Tres Cabeças Loucuras is the third album by Sao Paulo Underground. It's a very catchy, jazz + electronics album filled with sunny melodies, beats, noise, sounds and songs. The group formed around Rob Mazurek (cornet and electronics), a key player in the Chicago post rock/modern jazz scene, who has played with everyone from his own Exploding Star Orchestra and Chicago Underground projects to performing and/or recording with Tortoise, Jim O'Rourke, Pharoah Sanders, and many more and whose work reflects a keen interest in modern, interesting music, both from the jazz and rock traditions. He spent several years living in the Brazil and developing a music that reflected those experiences. While in Brazil he met the co-founder of the group, Mauricio Takara (drums, percussion, cavaquinho [the 'miniature guitar' of Brazil], electronics). Performing and recording their first album as a duo, the gravity of the ensemble pulled in two other musicians: Guilherme Granado (keyboards, electronics, samplers) and Richard Ribeiro (drums).
Each of the musicians is an example of the new vanguard in music; Rob in contemporary jazz and forward-looking rock and the 3 Brazilian musicians in updating and modernizing Brazilian musical forms. São Paulo Underground embodies a fascinating musical mixture of Sun Ra-esque cosmic noise and rhythms and phrasing from samba, maracatu, rock and free jazz traditions. The album has a huge, modern, laptop-laden, psychedelic sound which launches Brazil's "Tropicalia' into a new, heavily electronic millennia. One of it's charms is that it is very clear and direct and accessible, but it's also utterly filled with sound! This is the rare, ground-breaking effort that can be absorbed and enjoyed effortlessly; it's just a corker!
"Limitless in its possibilities." – Rolling Stone
"Post digital, post industrial psychedelia." – The Wire
"Rob Mazurek returns to Brazil and floats his cool blue cornet over a spellbinding collage of saturated textures, syncopated rhythms and sundry electronics." - Time Out Chicago – Voted one of the Top 10 jazz albums of the year – 2011
