In 1956, Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, two passionate jazz and blues fans, merged their love of music and founded Lippmann + Rau, a concert promotional agency that would ultimately become the largest in Europe. Lippmann, who as a teenager in 1941 under the Nazi regime helped form the illegal Frankfurter Hot Club (a jazz group) in the back of his parents’ restaurant, and had organized his first official jazz concert in Frankfurt in 1949, had been working with Günther Kieser since 1952. Having achieved success with the many iterations of the American Folk Blues Festival, Lippman + Rau staged a concert in Berlin of Brazilian macumba, samba, and bossa nova music. While it was a one-night event, the entire production was both filmed and recorded on an album for wider distribution. It would become one of singer Sylvia Telles’s last recordings—she died in a car accident a few weeks later. This concert was partly sponsored by VARIG, Brazil’s largest airline that, despite a decade of lobbying, had only gained access to the European market the previous year. The company frequently issued promotional records spotlighting the country’s best-known musical genres, and had even hired a bossa nova group to create its official jingle in 1963. An event like this one would have been part of its wider marketing efforts to attract an international audience. Artist Günther Kieser most likely designed this poster by hand-coloring a black-and-white photograph of a hand rather than physically painting on a body before photographing it. The vibrant composition has no clear source of inspiration, but, like many of Kieser’s concert posters, may reference the costumes or set designs for the production.