Friday Playlist: Os Tincoas

A brief sampler from the long career of an underloved harmony vocal gem from Bahia

This playlist, intended for a piece that ran earlier this week, starts with the above track from 1961, and the schmaltzy, beautifully sung debut of Os Tincoas. It’s incomplete because Spotify is incomplete (!), but it does include a track from one of singer and percussionist Mateus Aleluia’s solo albums.

When I hear Os Tincoas, I hear time collapsing, as devices from a fixed moment in history (in this case, the smooth harmonies of the pop trade) are used to celebrate and engage the many deities of the timeless spirit world. Often when the orishas are called or celebrated, it’s with somber, churchlike sounds. But this music radiates sublime and refined sweetness. It’s a differently euphoric vessel for the expression of devotion.

On many of the tracks, geography collapses as well: It can be difficult to tell where the African elements end, and the Brazilian ones begin. That is significant, because it stands in contrast to so many works that fall into (lazy) catch-all categories like “world fusion.” There is none of the ad-hoc paella jumble happening here; it’s spirit music that lives on an astonishingly pure frequency, connecting the audibly strong traditional African roots to the equally strong subsequent flowerings that happened in Brazil.

We have a (digital) suggestion box: Share cherished underloved/overlooked records at echolocatormusic@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading!