Beatriz Azevedo
The Brazilian singer, composer, poet and actress Beatriz Azevedo is a multi-faceted artist.
In her music she uses a rich arsenal of typical Brazilian styles, such as
samba, bossa nova, afoxé, xaxado, maxixi and other traditional rhythms, to
create a seductive and extremely personal style of this time.
She has been inspired by the Brazilian art movement "Anthropophagy", which in turn served as a source of inspiration for the legendary "Tropicália" movement, the sound of revolution in the 1960's cooked up by the likes of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. At the heart of Anthropophagy, or Cannibalism, is the eating-up of foreign cultures in order to strengthen your own, using the powerful elements from "the other". This mechanism has been seen as the driving force in Brazilian culture, a relatively young country that unites elements of indigenous, European and African cultures. If this sounds vague or complicated, rest assured: Beatriz Azevedo's music is very accessible, but also quite a bit more original than the gentle bossa nova sounds that usually drift over from distant Brazil.