If you know one Baden Powell song, it's probably Berimbau, and if you know two, the other is likely Canto de Ossanha — both came out of a stretch in the mid-1960s when he and the poet Vinicius de Moraes sat down together and wrote a batch of tunes that didn't sound like bossa nova and didn't sound like samba either. They called the result Afro-Samba, and the album Os Afro-Sambas (1966) is where you hear it fully formed: chants and rhythms lifted from candomblé and umbanda ceremonies, dressed in Powell's guitar work and de Moraes' lyrics about orixás and capoeira fighters. It's one of the strangest, most beautiful records to come out of Brazil in that decade, and it still doesn't sound like anything else.

Powell trained classically as a kid, which matters because it shows in everything he played. Where João Gilberto built bossa nova on a hushed, almost whispered guitar sound, Powell went the other direction — percussive, fast, full of flamenco-style right-hand runs and thumb-slapped bass lines that turned the guitar into a one-man rhythm section. He could play a ballad with real tenderness, but his default mode had fire in it. Listen to him solo and you hear samba's swing, jazz's harmonic reach, and a classical player's control all fighting for space at once.

He didn't stay put geographically either. Powell spent long periods living in Europe, particularly Germany and France, recording prolifically and finding audiences who loved Brazilian music without needing it filtered through the polite, cocktail-hour version that had sold so well in the U.S. Some of his catalog from those years is uneven — he recorded a lot, some of it quickly, some of it clearly for a paycheck — but the best of it holds up next to anything he made at home.

Musicians who came after him, from Egberto Gismonti to generations of Brazilian guitarists who never even met him, learned from how he treated the instrument as an orchestra rather than an accompanist. He wasn't chasing the American jazz guitar tradition, and he wasn't trying to be a pop songwriter either. He was just trying to get everything he heard in his head — church, street, forest, radio — onto six strings, and more often than not, he managed it.