The number of high-quality singers and musicians in Brazilian music besides these leading figures is enormous. Milton Nascimento has a talent that can only be compared with the founders of tropicalismo, a remarkable soaring voice, a genius for composing stirring anthems and a passion for charting and celebrating the experience of blacks in Brazil. Since his emergence from Minas Gerais in the 1960s, he has become a prominent spokesperson of black Brazilians. Fagner and Alceu Valença are modern interpreters of Northeastern music, and strikingly original singers. The latter is the creator of what has been termed " forró rock ". Elba Ramalho is a Northeastern woman with an excellent voice, which she too often wastes on banal rock rather than the more traditional material she excels at. Renato Borghetti , from Rio Grande do Sul, has done much to popularize gaúcho -influenced music through his skill on the accordion and his adaptations of traditional tunes. Ney Matogrosso has a striking falsetto voice which sounds female, but he is a man - although sometimes self-indulgent, he can be very good. Jorge Ben is a fine Rio singer who wrote the definitive Rio verse in his classic País Tropical : I live in a tropical country Blessed by God with natural beauty In February there's Carnaval I own a guitar and drive a Beetle I support Flamengo and have a black girlfriend called Tereza Vinícius de Morães and Toquinho are (or were in the case of Vinícius) a good singer and guitarist team, and Dorival Caymmi at over seventy is the doyen of Bahian musicians. Whilst all these figures have been going strongly for decades now, an artist to look out for is Zeca Baleiro from Maranhão who, with his bumba-meu-boi - and reggae-influenced style, has been described as one of the most innovative performers to have emerged in Brazil in the 1990s. Too many musicians these days, though, waste their time attempting to fuse Brazilian genres with rock-based formats. It's not that it can't be done - tropicalismo pulled it off several times in the 1960s - but the type of rock music currently most popular in Brazil, appalling heavy metal and stadium rock, is completely incompatible with the subtle, versatile musical imagination of Brazilians. National radio and the dominant São Paulo radio stations pump out the worst kind of British and US FM blandness, and this has spawned a host of Brazilian imitations, almost all of them embarrassingly bad. The other possible criticism of Brazilian music is that, while its popular roots are healthier than ever, nobody of similar stature has come up to succeed the towering figures of the 1960s and 1970s. Elis is dead, Gil, Caetano, Chico and Milton are still producing but are no longer young, and, while younger talent abounds, there's nothing at the moment which could be called genius - a lot to demand of anyone, but it's a tribute to Brazilian music that its pedigree allows us to judge it by the highest standards