Azymuth: samba doido starts in a house in Laranjeiras

The way into Azymuth is what they did before they were Azymuth: the backing band for almost every artist who mattered in Brazil.

José Roberto Bertrami on keyboards, Alex Malheiros on bass, Ivan Conti on drums, Ariovaldo Contesini on percussion. In Rio in the early seventies they played on other people’s records and wrote music to order.

The name for the sound that came out of it is theirs: samba doido, crazy samba. An electric hybrid of samba, jazz and funk that broke the structures everyone else was working inside.

The place it started is not a studio. Bertrami invited the other two to his house at weekends, to find out what the three of them did on their own.

Laranjeiras is the district and also the track

Between 1973 and 1975 those rehearsals went to tape in Bertrami’s home studio, in the Laranjeiras district. One of the tracks carries the name of the neighbourhood, seven and a half minutes of it.

Conti says most of those pieces grew out of ideas thrown around during breaks in sessions for other artists. Not offcuts: material that had no client.

The rehearsals were like we did in the recording studio, but it was for us.

They only came out in 2019, on Far Out Recordings, fifty years after they were cut.

The record the labels did not want

Those tapes existed to find a deal, and at first they did not find one.

“Linha do Horizonte” is on that album and runs four and a half minutes. It is samba doido already fully formed, before anyone outside Brazil had noticed.

Nine and a half minutes, and they are only the door

Light as a Feather came out in 1979, the group’s first record for Milestone. It carries “Jazz Carnival”, the track Azymuth is known for outside Brazil.

Far Out, which reissues the catalogue now, writes that the album spent eight straight weeks in the UK Top 20 and sold more than half a million copies.

The album version runs nine minutes and thirty-three seconds. Anyone who knows it from radio or a DJ set almost always knows it shorter.

Listen while you read

What sits next to the hit

On the same record, four minutes and ten seconds: “Partido Alto”. Far Out calls it the group’s samba doido staple, and there it is, two tracks ahead of the international hit.

That is why coming in through “Jazz Carnival” misleads. The album that made Azymuth known as a dancefloor group is also the one where samba stays the skeleton of everything.

Three tracks later comes “Avenida das Mangueiras”, which the same label presents as deep house arriving before deep house. Theo Parrish made a version twice its length.

The portrait

In that same 1979 the group started using the studio as an instrument: Far Out points to the Big Muff and the Dolby system, neither of them common on Brazilian records at the time.

Bertrami died in 2012, and Kiko Continentino took the keyboard chair. Conti and Malheiros are still playing, in Brazil and in Europe.

Since 2005 Conti has worked with DJs: Roni Size, DJ Nuts, Madlib. The original sixteen-track tapes of Light as a Feather were handed by the group to Far Out’s Joe Davis, who rebuilt the reissues from them.

The thread that holds fifty years together is not a genre. It is a group of session players who kept using their spare time to record things nobody had ordered.

Worth hearing

• “Laranjeiras” (1973-1975): seven and a half minutes cut at home, in the district that gives it its name, released only in 2019.
• “Linha do Horizonte” (1975): from the first album, the one that came out of the single demo a label accepted.
• “Jazz Carnival” (1979): nine minutes and thirty-three seconds in the album version, usually heard shorter.
• “Partido Alto” (1979): on the same record as the hit, with the samba kept in front.
• “Avenida das Mangueiras” (1979): what Far Out presents as deep house before deep house.