Amaro Freitas

★★★★ Sankofa FAROUT. CD/LP

Recorded over two years, with few breaks, the rhapsodic Sankofa fully nails Brazilian Freitas’s elaborate compositional style. The Monkish hard-edged vamps and stuttering groove of Ayeye are superseded by pulsing standouts Cazumbá and Malakoff, where the motorik repetition of Freitas’s off-thescale looping patterns threaten to spin into abstraction over the driving carnival rhythms of long-time compadres Jean Elton and Hugo Medeiros.