Bossa BeyondBossa Beyond

SomaFM added Bossa Beyond in 2023, one of three vintage-leaning rooms Rusty Hodge opened that year alongside The In-Sound and Tiki Time, all of them built out of record collections rather than new releases. The station behind it has run commercial-free from San Francisco since February 2000, when Hodge took it full-time out of a Bernal Heights basement garage after a micropower transmitter experiment at Burning Man, and it still carries no advertising at all — listener donations pay for every channel.

The rotation runs from the 1960s Rio originals — Antonio Carlos Jobim, Tamba Trio, Roberto Menescal, Wilson Simonal — out to the Italian bossa and lounge sessions that borrowed from them, then on to modern electro-bossa from Eric Hilton and Nicola Conte. That last stretch is the beyond in the name: samba-jazz and nu-jazz kept at the same unhurried tempo as the records they descend from.