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Tropicalia, SOUL JAZZ

While North America was engaged in its late-Sixties hippie revolution, South America - well, Brazil, at least - was undergoing its own comparable cultural insurgency, in the form of the Tropicalia movement. Centred around a small group of writers and musicians including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Ze, Gal Costa, Jorge Ben and the group Os Mutantes, Tropicalia sought to update the country's native bossa nova and samba stylings with the new sounds of the avant-garde and psychedelia, as the setting for a drily sardonic vein of social-surrealist protest rooted in, though by no means beholden to, the leftist opposition to the country's ruling military junta. Indeed, it was probably Tropicalia's rejection of both right and doctrinaire left that ensured the movement had an effective life of little more than one year, ending with Gil and Veloso's deportation to England in July 1969. But like punk in the 1970s, the seeds sowed back then continue to bear fruit decades later, across the globe. This excellent and informative anthology demonstrates why, virtually all 20 tracks radiating the perpetual freshness of the authentically innovative.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'A Minha Menina', 'Bat Macumba', 'Gloria', 'Tuareg', 'Tropicalia', 'Take It Easy, My Brother Charles'