Art by Evan Solano
Dean Van Nguyen‘s book Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur was included in NPR’s annual Books We Love list.
The half-century saga of Brazilian jazz’s most precious missing recordings begins at a hot spot called the CAMJA, or Clube de Amigos do Jazz, where cosmically aligned musicians based in São Paulo would regularly convene. At the group’s core was Hermeto Pascoal, legendary O Bruxo (The Wizard/Sorcerer), who by 1971 counted Miles Davis as a fan and collaborator. “The most important musician on the planet,” Davis would say. But many of Hermeto’s bandmates were drawn from nights at the CAMJA, a sanctuary from a military dictatorship that repressed artistic expression, at the heart of a dense urban city known as Selva de Pedra—the Concrete Jungle.
Among the musicians to meet Hermeto at the club in the late-1960s was young drummer Zé Eduardo Nazario, who soon became one of his preferred collaborators. Despite securing a work visa to link up with some fellow Brazilian musicians in Minneapolis, Zé Eduardo spurned the planned trip, such was his desire to continue playing with Hermeto. Lengthy jam sessions would take place at the shaman’s home; Zé Eduardo’s little brother Lelo Nazario, a keyboardist, was eventually brought into the fold. By 1976, the pair were sufficiently educated in their teacher’s mysticism to be offered the opportunity to enter Vice-Versa Studio in São Paulo as members of Hermeto’s band.
“A musician of Hermeto Pascoal’s calibre always had a positive impact on everyone who worked with him,” says Lelo. “Hermeto really encouraged his musicians to reach beyond themselves.”
The two-day sessions went harmoniously. And yet, the recordings were left in the can, away from public ears. No arrangements were ever made to release the album. Hermeto soon departed São Paulo to record in America—in 1977, he released his signature record Slaves Mass on Warner Bros. To this day, the masters of the Vice-Versa Studio sessions are thought to be lost. But there was a twist. Call it foresight, call it fortune, but upon completion of the project, Lelo had asked an engineer to make him a copy of the original tapes. For decades he kept the music safely in his archive, until 2017, when the album was remastered and released by UK label Far Out Recordings as Viajando Com O Som. Immediately, it was hailed as a great lost work from Hermeto, restored to its rightful place in his blessed catalogue. (The legend of Brazilian music died last September, aged 89.)
Around the release of Viajando Com O Som, the brothers mentioned to Far Out founder Joe Davies that they were sitting on their own Dante’s fortune: unreleased music recorded between 1975 and 1977. When not working with Hermeto, Zé Eduardo and Lelo led their own band, Grupo Um, initially with bassist Zeca Assumpção before later adding more musicians. To his astonishment, Davies discovered that the collective had recorded two unreleased albums that predated all their existing material. He agreed to check the recordings out, and immediately recognised their importance.
“Their sound had very much the feel of São Paulo, the nervousness of a city, like you potentially feel in the jazz music from New York,” Davies tells me. “It’s got that kind of nervous energy about it.”
Far Out went to work on the restoration of the albums Starting Point, put out in 2023, and the newly released Nineteen Seventy Seven. It’s music that captures Brazilian jazz innovation; a fragile scene of fusion and verve that existed in a world of cultural oppression. Many venues were shuttered in the 1970s. Reliant on handouts from the government, radio stations were highly compromised; censorship across all arts was the standard.
“Record companies only accepted popular and traditional music that was easy to sell,” explains Lelo via email. “Works that deviated from those standards or any music that could lead to open and sensitive listening were systematically refused. So, there were all sorts of difficulties in playing and producing more advanced music like ours.”
This spilled into live performance. At the time Lelo was tinkering with new-age synthesizers, specifically the ARP2600 and EMS Synthi AKS. When the band tried to unveil one of the fruits of this experimentation, the kinetic avant-garde piece “Mobile/Stabile” at the inaugural São Paulo International Jazz Festival in 1978, festival organizers tried to cut them off, enraging the audience. (A studio version of “Mobile/Stabile” appears on Nineteen Seventy Seven.)
According to Zé Eduardo, the story lays bare why the music never saw release during the era it was recorded. The band, he says, “tried to show to record companies, but for many reasons, including the military dictatorship, the kind of music we did was considered ‘degenerated art’, due to the control of art and culture implemented at that time.”
For the recording of Nineteen Seventy Seven, Lelo, Ze and Assumpção leveled up their sound by adding saxophonist Roberto Sion and drummer Carlinhos Gonçalves to the line-up. Sessions again took place at Vice-Versa Studio, with everything recorded straight to tape, no overdubs. Hermeto’s lessons in wizardry were funnelled into a cosmic, envelope-pushing set of breakneck grooves, light-touch organ play, otherworldly synthesizers, and Afro-Brazilian horns. Opener “Absurdo Mudo” is an ambitious three-part suite that begins smoky and enigmatic before the pace quickens with fast drums and peppy sax and electric piano interplay, decelerating into a thick slab of tweaked-out funk.
Saxophones and clarinets snake with a sense of spirituality, but there’s often a feeling of mystery to the compositions too, such as Lelo’s searching piano play on “Valsa Cromatica.” Though grand and celestial, this is also a record with connection to the soil. Hermeto’s interest in the sounds of nature are replicated on “Festa dos Pássaros”, which features chirping birds and swampy sounds.
“When we found Grupo Um, I had a clear vision of what I wanted to do,” says Lelo. “And that was to develop my own musical language and create something as cutting-edge as possible by blending contemporary avant-garde languages and Brazilian music, independent of genres and commercial interests. I think that the result of this fusion takes music to a new level and, after 50 years of the group’s foundation, the result achieved on our albums shows that.”
Grupo Um eventually released music in the late-1970s and 1980s—Lelo describes their album Marcha sobre a Cidade as the first independent instrumental album in Brazil. But for five decades, their origin story remained untold.
For the brothers, belatedly revealing this music to the world has brought a sense of solace and joy. For everyone else, Nineteen Seventy Seven is further documentation of an overlooked moment in jazz history, and proof that the sound of resistance can sometimes be wordless.
“I feel fulfilled,” says Lelo, “in seeing that music, which we made with enormous dedication and care, survives the passage of time.”
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