Take the swaying melodies of Brazilian samba, add a few hip-hop flavours, a handful of samples and some funked-up bass lines, and you have the rather fine second album from Brazil’s Carla Alexandar.
Now living in Copenhagen, she remains true to her Brazilian roots. Yet Sambamuffin is a truly cosmopolitan affair, which finds her inhabiting a rather magical triangle somewhere between Astrid Gilberto, Mary J. Blige and Jamaica’s Lady Saw. It’s increasingly hard to come up with anything genuinely new in the over-ploughed fields of global fusion, but Alexandar harvests her diverse influences in a way that’s always fresh and intriguing.
(April Records)