Review of the Week: Sessa live at Rich Mix

Rich Mix, London, 11 February

As carnival is about to kick off in Brazil for a week of sun, samba and celebration thousands of miles away, São Paulo’s cosmic-tropicália troubadour Sessa is being treated to an obscenely wet and windy London evening on which to launch his latest album. But while the weather is hardly a warm welcome, he’s cheered by the good vibes of the audience: “I’m very moved,” he says at one point, exaggerated lapels stretching almost to his armpits under his bushy head of hair. The people sway, they swoon, they show up enthusiastically: Sessa’s nocturnal jams and breezy spiritual questing have stirred music fans looking for soft and cosy in harsh times.

Sessa (real name Sérgio Sayeg) is signed to Brooklyn indie label Mexican Summer and is becoming increasingly well known on these shores. His collaborations include performing in Grupo Cosmo with the London-based contemporary soul artist anaiis, who will headline the Brick Lane Jazz Festival in April. 

Latin music is now at the top of the global cultural agenda (hi, Bad Bunny) with a renewed focus on styles beyond reggaeton. Brazilian music has had a stronghold in the British musical underground since the days of acid jazz and has been nudging into the mainstream again lately – see the breezy bossa nova on Olivia Dean's 2025 album The Art of Loving. While Sessa feels a world away from Dean, he's among a number of breakthrough Brazilian artists who are propelling musical traditions into the future and gaining worldwide recognition – like Liniker, who’ll headline a new one-day festival in London this spring.

Sessa’s songs draw on Brazil’s deep history of sensitive acoustic guitarists sighing into their microphones. His style encompasses bossa nova, which emerged in the 1950s and blended samba’s Afro-Brazilian rhythms with jazz and soft vocals, as well as MPB (música popular brasileira), a catch-all term for Brazilian music that emerged as a bossa nova alternative in the late 60s. And within that was the tropicália movement, a group of musicians who brought in the “foreign influence” of electric guitars – and psychedelia – and captured the spirit of political resistance, under the cosh from Brazil’s military dictatorship.

Sessa’s nimble fretwork and image is indebted to tropicália’s 70s heyday and forefathers such as Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, Ederaldo Gentil and, perhaps most famously, Gilberto Gil, who were either imprisoned, exiled or censored. But to quote one of the songs Sessa performs this evening, he’s all about the “Revolução Interior” (inner revolution). His concerns are existential and his vivid poetry about comets and mermaids, destiny and dawn, considers the bigger picture: nature, life, God. Although there is the occasional older song tonight, such as 2019’s Flor Do Real, that talks about the euphoria of fornication. His subject matter has mostly moved on from the sensual, however: tonight he opens with the title track from his third album, Pequena Vertigem de Amor, released last year, the “little vertigo of love”, about the sweetness of new parenthood and the hazy intimacy of domesticity, having become a father in 2022.

If you don’t speak Portuguese, it’s not possible to cop a word, but the easygoing music is a balm regardless. Over three albums, Sessa has evolved from sparse, Leonard Cohen-indebted minimalism to the addition of lush instrumentation (like Arthur Verocai, or perhaps Alice Coltrane), Afro-Brazilian and shamanic percussion (congas, a cabalonga) and female voices. His sound subtly brings in a more rhythmic style of strumming alongside his finger-picking, an influence Sessa gained while working in a New York record shop and sifting through stacks of soul 45s. Though tonight he has a more modest set-up: drummer Biel Basile and bassist Marcelo Cabral join him onstage and while it’s not possible to have a full choir, superb backing vocals come from Lê Veras on keys, an ethereal counterbalance to Sessa’s croon. 

There’s a gentle gear shift when Cabral, who cuts a stoic Wilko Johnson figure, begins to bow his bass. But for the most part Sessa’s set, and chord sequences, coast along a similarly chilled vista. We’re in cruise mode, high on calm. When he does pick up the pace a little – like with Canção da Cura, from his fittingly titled second album Estrela Acesa (“burning star”) – it’s a tantric treat, enough to encourage devoted fans to holler “we love you”. The psychedelic flourishes are subtle too – a phaser effect on Sessa’s guitar towards the end of the show provides a pleasingly wigged-out moment, as if the magic portal is opening. Form an orderly queue for the astral plane, please. Sessa’s burning star will only continue to rise.

Kate Hutchinson is the Nerve's music critic. A writer and broadcaster, she’s behind the audio series The Last Bohemians, and the 2025 music podcast Studio Radicals, which Radio Times called "podcasting at its best". She currently presents a fortnightly show on Soho Radio.