This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK). In the shuffling rhythms of samba, in its defiance and energy and lust for life, lies the soul of Rio de Janeiro. Samba is heard ...

Brazilian-American musician Beto Gonzalez was too young to understand the country around him when his family returned to Brazil in the 1970s. It was only as he grew older, after coming back to the ...

Monday nights feel like Saturdays in Rio's Little Africa neighborhood when the sun sets and the samba starts to play. Surrounded by a mostly young crowd, seven musicians sit around a table with the ...

As clichéd as it sounds, music is truly a universal language. Just ask trumpeter and MC Ben Lamar and Brazilian hip-hop lyricist Edu Lopes. Both were raised on samba and bossa nova, specifically on ...

This year is the 60th anniversary of the cool beat of bossa nova. What could that possibly have to do with the D.C. area? Well, it turns out that the album “Jazz Samba,” which introduced to the world ...

Most people who follow music have at least heard of tropicalia, the genre-blending Brazilian pop style that enjoyed a new surge of popularity in the States and Europe upon its 30th anniversary, in ...

Today is the final day of the massive Carnival in Rio de Janiero, Brazil. Samba is that festival's native sound, but the music can be heard in Brazil for the entire year. Tom Moon went to Rio before ...

Musicians at Casa de Francisca, in São Paulo, Brazil. One afternoon in 1962, lyricist Vinícius de Moraes and composer Antônio Carlos “Tom” Jobim were sitting at Bar Veloso, in Rio de Janeiro, when ...