From around the mid 70's in Brazil, Belem's DJs and musicians started playing around with the Carimbe? Rhythms, adding to it elements of the Merengue, Salsa and Reggae. Constantly played on the radio stations of the Guianas a few hundred kilometers north, a new dance music they called Lambada was produced. Lambada made its way to Salvador in 1980s, where it was absorbed and transformed like so many other musical imports, and by the mid 1980s a Bahian version, lighter and boppier and based around synthesizers, was hitting local radio stations. There it was heard by a group of French record producers on holiday, who were equally interested in the spectacular dance that Bahia developed. They signed up Bahian Lambada dancers and musicians, took them back to Paris in 1988, and the rest, as they say, is history.
