Brazilian Film Festival of NY: Baby do Brasil / Screening: Samba & Jazz

Baby Do Brasil is considered one of the biggest Brazilian singers, and a music legend who has been revolutionizing the history of the Popular Brazilian Music (MPB). Baby is famous for her soft, indescribable and unique voice, and strong rhythmic versatility not only in her ballads but also in her electric songs. She began her career along with Moraes Moreira, Galvão, Paulinho Boca de Cantor and Pepeu Gomes, creating the Novos Baianos group. The band formed in 1970, and quickly reached national media, including being named as the best album of Brazilian music of all times by Rolling Stones. After the success of the music movements of Bossa Nova and Tropicalismo, the Novos Baianos was recognized as the new Brazilian music movement with the fusion of all styles of Brazilian roots with the appearance of a new artistic language that has been influencing the new generation. In 1978, Baby do Brasil started her successful solo career, and today, “Baby is a main reference in the history of the Brazilian female singing. Novos Baianos, Baby and Pepeu, Baby do Brasil. Today she has incorporated all the group of the public personas that she has created and, most importantly, she sings better than ever.” Caetano Veloso, one of the biggest Brazilian composers of all time.


Directed by Jefferson Mello, author of the book “Paths of Jazz,” this feature length documentary intends to draw a parallel between Jazz and Samba, showing in a versatile and unpretentious way the synergy between these two rhythms and the cities in which they are most present: Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans, respectively. Samba & Jazz portrays, through unusual situations, the authentic artistic expression of distant peoples, but with a feeling in common: a passion for music. The aim of the work is to expose the similarity of musical and behavioral aspects of people of these two cities: it is samba and jazz, its myths, its agents, its traditions, freedoms, adjustments and mergers, their knowledge, inclusion or marginalization, artists from stage and from streets and the whole atmosphere of the rhythms. It is history, culture and entertainment condensing into a single composition.