica, folds Brazilian music, jazz, Latin jazz, soul and funk into one another; the column singles out Viberian Waves, Pt. 1&2 as the track that hooked him first, and the album as a whole as something full of colour, scent and flavour.
The second pick is a rescue job. Manfredo Fest was a blind Brazilian jazz and bossa pianist who moved to the United States in 1976 and self-released Brazilian Dorian Dream the same year — Brazilian rhythm, North American jazz-funk and a faintly baroque European undertow, well ahead of its moment. Original copies are effectively unfindable, and Fest died in 1999 without ever reaching the audience the record deserved, which is what makes Far Out’s reissue worth the fuss. The third is Azymuth’s Demos (1973-75), cut in keyboardist Bertrami’s home studio in Rio de Janeiro before the band’s official 1975 debut and turned down at the time by publishers who kept telling him the music was simply wrong.
The part that stayed
Kinčl prefers those demos to the finished versions that later surfaced on records such as 1996’s Carnival, and the rough edges are exactly the reason. The music is close to fifty years old and played on thoroughly classical instruments — bass, drums, Fender Rhodes, percussion and a Roland RS-101 or a Solina — yet tracks like Laranjeiras and Castelo (Version 2) still sound, to his ear, more futuristic than most music made today on modern synthesisers. Put headphones on, he writes, and you are effectively sitting in the room while the band tries out variants. For a band with roughly forty albums and half a century of Brazilian music history behind it, that is an unusually intimate way in.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Four minutes.
The Jan Diaries | Od Londona do Brazila u 2020 via Far Out Recordings → redbull.com