The Brazilian Future That Almost Disappeared
Some lost albums sound lost.
They arrive decades later carrying obvious traces of unfinished sessions, abandoned experiments or musicians still searching for a direction. Their historical fascination can be greater than their musical achievement.
The 1976 recordings of Marcos Resende & Index are something else entirely.
When the tapes were finally released in January 2021, approximately forty-five years after they had been recorded at Sonoviso Studios in Rio de Janeiro, the startling thing was not simply that the music had survived. It was how complete it sounded. Synthesizers, electric keyboards, acoustic and electric rhythm, Brazilian percussion, jazz improvisation and progressive-rock ambition existed inside compositions that could have stood comfortably beside the adventurous Brazilian instrumental records actually released during the decade.
Nothing about the music suggested an unfinished historical curiosity.
It sounded like a missing chapter.
At its center was keyboardist and composer Marcos Resende, a musician whose unusual journey had taken him from Espírito Santo to Portugal, from medical studies to progressive rock, from encounters with American jazz musicians back to Rio just as Brazilian instrumental music was undergoing another extraordinary transformation.
Around him were bassist Rubão Sabino, drummer Claudio Caribé and multi-instrumentalist Oberdan Magalhães, whose tenor and soprano saxophones and flute gave the quartet much of its distinctive melodic personality. The sessions were recorded between September 5 and 28, 1976, with engineer Toninho Barbosa at Sonoviso.
The album should have announced the arrival of an important new Brazilian fusion group.
Instead, almost nobody heard it.
A Child at the Accordion
Marcos Resende was born in Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, Espírito Santo, in 1947, and the mythology surrounding his musical childhood begins extraordinarily early. According to the history accompanying the eventual release of the Index recordings, he started playing accordion at two and taught himself piano at six.
Yet music did not initially determine his professional destination.
During the 1960s, Resende went to Lisbon to study medicine. The decision created one of those productive contradictions that appear repeatedly in jazz history: a musician pursuing a supposedly more conventional career while the supposedly secondary activity gradually takes over everything.
Portugal exposed Resende to a musical environment different from Brazil. American jazz circulated through records and visiting musicians, while European rock was becoming increasingly adventurous. British progressive rock in particular was demonstrating that electric keyboards could occupy the center of an ensemble rather than simply decorate it.
The organ, electric piano and synthesizer were becoming compositional instruments.
Resende was listening.
Cascais, 1971
The decisive moment came through jazz.
While still in Portugal, Resende formed a trio that appeared at the Cascais Jazz Festival in 1971, opening for Dexter Gordon.
The historical context matters. Gordon was one of the great tenor saxophonists to emerge from bebop, but by this period he had spent years living in Europe, where American jazz musicians often found audiences and professional opportunities that contrasted sharply with the difficulties they encountered at home.
For Resende, performing in that environment meant encountering jazz not as an abstract imported style but as a living international culture.
The festival experience helped establish that music could be more than the parallel life beside medicine.
And soon his interests moved toward something even more electric.
Status and the Progressive-Rock Laboratory
Resende subsequently formed Status, an electronically oriented progressive jazz-rock group. The band reportedly opened concerts for an extraordinary range of visiting performers, including Stan Getz, Phil Woods, Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers and Elton John. No known Status recordings survive, making the group one of the tantalizing missing pieces of Resende’s development.
But the list of artists surrounding them reveals the musical environment.
Art Blakey represented hard bop.
Stan Getz carried several decades of jazz history and an enormous Brazilian connection.
Phil Woods represented virtuoso post-bop alto playing.
Elton John belonged to the expanding world of sophisticated rock and pop.
Resende was absorbing all of it.
This helps explain why his later Brazilian recordings resist easy categorization. He did not return from Europe simply as a jazz pianist. He had experienced a period when the distinction between jazz, rock, electronic music and experimental composition was being aggressively dismantled.
Miles Davis had gone electric.
Weather Report was forming a new language.
Herbie Hancock would soon make funk central to his music.
Chick Corea was moving through electric jazz toward Return to Forever.
In Britain, groups such as Soft Machine were connecting improvisation with progressive rock.
Resende understood that keyboards could be the laboratory where those worlds met.
JazzLatitude Insight
Marcos Resende’s importance begins with geography. He left Brazil before the country’s great 1970s fusion explosion, absorbed American jazz and European progressive rock in Portugal, then returned carrying those influences back into a Brazilian rhythmic environment already undergoing its own electric revolution.
Revolution and Return
Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 1974 became the historical marker surrounding Resende’s return to Brazil. Far Out’s account places his homecoming after the revolution, with the keyboardist now determined to integrate what he had encountered in Europe with Brazilian rhythm and jazz.
The Brazil to which he returned was musically extraordinary.
MPB had expanded far beyond the acoustic sophistication of the previous decade. Electric instruments were everywhere. Rock, funk, soul, samba, jazz and regional Brazilian traditions were interacting. Marcos Valle was exploring increasingly funky and electronic territory. João Donato had returned from years in the United States with a transformed rhythmic sensibility. Azymuth was developing a uniquely Brazilian version of electric jazz. Eumir Deodato’s international success had demonstrated that a Brazilian arranger could operate inside large-scale jazz-funk production.
And Rio’s Black music scene was about to produce Banda Black Rio.
Resende arrived at exactly the right moment.
The Keyboard Arsenal
He also arrived with the right obsession.
Resende became deeply interested in electronic keyboards and synthesizers. Accounts of his equipment mention instruments including the Mini Moog, alongside electric and acoustic keyboards that allowed him to think beyond the traditional piano trio.
This matters because early synthesizers demanded a different relationship with sound.
A piano gives the musician a highly developed instrument whose basic acoustic identity is already determined.
A synthesizer asks questions.
What should the note sound like?
How quickly should it attack?
How long should it remain?
Should it resemble an existing instrument at all?
For a composer like Resende, this meant that timbre itself could become part of composition.
He was not merely playing keyboard parts.
He was designing environments.
Building Index
Back in Rio, Resende assembled the quartet that would become Index.
Rubão Sabino played bass.
Claudio Caribé played drums.
Oberdan Magalhães handled tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone and flute.
Resende played keyboards and wrote the arrangements. Most of the compositions were his, with “Nina Neném” written by Sabino.
The instrumentation was deceptively simple.
No guitarist.
No dedicated percussionist.
No large horn section for most of the sessions.
Instead, the quartet created its range through instrumental flexibility. Oberdan could move between saxophones and flute. Resende could change the entire harmonic color by moving between keyboard sounds. Sabino and Caribé provided the rhythmic stability that allowed those colors to expand.
It was a fusion group built for movement.
Oberdan Before Banda Black Rio
The presence of Oberdan Magalhães gives the sessions enormous historical significance.
Oberdan would soon become a foundational figure in Banda Black Rio, whose combination of samba, funk, soul and jazz produced one of the most important Brazilian instrumental sounds of the late 1970s. His compositions for that group would include material associated with the classic Maria Fumaça era.
But the Index recordings capture him just before that history fully unfolds.
His reeds provide a crucial counterweight to Resende’s electronic imagination. Synthesizers can easily make 1970s fusion feel technological. Oberdan brings breath back into the music.
The flute can lighten a dense arrangement.
The tenor can give it weight.
The soprano can move through the synthesizers almost like another electronic frequency.
This contrast between circuitry and breath became one of Index’s defining strengths.
Rubão Sabino and Claudio Caribé
The rhythm section deserves equal attention because Resende’s compositions required more than conventional jazz accompaniment.
Rubão Sabino needed to create bass lines capable of anchoring shifting harmonic environments without becoming trapped beneath them. His composition “Nina Neném” also demonstrates that Index was not simply Resende plus accompanists; the group possessed its own internal musical resources.
Claudio Caribé, meanwhile, had to negotiate the difficult territory between jazz flexibility and the precision demanded by fusion. The drums could not simply swing conventionally, nor could they become a rigid rock backbeat.
Brazilian rhythm complicated everything.
That complication was productive.
The rhythm section allowed Index to sound progressive without ceasing to sound Brazilian.
Sonoviso, September 1976
The quartet entered Sonoviso Studios in Rio de Janeiro in September 1976. The sessions ran across much of the month, from September 5 to September 28. Behind the console was Toninho Barbosa, an engineer whose work with Brazilian artists including João Donato and later Azymuth earned him comparisons with Rudy Van Gelder.
The comparison is revealing.
Van Gelder’s importance to American jazz came partly from understanding how to capture an ensemble as a coherent physical event. Brazilian electric jazz required a different technical vocabulary, but the challenge was related: preserve instrumental personality while allowing increasingly complex electric textures to coexist.
Index needed clarity.
Bass had to remain physical.
Drums needed space.
Oberdan’s reeds needed air.
Resende’s keyboards could not swallow everything.
The surviving tapes demonstrate how successfully those balances were achieved.
“My Heart”
The album begins with “My Heart,” immediately establishing that this is not conventional samba-jazz.
Resende’s keyboards create a wide harmonic environment while the rhythm section supplies movement beneath it. Oberdan enters not as decoration but as a second principal voice.
The composition reveals one of Resende’s strongest qualities: he could make sophisticated instrumental music feel spacious.
Many fusion groups equated progress with density.
More notes.
More equipment.
More time-signature changes.
More virtuosity.
Index could certainly play, but Resende understood atmosphere.
That difference is crucial.
“Nina Neném”
“Nina Neném,” written by Rubão Sabino, shifts the perspective and demonstrates the group’s collective identity.
Here the rhythm section becomes particularly important. The bass is not simply supporting harmonic changes; it participates in the composition’s personality. Resende responds with keyboards that add color without erasing the groove, while Oberdan moves through the arrangement with the instinct of a musician equally comfortable in jazz and Brazilian popular music.
This is where comparisons with Azymuth become tempting.
But Index should not be treated as an Azymuth imitation.
Both groups emerged from the same extraordinary Brazilian moment and shared an interest in keyboards, rhythm and jazz improvisation. Their personalities, however, were distinct.
Index often feels more explicitly connected to progressive composition.
“Praça da Alegria”
With “Praça da Alegria,” the scale expands.
The track runs beyond eight minutes, giving the ensemble enough room to develop ideas gradually.
This is where Resende’s European experience becomes particularly audible—not because the music suddenly sounds British or Portuguese, but because he is comfortable allowing a composition to develop beyond the compact forms of Brazilian popular song.
The arrangement becomes a journey.
Themes can emerge, dissolve and return.
Electronic textures alter the landscape.
Improvisation becomes part of the architecture rather than a prescribed solo section inserted between melodies.
Index begins to sound less like a studio project and more like a band imagining its own future.
“Nergal”
Then comes “Nergal,” extending beyond nine minutes.
The title references the ancient Mesopotamian deity associated with war and the underworld, exactly the kind of name one might expect from progressive rock rather than mainstream Brazilian instrumental music.
The music matches the ambition.
“Nergal” pushes Index toward its most cinematic and exploratory territory. Resende’s keyboards establish an almost otherworldly atmosphere while Oberdan’s reeds prevent the electronic textures from becoming detached from human expression.
This is fusion as imagination rather than genre.
Jazz provides improvisational freedom.
Progressive rock provides scale.
Brazil provides rhythmic identity.
Electronics provide color.
Index combines them without asking which category should dominate.
“Martina” and the Expanding Ensemble
“Martina,” the longest track on the eventual release, expands the palette considerably. Session documentation lists additional horns including Barrosinho, Bidinho, Lúcio, Zé Carlos, Leo Gandelman and J.T. Meirelles, turning Resende’s quartet concept into something closer to an orchestrated fusion ensemble.
The personnel alone connects multiple generations of Brazilian instrumental music.
J.T. Meirelles carried direct connections to the samba-jazz revolution of the 1960s.
Leo Gandelman represented a younger generation that would become increasingly prominent.
Oberdan stood on the threshold of Banda Black Rio.
Resende placed them inside his electronic compositional world.
Past and future were occupying the same studio.
“Behind the Moon”
The album closes with “Behind the Moon,” returning to the quartet and providing a more compact conclusion.
By this point the identity of Index is clear.
This is not simply Brazilian jazz played with synthesizers.
The electronic instruments have changed the compositional possibilities.
The reeds have connected those possibilities to jazz.
The rhythm section has prevented the music from floating away into progressive abstraction.
And Brazilian rhythmic knowledge sits underneath everything without needing to advertise itself through obvious stylistic markers.
The record was ready.
The musicians had made their statement.
What they needed was a label.
The CTI Dream
Resende believed he might have found the perfect one.
He hoped the album could be released by CTI Records, the American label founded by producer Creed Taylor. By the mid-1970s, CTI had become synonymous with highly produced jazz that could incorporate electric instruments, funk, orchestration and crossover ambition without abandoning serious musicianship.
For Index, the connection made remarkable sense.
A Brazilian keyboardist combining jazz, progressive rock and electronic sound could imagine a natural international home there.
According to Far Out’s account, a CTI deal came close.
Then it collapsed.
And with that, one of the most intriguing Brazilian fusion albums of the decade disappeared before it had even been released.
The tapes went into storage.
Resende moved on.
Oberdan moved toward Banda Black Rio.
Brazilian instrumental music continued evolving.
Two years later, another version of Marcos Resende & Index would finally reach record stores through Philips as Festa Para Um Novo Rei, featuring a changed lineup and the extraordinary “Vidigal.” The 1978 LP is documented as a nine-track instrumental release with Resende arranging and playing keyboards alongside Oberdan Magalhães, Wilson Meireles, Jorge Degas, Marcelo Salazar and Claudio Gabis.
But the 1976 album remained unheard.
One year became ten.
Ten became twenty.
Twenty became forty.
And all that time, Marcos Resende kept the tapes.
The Album That Had Nowhere to Go
When the hoped-for CTI Records deal failed to materialize, Marcos Resende & Index faced a problem that has erased countless ambitious records from jazz history. The music was finished, but finishing an album and releasing an album were two entirely different things. Without a label willing to finance manufacturing, promotion and distribution, even a fully realized studio project could effectively cease to exist.
The irony was particularly sharp because Index sounded suited to the international jazz environment of 1976. CTI had already demonstrated that sophisticated instrumental music could combine jazz improvisation, funk, elaborate production and electric keyboards while reaching listeners beyond the traditional jazz market. Resende’s European experience and Brazilian rhythmic vocabulary could have provided the label with something distinctive rather than derivative. But potential is not distribution, and the Sonoviso sessions were shelved.
The musicians returned to careers that were already beginning to move in different directions. No audience had rejected the record. Critics had not misunderstood it. Sales had not disappointed.
The album simply never entered the marketplace.
Oberdan Magalhães Finds Another Vehicle
For Oberdan Magalhães, history accelerated almost immediately.
The saxophonist and flautist became a founding force behind Banda Black Rio, formed in the second half of the 1970s as Brazilian Black music was entering an extraordinary period of cross-pollination. Samba, soul, funk and jazz were no longer separate reference points. In Rio’s Black cultural environment, they could function as components of the same modern identity.
Banda Black Rio’s Maria Fumaça, released in 1977, became one of the defining Brazilian instrumental albums of the decade. Its combination of horn arrangements, samba-derived rhythm and American funk remains immediately recognizable.
Hearing the unreleased Index sessions retrospectively changes the chronology.
Oberdan’s playing with Resende was not an isolated prelude to Banda Black Rio. It demonstrates that he was already working inside the broader question that would define his subsequent music: how could sophisticated jazz language coexist with the rhythmic force of contemporary Brazilian Black music?
Index answered one way.
Banda Black Rio would answer another.
Index and Banda Black Rio Were Different Futures
It is tempting to draw a straight line between the groups because Oberdan connects them.
But the differences are illuminating.
Banda Black Rio often organizes its identity around groove and horn architecture. Even at its most harmonically sophisticated, the music has an immediate physical presence. Funk is structural.
Index approaches fusion more strongly through Resende’s compositional and keyboard imagination. Synthesizers can create atmospheric spaces. Pieces unfold across extended durations. Progressive rock and European electric jazz sit more visibly beside Brazilian rhythm.
One group points toward Brazilian jazz-funk.
The other frequently points toward Brazilian progressive fusion.
They overlap.
They do not duplicate one another.
JazzLatitude Insight
Marcos Resende & Index belong beside Azymuth and Banda Black Rio not because the three groups sounded alike, but because each answered the same historical question differently: what should Brazilian instrumental music become after electric jazz, funk and synthesizers changed the possibilities?
Resende Does Not Abandon the Name
The failure of the 1976 release did not immediately kill the Index concept.
Two years later, Festa Para Um Novo Rei appeared through Philips under the name Marcos Resende & Index, but the personnel and context had changed substantially. The album featured Resende with musicians including Oberdan Magalhães, Wilson Meireles, Jorge Degas, Marcelo Salazar and Claudio Gabis, among others.
This distinction is important when navigating the group’s discography.
The 1976 Index was the compact quartet of Resende, Oberdan, Rubão Sabino and Claudio Caribé, occasionally expanded by guest horns.
The 1978 album represented a broader ensemble and another stage in Resende’s thinking.
The name survived.
The band had evolved.
Festa Para Um Novo Rei
The title Festa Para Um Novo Rei—roughly, Celebration for a New King—already suggests a more outward-facing record than the mysterious 1976 sessions. Released as part of Philips’ contemporary Brazilian music series, it finally gave Resende an official LP through which listeners could encounter his instrumental world.
Yet the record never became a mainstream Brazilian classic.
This should not be surprising. Instrumental fusion occupied an awkward commercial position. It could be too complex for pop radio, too electric for traditional jazz audiences and insufficiently rock-oriented for progressive-rock listeners. Brazilian record companies might release such music without possessing a clear strategy for marketing it.
Azymuth would eventually demonstrate that an international market existed.
Many others remained cult artists.
Resende belonged largely to the second category.
“Vidigal”
One composition gradually escaped that obscurity.
“Vidigal.”
Named after the Rio neighborhood rising dramatically above the Atlantic, the track became one of the pieces most strongly associated with Resende’s recorded legacy. Its appeal lies in the balance that defined his best music: electric keyboards and compositional sophistication never overwhelm the rhythmic foundation.
“Vidigal” moves.
That quality would become increasingly important decades later when DJs and collectors began reassessing Brazilian records according to criteria very different from those used by traditional jazz criticism.
A rare record did not need to belong to the canon.
It needed something people wanted to play.
“Vidigal” had it.
The DJ Ear Rewrites Brazilian Jazz
The international rediscovery of Brazilian music during the late twentieth century profoundly changed the reputations of many musicians.
Collectors in Britain, Japan, continental Europe and the United States began searching beyond Antônio Carlos Jobim and the familiar bossa nova canon. Samba-rock, Brazilian funk, obscure MPB, jazz-fusion, private pressings and library-style instrumental records entered a new circulation.
DJs heard records differently from historians.
They listened for breaks.
Bass lines.
Percussion.
Electric textures.
Unexpected arrangements.
Moments that could transform a dance floor or connect with contemporary production.
This new listening culture helped records by artists such as Azymuth, Marcos Valle, Arthur Verocai, Banda Black Rio and numerous lesser-known Brazilian musicians acquire international second lives.
Resende’s music was almost perfectly designed for rediscovery.
Why the Synthesizers Aged Well
1970s synthesizers can create two opposite reactions.
In some recordings, they date the music immediately.
In others, they make it timeless.
Resende generally belongs to the second category because he did not use electronic keyboards merely to announce modernity. Timbre was integrated into composition. A synthesizer might create atmosphere, extend harmony or establish a contrasting voice against Oberdan’s acoustic reeds.
That approach has aged better than novelty electronics.
Modern listeners accustomed to ambient music, electronic jazz, broken beat and synthesizer-based improvisation can hear Resende without needing to mentally translate the technology back into 1976.
The instruments are old.
The idea is not.
Session Work Replaces the Missing Career
After Index, Resende did not receive the kind of internationally visible band career that the Sonoviso sessions might have suggested.
Instead, his abilities made him valuable elsewhere.
He worked as an arranger, keyboardist and musical director across Brazilian popular music, collaborating with important artists including Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Edu Lobo and Carlos Dafé. His career also expanded into television, film and other production environments.
This is a familiar pattern in Brazilian music.
Exceptional instrumentalists often become invisible precisely because they are employable.
A musician who can arrange, read, program keyboards, compose and adapt quickly may spend decades helping other people’s projects succeed. The public hears the work without learning the name.
Resende’s career increasingly followed this path.
Television Changes the Scale
Television required another kind of musicianship.
A progressive-fusion composition can take nine minutes to unfold. Television music may need to establish an emotional atmosphere almost instantly. Themes, transitions and arrangements must communicate efficiently, often under strict production schedules.
Resende’s background made him unusually suited to that environment.
He understood orchestration.
He understood electronics.
He understood Brazilian popular language.
He understood jazz harmony.
And he could move between acoustic and electronic instruments without treating either as ideologically superior.
The same flexibility that made Index difficult to classify made Resende highly useful professionally.
But it also pushed his identity as an album artist farther from public view.
A Generation Hidden in the Credits
Resende’s story therefore belongs to a broader history of Brazilian musicians whose influence cannot be measured solely through leader discographies.
The 1960s and 1970s produced an extraordinary professional ecosystem of arrangers, session players, composers and musical directors. Some became international stars.
Others became musicians’ musicians.
Their names appear in credits.
Their ideas appear in arrangements.
Their sounds become part of records associated primarily with somebody else.
Resende increasingly occupied this hidden layer.
Meanwhile, the 1976 tapes remained in his possession.
The Tape Becomes an Archive
As years passed, those tapes changed meaning.
In 1976 they were an unreleased new album.
By the 1980s they were an abandoned project.
By the 1990s they had become historical evidence.
By the 2000s, as international interest in Brazilian jazz-funk and fusion expanded, they represented something potentially much more valuable: unheard music from exactly the period collectors were trying to reconstruct.
But survival itself was remarkable.
Master tapes are fragile.
Labels close.
Studios change ownership.
Archives are discarded.
Magnetic tape deteriorates.
Musicians move house.
Entire sessions disappear.
Resende kept his.
That decision ultimately saved the album.
Far Out Recordings Was the Natural Destination
By the twenty-first century, Far Out Recordings had become one of the most important international labels for connecting Brazilian music’s past and present. Its catalog included new work, archival discoveries and reissues by musicians whose significance often extended beyond their original commercial recognition.
The label’s relationship with Azymuth was particularly relevant. Far Out understood the international audience for Brazilian electric jazz not as nostalgia but as an active listening culture.
Founder Joe Davis had spent decades digging deeply into Brazilian music.
A lost 1976 fusion album involving Marcos Resende and Oberdan Magalhães was exactly the kind of discovery that could matter.
Eventually, the connection was made.
2018: The Tapes Emerge
In 2018, Resende provided the original tapes to Joe Davis and Far Out. The process began of restoring and preparing the music for the release it had been denied four decades earlier.
Crucially, Resende was involved.
This was not a posthumous archive assembled entirely without the artist. He could participate in the recovery of his own past, hear the recordings again and help ensure that the album finally appeared in a form worthy of the original sessions.
Imagine the experience.
Music recorded when he was around twenty-nine years old was returning to him when he was in his seventies.
Oberdan had already become part of Brazilian music history.
Banda Black Rio had become canonical.
Azymuth had toured the world.
Fusion had risen, fallen out of fashion and been rediscovered.
Vinyl had supposedly died and returned.
The world surrounding the music had changed completely.
The tapes had not.
The Cruel Timing
Then the story took a devastating turn.
Marcos Resende died on November 12, 2020.
The album was scheduled for release only weeks later.
He had preserved the recordings for more than forty years.
He had finally found the label that understood them.
He had participated in bringing them back.
But he did not live to see the completed release reach the public.
In January 2021, Marcos Resende & Index finally appeared through Far Out Recordings.
An album recorded in Rio in September 1976 entered the world approximately forty-five years late.
And suddenly the historical question changed.
The question was no longer:
Why wasn’t this released?
It became:
Where does this record belong in the history of Brazilian jazz-fusion?
Because once listeners could finally hear the complete sessions, the answer was difficult to avoid.
Index had not been a footnote.
They had been standing near the center of one of Brazilian instrumental music’s most creative moments.
We simply hadn’t been allowed to hear the evidence.
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Forty-Five Years Late, but Somehow on Time
When Marcos Resende & Index finally appeared through Far Out Recordings in January 2021, it entered a musical world that could understand it differently from the one that had existed in 1976. Jazz fusion had passed through several cycles of popularity and rejection. Analog synthesizers had gone from symbols of technological modernity to obsolete hardware and then back to highly prized instruments. Brazilian jazz-funk had been rediscovered by collectors, DJs and producers around the world. Records by Azymuth, Marcos Valle, Banda Black Rio and Arthur Verocai had found younger international audiences.
The historical conditions had finally caught up with the music.
That helps explain why the Index recordings did not arrive sounding like a charming archival curiosity. The combination of synthesizers, electric keyboards, acoustic reeds, extended composition and Brazilian rhythm corresponded remarkably well with twenty-first-century listening habits. Audiences accustomed to broken beat, jazz-electronic hybrids and the new generation of groove-oriented jazz could enter the album without treating it as a museum piece.
The tragedy was that Marcos Resende, who had protected the tapes for decades and participated in their restoration, died on November 12, 2020, shortly before the release. The record that should have introduced him internationally in his twenties became one of the final revelations of his career after his death.
A Missing Piece of the Brazilian Fusion Map
The release also forced a reassessment of Brazilian instrumental music during the 1970s.
The established map already contained extraordinary landmarks. Hermeto Pascoal demonstrated how Brazilian regional traditions, advanced composition and improvisation could create a musical universe almost impossible to categorize. Azymuth developed an immediately recognizable synthesis of samba, jazz, funk and electronics. Banda Black Rio created an explosive meeting between samba and American Black music. Egberto Gismonti approached Brazilian music through composition, acoustic virtuosity and progressive experimentation.
Index belongs somewhere among these histories without fitting comfortably into any of them.
Resende’s European experience gave the music an unusually explicit relationship with progressive rock and electric jazz. Oberdan Magalhães connected it to the emerging Brazilian jazz-funk world. Rubão Sabino and Claudio Caribé gave the compositions a rhythm section flexible enough to move between those environments.
Index therefore fills a gap.
The group demonstrates that Brazil’s electric-jazz revolution was even more diverse than the surviving discography had suggested.
Index and Azymuth
The comparison with Azymuth is unavoidable because both groups placed keyboards at the center of Brazilian instrumental fusion.
Yet their differences are more interesting than their similarities.
Azymuth developed extraordinary collective chemistry among José Roberto Bertrami, Alex Malheiros and Ivan Conti. Their best music can move effortlessly from samba-derived rhythm toward jazz improvisation, funk and electronic atmosphere while retaining an immediately identifiable trio sound.
Index was more compositionally centered around Resende.
The reeds of Oberdan create another melodic axis, while Resende’s fascination with progressive rock gives certain passages a more cinematic sense of development. Extended pieces such as “Nergal” and “Martina” do not merely establish grooves for improvisation; they construct environments.
Both groups were exploring the Brazilian future.
They simply imagined different versions of it.
JazzLatitude Insight
The discovery of Index does not require rewriting Brazilian fusion around Marcos Resende. Its importance is subtler: the album proves that the scene contained more parallel experiments than the records released at the time allowed history to remember.
Oberdan and the Black Rio Connection
For Oberdan Magalhães, the recovered album adds an important chapter before Banda Black Rio.
His later achievement is secure. As a central architect of Banda Black Rio, Oberdan helped establish a language in which samba could interact with funk and soul without either becoming superficial decoration.
Index shows another side.
The 1976 sessions give him considerably more atmospheric space. Flute, soprano and tenor saxophone interact with synthesizers and longer compositional forms. Hearing this material makes his subsequent work feel less like a sudden stylistic arrival and more like part of an ongoing search.
Oberdan was already investigating how Brazilian instrumental music could absorb contemporary Black American sounds.
With Resende, the surrounding architecture leaned toward fusion and progressive jazz.
With Banda Black Rio, groove moved closer to the center.
Rubão Sabino and Claudio Caribé
The rediscovery also restores visibility to Rubão Sabino and Claudio Caribé.
This is one of the great benefits of archival releases. History tends to preserve famous names while the working musicians who made scenes possible become increasingly difficult to see. A recovered session returns those relationships to the foreground.
Sabino’s bass is fundamental to the Index sound because Resende’s harmonic vocabulary could easily have become abstract without a strong low-frequency center. His composition “Nina Neném” also confirms his role as a creative contributor rather than merely an accompanist.
Caribé’s drums solve a similarly difficult problem. The music requires precision without rigidity and freedom without losing momentum. He allows the group to move between jazz, Brazilian rhythm and progressive structures without announcing every transition.
Their contributions remind us that fusion succeeds collectively.
Electronic instruments may attract attention.
The rhythm section determines whether the experiment actually moves.
Resende Among Brazil’s Keyboard Explorers
Marcos Resende also deserves a broader place within the history of Brazilian keyboard music.
Brazil produced several radically different approaches to the electric keyboard during this period. João Donato used piano and electric keyboards with extraordinary rhythmic economy. Marcos Valle integrated synthesizers into songwriting, funk and studio experimentation. José Roberto Bertrami made electric keyboards central to Azymuth’s distinctive fusion vocabulary. Eumir Deodato brought Brazilian musicianship into large-scale international jazz-funk production.
Resende occupies another position.
His keyboards frequently feel compositional before they feel virtuosic.
He uses electronics to alter the architecture surrounding the band. The synthesizer is capable of creating an atmosphere in which Oberdan’s flute means something different from what it would mean over an acoustic piano.
That instinct links Resende as much to progressive composition as to keyboard jazz.
He was interested not merely in what notes the instrument could play.
He was interested in what kind of world the instrument could create.
The Value of Restraint
This may be why the 1976 album aged so well.
Fusion developed a reputation for excess partly because later examples emphasized technical display. Long solos, complex meters and increasingly elaborate equipment could become ends in themselves.
Resende certainly possessed the vocabulary for virtuosity, but Index rarely sounds as though it exists primarily to demonstrate difficulty.
There is space.
Themes have room to establish themselves.
Oberdan is allowed to breathe.
Bass and drums can create momentum without constantly competing with the keyboards.
Even the electronics are frequently atmospheric rather than aggressive.
The result feels exploratory without becoming exhausting.
That quality connects surprisingly well with contemporary jazz.
Why Younger Listeners Could Hear It Immediately
By 2021, a new international jazz audience had emerged around music that freely combined improvisation, electronics, funk, hip-hop, broken beat and global rhythmic traditions. The old arguments about whether electric instruments compromised jazz had become largely irrelevant.
This environment made Index unusually accessible.
A listener familiar with modern keyboard-driven jazz does not need to hear the Mini Moog as a period effect. A producer accustomed to layering electronic textures can understand what Resende is doing intuitively. DJs can respond to the rhythm section before learning anything about the album’s history.
The music enters through multiple doors.
That is one definition of durability.
The Album Changes Resende’s Biography
Before the tapes emerged, Resende could easily be remembered primarily as an accomplished Brazilian keyboardist, arranger and musical director whose work intersected with major artists and television production, with Festa Para Um Novo Rei representing his principal recorded statement as a leader.
The 2021 album changes that interpretation.
Suddenly there is evidence of a fully developed fusion concept in 1976.
Not sketches.
Not demos.
A finished artistic statement.
This shifts the center of his biography backward and reveals how early his synthesis had matured.
It also makes the failure of the original release more frustrating.
Had the CTI connection succeeded, Index might have entered the international jazz-fusion conversation while the music was new.
What would have happened afterward is unknowable.
But the possibility is difficult to ignore.
The Danger of Inventing the Career That Never Happened
There is a temptation with lost albums to create an alternative history.
Perhaps Index would have toured America.
Perhaps CTI would have made Resende internationally famous.
Perhaps the group would have become Brazil’s answer to Return to Forever or Weather Report.
Perhaps they would have rivaled Azymuth.
None of this can be known.
And it is unnecessary.
The music does not require imaginary success to become important.
What we can say is more grounded and more interesting: Marcos Resende & Index created a sophisticated Brazilian fusion album in 1976 that was not commercially released at the time, and its recovery decades later expanded our understanding of the scene that produced it.
That is enough.
Festa Para Um Novo Rei Reconsidered
The recovery of the earlier sessions also changes how Festa Para Um Novo Rei should be heard.
Instead of representing the beginning of Resende’s Index concept, the 1978 record becomes a second chapter.
Its altered personnel and broader arrangements show a musician continuing to develop ideas that had already reached considerable maturity two years earlier. “Vidigal,” in particular, gains historical context. Its combination of groove, keyboards and sophisticated instrumental writing no longer appears isolated.
There was a road leading toward it.
We simply heard the road afterward.
Essential Albums and Recordings
Marcos Resende & Index — recorded 1976 / released 2021
The essential document. “My Heart,” “Nina Neném,” “Praça da Alegria,” “Nergal,” “Martina” and “Behind the Moon” reveal one of the great missing Brazilian fusion projects of the 1970s.
Festa Para Um Novo Rei — 1978
The officially released Index statement from the original era, featuring a substantially changed ensemble and providing the crucial second half of Resende’s band history.
“Vidigal”
The standout gateway into Resende’s late-1970s sound and one of the compositions that helped his work find renewed life among collectors and listeners interested in Brazilian jazz-funk and fusion.
Banda Black Rio — Maria Fumaça — 1977
Not an Index recording, but essential context for understanding where Oberdan Magalhães’s musical journey went immediately afterward and how Brazilian jazz, samba and funk were converging during the same period.
Technical Profile
Artist: Marcos Resende & Index
Origin: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Key Period: 1976–1978
Leader: Marcos Resende
Born: 1947, Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, Espírito Santo
Died: November 12, 2020
Primary Instruments: Acoustic piano, electric keyboards and synthesizers
Original 1976 Index: Marcos Resende, Oberdan Magalhães, Rubão Sabino and Claudio Caribé
Key Guest Musicians: J.T. Meirelles, Barrosinho, Bidinho, Zé Carlos and Leo Gandelman
Recording Studio: Sonoviso, Rio de Janeiro
Engineer: Toninho Barbosa
Original Sessions: September 1976
Intended International Connection: CTI Records
Archival Release: Far Out Recordings, 2021
Primary Styles: Brazilian Jazz-Fusion, Jazz-Funk, Progressive Jazz and Electronic Jazz
Signature Characteristics: Synthesizer atmosphere, extended compositions, Brazilian rhythmic foundation and reed/keyboards interaction.
Five Lesser-Known Facts About Marcos Resende & Index
1. Resende originally went to Portugal to study medicine
His European period was not initially planned as a professional musical journey, yet it became fundamental to his exposure to jazz and progressive rock.
2. His Portuguese trio opened for Dexter Gordon
Resende appeared at the 1971 Cascais Jazz Festival in a trio that performed before the legendary American tenor saxophonist.
3. His pre-Index band Status left no known recordings
The progressive jazz-rock group reportedly shared bills with major international artists, but no known recording survives, leaving a significant gap in Resende’s musical evolution.
4. Oberdan recorded with Index immediately before his Banda Black Rio breakthrough
The 1976 tapes therefore provide important evidence of the saxophonist’s musical development just before Maria Fumaça.
5. Resende preserved the tapes himself
The album survived because Resende kept the recordings for decades and eventually delivered them to Far Out, participating in the recovery process before his death.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Marcos Resende?
Marcos Resende was a Brazilian keyboardist, composer, arranger and musical director whose career encompassed jazz fusion, progressive music, Brazilian popular music, television and studio work.
What was Index?
Index was Resende’s Brazilian instrumental fusion project, combining keyboards and synthesizers with saxophone, flute, bass and drums.
Who played on the 1976 Index recordings?
The core quartet consisted of Marcos Resende, Oberdan Magalhães, Rubão Sabino and Claudio Caribé, with additional musicians appearing on expanded arrangements.
Why wasn’t the 1976 album released at the time?
Resende hoped for an international release connected with CTI Records, but the arrangement did not materialize. The completed recordings were subsequently shelved.
When was the lost album finally released?
Far Out Recordings released Marcos Resende & Index in January 2021, approximately forty-five years after the sessions.
What is “Vidigal”?
“Vidigal” is one of Resende’s best-known instrumental compositions and appears on the later Festa Para Um Novo Rei album.
Is Marcos Resende & Index similar to Azymuth?
There are important similarities—Brazilian rhythm, jazz improvisation and electronic keyboards—but Index often places greater emphasis on progressive composition and the interaction between Resende’s synthesizers and Oberdan Magalhães’s reeds.
JazzLatitude Rating
| Category | Rating |
|---|---|
| Keyboards & Synthesizers | ★★★★★ |
| Composition | ★★★★½ |
| Jazz-Fusion | ★★★★★ |
| Groove | ★★★★½ |
| Progressive Influence | ★★★★★ |
| Ensemble Interaction | ★★★★½ |
| Brazilian Identity | ★★★★★ |
| Historical Significance | ★★★★½ |
| Rediscovery Value | ★★★★★ |
| JazzLatitude Essential | ★★★★★ |
Final Thoughts
The most remarkable thing about Marcos Resende & Index is not that their album was lost.
Jazz history contains many lost recordings.
The remarkable thing is how little the music needed history’s sympathy once it returned.
Put aside the story of the tapes.
Forget CTI.
Forget the forty-five-year delay.
Forget, temporarily, that Marcos Resende died only weeks before the album finally appeared.
Listen.
The synthesizers establish a space.
Rubão Sabino finds the ground.
Claudio Caribé creates movement.
Oberdan Magalhães enters with breath against electronics.
And suddenly 1976 feels much closer than it should.
That durability tells us something important about Brazilian fusion.
The movement was never one sound.
Azymuth found one solution by creating extraordinary trio chemistry around keyboards, bass and drums. Banda Black Rio placed samba and funk inside powerful horn arrangements. Hermeto Pascoal built an almost self-contained universe from Brazilian traditions, improvisation and compositional freedom. Egberto Gismonti moved between acoustic virtuosity, orchestration and progressive imagination.
Marcos Resende had another idea.
His years in Portugal had exposed him to American jazz and European progressive rock. When he returned to Brazil, he did not discard those experiences in search of authenticity. He placed them inside Brazilian rhythm.
Index became the laboratory.
Oberdan was the perfect collaborator because he could move between flute and saxophones, lyricism and groove, jazz and the Black Brazilian instrumental language he would soon help define with Banda Black Rio. Sabino and Caribé supplied enough rhythmic strength to keep Resende’s electronic imagination connected to the body.
The music was ready.
The industry was not.
And that difference determined almost everything that followed.
Instead of an international debut in 1976, Resende moved into another kind of professional life. He arranged. He played keyboards. He worked with major Brazilian artists. He entered television and other media. Index changed personnel and produced Festa Para Um Novo Rei. “Vidigal” survived.
The first album became tape.
Then archive.
Then memory.
Until finally, in 2018, Resende placed those tapes in the hands of a label capable of understanding what they contained.
He did not live to experience the full response.
But the release accomplished something more durable than correcting a discographical omission.
It changed the chronology.
Now we know that in Rio de Janeiro in September 1976, while Azymuth was developing its language and Oberdan stood on the threshold of Banda Black Rio, another Brazilian fusion project had already found a remarkably complete sound.
History simply failed to release it on schedule.
Perhaps that is the best way to understand Marcos Resende & Index.
Not as musicians rescued from obscurity.
Not as the Brazilian supergroup that might have been.
And not merely as another rare record for collectors.
They are evidence.
Evidence that some of the most interesting musical histories are incomplete not because the music was never created, but because the world did not hear it when it happened.
For forty-five years, the missing chapter sat on tape.
When it finally opened, the future was still inside.