Here’s an album that soothes while it grooves, proving that at its best, Brazil makes music like no one else. The album focuses on soft sambas, and once or twice on their sophisticated cousins from bossa nova, but it also explores other genres, making this album not so simple to pigeonhole. Things open with Gal Costa wrapping her seductive voice around a bossa concoction of sophisticated musicality and gentle eddies of rhythm. Who else but Paulinho da Viola could do justice to a fleet samba that never seems to rise above a whisper? But as the song list sidetracks to other rhythms, it maintains its delicate but ineluctable swing: Caetano Veloso tiptoes through a sweet tune that distills the elements of forro and Monica Salmaso is the color wash that fills in the spaces between the pointillist percussion on “Mora Na Roca.” The truth is that Brazil has such a wealth of great music that Putumayo could probably make a dozen or more collections that would be just as good, but thankfully they’ve made this one.

-Marty Lipp