Nineteen Seventy Seven

Description

Brazilian avant-jazz vanguardists Grupo Um celebrate their 50th anniversary, sharing a second previously lost 1970s album from the vaults. ‘Nineteen Seventy Seven’ (titled after the year it was recorded) is another rip-roaring instrumental fusion treasure from the band which spawned from within Hermeto Pascoal’s famed mid-1970s Sao Paulo collective. Like their debut album ‘Starting Point’, Grupo Um’s ‘Nineteen Seventy Seven’ was recorded when Brazil’s military dictatorship was at its most repressive. ‘There were no open doors to those who dreamt to be protagonists in creative instrumental music’, remembers drummer Zé Eduardo Nazario, ‘even popular composers and singers had to submit their songs to censors and many records were banned and confiscated from the stores’. Just like Hermeto Pascoal’s ‘Viajando Com O Som’ (1977) and Grupo Um’s previous album ‘Starting Point’ (1975), both of which remained unreleased until the 21st century, Zé Eduardo asserts that the 1977 album was flatly ‘without any chance to be released at that time’.