CHICO CORREA & ELECTRONIC BAND – Berra Boi (live) | Festival Mucho

Created by multi-instrumentalist Esmeraldo Marques, born in the Brazilian state of Paraíba, Chico Correa & Electronic Band are musically rooted in a variety of genres, pushing the horizons of northeastern Brazilian music far beyond the afrocyberdelia of manguebeat. A blend of Northeastern Brazilian music with jazz, trip hop, afrobeat, dance hall, and Jamaican dub. The music produced by Chico Correa & Electronic Band also relies on samplers, echo pedals, scratches and computer programs.

Esmeraldo Marques adopted the artistic name Chico Correa as a tribute to Chik Corea, who in the 1970s was the precursor to the fusion of jazz with technological musical languages. He plays the guitar, operates electronic devices and even controls effects in real time during their performances. Despite all the rhythms that are improvised in the group’s sound, the structure is always focused on electronic grooves.

Correa, who is from Bahia and currently lives in João Pessoa, also uses public domain folk songs in the group’s repertoire. This was the result of research he developed when he was a scholarship holder at the Orality Studies Laboratory, at the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB). “I worked with research and documentation of popular culture in the Northeast. That helped a lot,” he says in the same interview.

Their first homonymous album, Chico Correa & Electronic Band, was released in 2006. On the album the rhythms range from the agrestewerk cangaçi-gangsta of ‘Coco de elevador’ to the electrofunk that characterizes ‘Eu Pisei Na Pedra’, while ‘Mangangá’ mixes rock and maracatu, but with a different formula to that used by manguebeat. Other hints: ‘Bossinha’, ‘Baião Lo-fi’, ‘Lelê’, and ‘Odete’.

In 2012, the band released the virtual EP DerivaSons, which includes remixes of the group’s songs made by other musicians that were created for the album of the same name. However, due to tight time, this plan was not implemented on the first album. Now they continue to fight to release their second album, Baile Muderno.