History
In 20 years Joe Davis has gone from hunting treasures in dusty old record stores across Brazil, to running a successful record company with impressive world-wide sales and an international reputation. What started out as a desire to feed the UK jazz scene’s taste for rare Brazilian jazz, has resulted in Far Out Recordings - a label dedicated to all angles of Brazilian music, from jazz to electronica.

The progression for Joe from buying records, to selling them, to producing them for his own label was a logical one. He explains: ’Whilst I was growing up I was always involved in the street music scene - whatever clubs were going on, in and around London, and all types of dance music. Suddenly innovative DJs like Gilles Peterson were playing Brazilian, Latin, and jazz out in the clubs, and people were going crazy over it. Gradually the scene moved on but the new music being played didn’t really capture my imagination, so I returned to Brazilian music, which I really loved and which had always held a very instant appeal for me’

At this point Joe decided to take his interest further, spending several intense years traveling to Brazil and developing an encyclopedic knowledge through buying obscure Brazilian music, which was in great demand in Europe and Japan. Along the way he also got to know a lot of the musicians whose records he was buying. His personal friends included Marcos Valle, Joyce, Wilson Das Neves, Celia Vaz, Jorge Ben and various other leaders of the Brazilian scene

In the UK, his reputation was growing in connection with all things Brazilian and he had an increasing desire to use all the knowledge and contacts he had made for a new project. In 1995 as a creative experiment he hired a studio in Brazil for a month and recruited some of the dons of Brazilian music, as well as some of Rio’s most exciting young musicians. They spent the time recording an album of new material and old classics called ‘Friends From Rio’, which featured Marcos Valle and Wanda de Sa.
This album put the label on the map and set out the Far Out philosophy.

The next project was a remixed album of ‘Friends from Rio’ called Misturada (Portuguese for mixing). The idea was to fuse Brazilian rhythms and melodies with electronica, and remixers included; Da Lata, Pressure Drop, APE. Once again, the feedback was massive, convincing Joe there was a market for the music he wanted to release. This was all the encouragement he needed, and since then Far Out Recordings has been steadily growing. The next step was to appoint and produce a CD with Azymuth, Joe’s favourite group of all time.

Continual trips to Brazil have led to recordings of new material from Joyce, Marcos Valle, Azymuth and the Ipanemas - all of which have received critical acclaim, establishing Far Out Recordings as the leading independent producer of Brazilian music outside Brazil. Far Out has also been responsible for making rare Brazilian classics available once again. Reissues of Joyce’s seminal ‘Tardes Cariocas’, ‘Quartin’ a compilation of 70s jazz from Rio based producer Roberto Quartin as well as Milton Nascimento’s legendary ballet scores ‘Maria Maria’ & ‘Ultimo Trem’ released as a package for the first time as originally intended, two decades after their creation.

The electronic side of the label has also flourished, with the ‘Misturada’, ‘Brazilian Love Affair’ ‘Rhythmix’ and now ‘Brazilika’ albums all helping define electronic jazz influenced music and creating their fare share of dancefloor classics.

“After ten years of Far Out, we are only beginning to achieve our ambitions” surmises Joe. “We are still learning about production, recording and music and we have an exciting group of new musicians who are producing some brilliant music. We are intent on creating the next Milton Nascimento or Marcos Valle”.