AVE SANGRIA (Sangria Bird as evidenced on the rather bizarre album cover) was a rare example of a progressive folk rock band that came from the western most part of Brazil in the Pernambuco region and released this one specimen of progressive psychedelic folk rock in 1974. While psychedelic folk that mixed in European progressive rock was unusual in Brazil, there were other bands such as Alceu Valena, Flaviola, Bando do Sol, Lula Crtes, Marconi Notaro and Lailson that ventured down the same path and like their more famous contemporaries Os Mutantes utilized their own native Brazilian musical styles to add flavor into a more European derived sound.
The band started out under the name Tamarineira Village but took the advice of a gypsy friend who suggested the admittedly better band name AVE SANGRIA. The band consisted of Marco Polo (vocals), Ivson Wanderly (guitar), Paulo Raphael (guitar, synthesizer, vocal, Almir de Oliveira (bass), Israel Semente (drums) and Agrcio Noya (other percussion) and together would craft their one and only self- titled album that found the band the subject of military and government censorship for their hippie ideals and outlandish stage performances where they wore lipstick, kissed each other and talked dirty on stage. They sort of had a punk attitude and a glam rock image but were considered extremely shocking by the 1970s conservative values of Brazilian culture. Lyrics are exclusively in Portuguese.
Bandleader Marco Polo was a former legal scholar and led an unsuspecting sheltered band out of their home enclave of Recife and took them to the wild and crazy big city of Rio de Janeiro and without any recording experience under their belts the band successfully created a splendid album that mixed the disparate elements of 60s based psychedelic folk and rock, progressive rock and the Brazilian musical styles of samba and xote. Like most Latin American based traditional musical styles, AVE SANGRIA's addition of their own local flavor allows a super catchy, instantly infectious mix of musical styles that offered the band a small amount of success within Brazil but never caught on beyond its borders. Unfortunately the band ruffled all the wrong feathers and found themselves censored and harassed by the government which ultimately led to their disbanding and only leaving behind this one and only album.
Despite all the censorship and a flood that destroyed most of the albums in their record company warehouse, this UNCENSURED album version is one of the hardest one to find nowadays, only few in the world survived the flood destruction.