Carla Alexandar

Take the swaying melodies of Brazilian Samba, add a few hip-hop flavours, a handful of samples and some funked-up bass lines, and you have the rather fine second album from Brazil´s Carla Alexandar. Now living in Copenhagen, she remains true to her Brazilian roots. Yet SAMBAMUFFIN is a truly comopolitan affair, which finds her inhabiting a rather magical triangle somewhere between Astrid Gilberto, MAry J. Blige and Jamaica´s Lady Saw. It´s increasingly hard to come up with anything genuinely new in the over-ploughed fields of global fusion, but Alexandar harvests her diverse influences in a way that´s always fresh and intriguing - TIMES MAGAZINE - Nigel Williamson