Brazilian music has lived in London for years through Jazz Cafe residencies, samba schools in Notting Hill, baile funk nights in Hackney warehouses and a community that fills out shows from Camden to Brixton every weekend. What it has never had is a festival of its own. That gap closes on Friday 22nd May, when Boa Nova Festival takes over Leyton Jubilee Park with a bill made up entirely of Brazilian artists, presented by The Columbo Group in collaboration with the UK/Brazil Season of Culture 2025–26. The Columbo team has been programming the Jazz Cafe’s sold-out Brazilian nights for years; Boa Nova is the open-air version, scaled up to a full Bank Holiday day.
From the Northeast to São Paulo to the Cerrado, the three headliners map the range of what Brazilian music sounds like right now. João Gomes brings piseiro from Serrita in Pernambuco, the electronic descendant of traditional forró that swaps out acoustic ensembles for heavy keyboard backing, fast-paced accordion samples, and synthetic, syncopated programmed beats. Gomes sings in the style of aboio, the melancholic, slurred cattle-herding chants used by Northeastern vaqueiros, and he still frequently takes the stage wearing the traditional leather chapéu de couro. He is 23, and his transition from recording videos in his bedroom to filling stadiums happened almost overnight. The scale of his draw was made clear last October at Rio’s Arcos da Lapa, where a free show recorded for his Acredite live project pulled in 80,000 people, bringing the raw sound of the rural sertão directly to the coastal mainstream.
From Araraquara, a working-class city on the edge of São Paulo state, Liniker is a singer-songwriter who first made her name fronting Liniker e os Caramelows before going solo. Her writing has evolved from the raw, exposed soul ballads of her early career into complex narratives that treat love, desire and the small private moments of Black trans life in Brazil as acts of sanctuary and survival. Her 2024 album CAJU, recorded on analogue tape and built around pagode, samba, hip-hop and electronica, was conceived as a one-day imaginary trip to Japan and became one of the most talked-about Brazilian records in years; at the 2025 Latin Grammys she walked away with three wins including Best Portuguese-Language Song for “Veludo Marrom”, a track that captures that sense of domestic peace over a driving, cinematic string arrangement. It was her second Latin Grammy win; in 2022 she had become the first trans woman to take the prize. She has since recorded with Milton Nascimento and the late Elza Soares, two of the defining voices of Brazilian music across the last half-century, and last May performed in front of two million people on Copacabana beach.
Mari Froes completes the headline trio from Goiânia, in Brazil’s interior. She started out posting covers on YouTube, built an audience of over 100 million views, and has been releasing her own material since 2019, working in the MPB, bossa nova and samba tradition with a voice that Rolling Stone Brasil described as mature, with a hoarseness that scratches sweetly. In July 2024 she performed “Gabriela” for the COLORS channel, and later that year appeared at the London Jazz Festival as part of her third European tour. She is one of the younger artists on this bill, still in the early stages of a career that already has serious critical attention behind it in Brazil and internationally.
When we say Brazilian music has lived in London for years, Aleh Ferreira has been at the centre of it: the Rio-born singer-songwriter fronted Banda Black Rio and has spent three decades at the intersection of samba, funk and Afro-Brazilian soul in this city. His set here feeds into a live tribute to Tim Maia, the man who came back from New York in the early 1960s with American soul in his bones and spent the next three decades fusing it with samba, funk and baião into something that had no real name until it became the blueprint for an entire movement.
Further down the bill, Nyron Higor is a Maceió-born multi-instrumentalist whose 2025 Far Out Recordings album draws on Northeastern tradition and golden-era MPB; recorded at home and finished in São Paulo with Bruno Berle and Batata Boy, it opens on a slow frevo rhythm and moves through samba canção, jazz and acoustic balladry, and has drawn support from BBC 6 Music and KEXP.
Baile Funk Culture runs the second stage, with DJ Patife headlining: a São Paulo producer making Brazilian drum and bass since the mid-1990s, who forged connections with the UK scene through V Recordings and Bryan Gee, and whose rework of Fernanda Porto’s “Sambassim” became one of the tracks that put Brazilian d’n’b on the map internationally. He plays alongside Caio Prince, TH4YS, BRONKA, Mango & Ginger and the Baile Funk Culture residents, with the stage focused on baile funk, breaks and club-driven sounds throughout the afternoon and into the evening.
All of it lands in Leyton Jubilee Park, the largest green space in Waltham Forest, one of the most culturally diverse boroughs in London and home to a significant Brazilian community. A fifteen-minute walk from Leyton tube on the Central line, the park on 22nd May becomes the backdrop for something the neighbourhood has never seen before. Between the two stages, live samba drumming, Samba de Malandro and carnival performances keep the energy running across the whole site from 14:00 to 22:30.
Tickets and full access information are available via the official festival page, RA & Dice
