Seu Jorge

Charismatic samba revivalist and actor Seu Jorge was born Jorge Mário da Silva in Rio de Janeiro in 1970. After stints working in a tyre shop, a bar and the army, Jorge wound up homeless for three years. He joined a prominent theatre group in 1993, leaving four years later to make music with the eclectic Farofa Carioca band. He quit the group to concentrate on samba, for him the gold standard of Brazilian music, and released his solo debut, Samba Esporte Fino, in 2001. After seeing Jorge in the 2002 film City of God, director Wes Anderson cast him as a sailor in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), in which he sang acoustic, saudade-drenched versions of Bowie tracks to international acclaim. His subsequent albums mixed heartfelt sambas with offbeat covers, such as Serge Gainsbourg’s “Chatterton”, on 2004's Cru, and Kraftwerk’s "The Model", on 2010’s Seu Jorge and Almaz with members of manguebeat combo Nação Zumbi. American soul later fuelled his 2011 and 2015 collections of Música para Churrasco (Barbecue Music).