"Bossa Maximus", a trip into deep afro-bossa territory by long-lost singer Carlos Lee! ----------- We guess that forty years is a long time to remember everything one ever did. Normally when whatmusic.com releases an album we either already know a lot about the artists or can quite easily track them down through the original record label owners, producers, sidemen etc. Even if the artist is no longer living, there’s usually somebody who’s more than happy to fill in details of their lives. However, with Carlos Lee, it was a chance sighting online of this LP for sale secondhand that provoked our curiosity. The record looked interesting and our exclusive relationship with Musidisc Brasil meant that if we liked the album, then reissuing it would be a certainty. Whilst waiting for the LP to arrive in the post, we started to do some research into Carlos Lee and his ‘Bossa Maximus’ album. Usually, it’s not too difficult to track down details of an artist online, or at least find some info trail that leads to someone who knows something about the subject. But not this time. No problem we thought, we’ll just have to wait for the LP to arrive and check the liner notes. The LP arrived but, like Orlann Divo’s ‘Samba Em Paralelo’, it was one of those Musidisc titles where the back cover only advertised their other easy listening titles – Os Romanticos de Cuba, and so on. No problem, Nilo Sérgio and Ary at Musidisc will have everything we need. Then we got a call from whatmusic.com’s Brazilian ‘aide de camp’, Durval Ferreira, saying that Musidisc didn’t release any records by Carlos Lee and what’s more they’d never even heard of him! But the record in our hands was incontrovertible proof. After some searching around, the master tapes were found – much to Nilo Sérgio and Ary’s amusement. ‘I’ve been asking around and no one’s ever heard of this guy’, said Durval, despite the fact that one of his own songs, ‘Mensagem’, was featured on the album – which must have meant that he cleared the song for use back in the mid-60s. The album ‘Bossa Maximus’ sits somewhere between the earliest Jorge Ben albums, with their simplistic rhythms but jazzy Meirelles arrangements, and the emergent ‘cançăo de protesto’ movement with its ‘primitive’ songs about the struggles of the poor; as typified by Geraldo Vandré, Ruy Guerra and Edu Lobo and their muse Nara Leăo.