DIGRESSING IN THE CRATES | Lange jojo – Es’t Neie Of Es’t Ja – Olympia.

This one is right up our alley. Combining our love for Brazilian music with local folklore and with one of our favourite singers from Brussels. Lange Jojo, or Le Grand Jojo as he’s known to the French speaking community, might be best known as a producer of funny novelty songs and our own favourite football team’s signature chant, but there’s more to the man than that. He started his career in music as jazz specialist in a record store and the story goes he pointed a young Marc Moulin towards the best the genre had to offer adding his 2 cents to a main section in Belgian jazz history.

Maybe that’s why he chose to cover an Onda Sonora classic early in his career, staying away from the more cheesy instrumentals he got famous for. Wilson Simonal’s “Nem Vem Que Não Tem” has been part of our sets thanks to Mr Bongo’s excellent Brazil45 7″ series. Being able to play this in our own dialect is immense.

Another, maybe more likely reason for reworking this particular track is Marcel Zanini’s French novelty rework of the same original. This one being released in 1969 while the Lange Jojo entered the shops a year later. The original being from 1967.

If you need a 4th version we can point you in the direction of Brigitte Bardot’s slightly more beefed up French pop version. Not our favourite one but handy nonetheless if you want to show off your musical erudition as a DJ.

We discovered the Lange Jojo version while we got the chance to play with the jukebox collection of a former bar in Schaarbeek, Les Trois Rois. A collection we should definitely check out a bit better as we only scratched the surface of it the few moments we got the chance to explore it. We’ll play again with the same collection at this year’s Alles Es Just festival, by the way.

Our own copy we found at The Collector, a Brussels record shop that will sadly close very soon.