The home to samba
At the heart of Brazilian music is samba, the musical and dance style with roots in African religion and ritual. Dating from the early 19th century and the festival dances of Bahian slaves, samba began amid the black working class. It was viewed with distaste by the country’s white establishment, but it has since permeated every tier of Brazilian society, with each region having its own style. Brazilian carnival is dominated by samba. A 100 years after the first recorded samba, Pelo Telefone, it has become the national music.

Brazil invented easy-listening
Bossa nova is essentially samba in a dinner jacket, a sophisticated blend of samba and jazz, but its languid, melodic style and lyrics depicting the glamorous lives of affluent Brazilians can also be found in Muzak, that curse of lifts and hotel lobbies the world over. No song better captured the soothing power of bossa nova than The Girl From Ipanema, written by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes as they sat in a bar in the beachfront neighbourhood of Ipanema and watched a pretty girl walk by each morning. When Astrud Gilberto, the wife of the bossa nova guitarist Joao Gilberto, sang an out-of-tune English version in 1964, it established a global image of Rio as a sun-kissed paradise — just as a military dictatorship took power and ended the good times.

Music behind bars 
The Bahian songwriters Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil formed Tropicalia as Brazil’s response to the hippy movement, but the military junta took a dim view of their colourful clothes, surreal lyrics and blending of Brazilian roots music with Western rock. In 1968 Veloso and Gil were thrown into solitary confinement in Rio jail cells for two months. “I thought I might be there for the rest of my life,” says Veloso, while Gil says of the motives for their arrest: “They gave us lots of ridiculous reasons, like you work for the communists, you want to destroy our youth. The real reason was: you are too enigmatic and we can’t understand you, so it’s better that you are in jail.” Imprisonment was followed by four months under curfew in Salvador, then two years of exile in London before the pair returned as national heroes. They are the country’s biggest stars, and from 2003 to 2008 Gil served as Brazil’s minister of culture. 

Brazil’s Amy Winehouse
Known as Pimentinha (little pepper) because of her fiery personality, Elis Regina is one of the most loved Brazilian singers and one of the wildest. Her 1974 version of the bossa nova classic Aguas de Marco (Waters of March), often cited as the greatest Brazilian song of all, is a work of heartbreaking beauty, but she was a fierce, strident figure, criticising the dictatorship at a time when to do so was extremely dangerous. Her popularity protected her from jail, but ultimately she was a victim of her own excesses. In 1982 she died, at the age of 36, through a combination of alcohol, cocaine and sleeping tablets. A memorial concert in Sao Paulo attracted a crowd of 10,000 and for many years after her death the words ‘Elis vive’ (Elis lives) could be seen on the walls of cities throughout Brazil. Regina’s daughter, Maria Rita, who looks and sounds a lot like her, is a big star. 

The inventor of glam rock
Formed in 1971 by the outrageous counter-tenor Ney Matogrosso and the Portuguese songwriter Joao Ricardo, Secos & Molhados were a theatrical rock band who wore heavy make-up and outfits inspired by the tribal markings of native Amazonians and Japanese kabuki theatre. Their debut album was a huge success in Brazil, selling more than a million copies and inspiring their label to take out a full-page advertisement in the US industry bible Billboard in an attempt to break America. It didn’t happen, although one band from Detroit took note. “Six months after [the advert],” claims Matogrosso, “Kiss started, with identical make-up and a heavier sound.”

There’s nothing bad about bad taste
It should come as no surprise that the country that gave us the dental-floss bikini also celebrates bad taste in music, to the extent that brega, a slang term for unstylish and outdated, is a much-loved genre of its own. Its origins lie in gaudy, sentimental ballads from the Amazon state of Para, and it has developed into sub-sections such as tecno brega, which sounds as if it was made on a drum machine from Toys R Us. Banda Uo, a midwestern trio lauded by the American DJ Diplo, and Gaby Amarantos, a shamelessly cheesy singer and dancer from the northern city of Belem, are the present-day reigning figures of tecno brega.

A challenge for Madonna
A gay icon throughout Brazil, Elza Soares, now 79, was born in a Rio favela (shanty town), married at 12 and widowed at 21. She launched her career as a samba singer at 16 after winning a radio talent contest, only to suffer national condemnation when her affair with the superstar footballer Garrincha was exposed. Garrincha died of alcoholism in 1983 and their son died in a car crash three years later. After years in the wilderness Soares has become a heroine to a new generation with The Woman at the End of the World, a remarkable “post-samba” album made in 2016 and inspired, according to Soares, by “sex and blackness”. One song is an ode to the female libido simply titled Pra Fuder (To F***). Not even Madonna dared do that.

A genre only for drug lords
Baile funk derives its name from the enormous parties in Rio favelas (slum) from the late Seventies and bankrolled by drug factions as a way of showing investment in their communities — and attracting customers. Over the past decade the genre, which features irreverent raps about sex, violence and social injustice against booty-shaking beats, has become a hit throughout Brazil. The most extreme form, proibidao (a subgenre of funk carioca music), glorifies and namechecks drug lords and is confined mostly to illegal raves, but middle-class cariocas can enjoy the style in safer environments; Circo Voador, a nightclub in the fashionable Lapa district of Rio, is hosting baile funk nights throughout the Olympics.

... But it’s not all samba and bossa nova
Mais Um Discos, a label run by the British enthusiast Lewis Robinson, aims to showcase the diversity of Brazil’s contemporary music scene. “The incredible thing about Brazilian music is that it always has swing,” says Robinson. “It might be post-punk, but it still swings.” Among his recent discoveries are Graveola, a band from Belo Horizonte who combine indigenous folk rhythms with indie rock and anything else they happen to chance upon; and Dona Onete, a singer from an Amazonian town who released her debut album two years ago, aged 73.