John Burdick's new book makes a connection between three themes which Latin Americanists have rarely brought together, even though everyday life and the social history of the United States tell us that they are closely intertwined and have been so since time immemorial – namely religion, music and racial identity. For several years Burdick has followed, listened to, interviewed and socialised with musicians in several different milieux in São Paulo, and in the end he has done a service both to the musicians themselves, whose devotion to music, religion and sometimes black empowerment now receives well-earned public attention, and to the students of these subjects and of Brazil, who will discover new dimensions to the country's religious and musical life, and to some extent even its identity politics.

Burdick frequents three ‘scenes’, all described, in Portuguese as well as English, as ‘Gospel’: gospel rap, samba gospel and black gospel. He is looking for a synthesis of evangelical religion and black identity politics which will contribute to a reduction in the racial inequalities that still characterise Brazilian society. His search is partly successful. Among the rappers he finds a complete lack of interest in identity politics, as he disarmingly admits. The rappers are concerned with social issues, and although many are dark-skinned evangélicos, they do not usually bring either religion or race into their music. The United States does appear in their conversation, but only incidentally, and they are eager to distance themselves from what they see as the moral decline of the US rapping scene.

Burdick's search for the synthesis of music and race then moves on to gospel samba, where he finds an enthusiasm for the Brazilian roots of samba among people whom he rather hoped would value its supposed African roots. But the sambistas are uninterested in such things and, as he notes, are embarrassed by any hint of an association with possession cults like candomblé, regarded by evangélicos as tainted by diabolic associations.

In gospel samba the United States is absent, but in the final case, that of black gospel, the United States is a great inspiration and themes associated with Brazil fade into the background. Burdick deploys much eloquence in describing the melismas, the belting and the growling of gospel performance, and he transmits the enormous efforts of voice training and study which are the life of evangelical gospel singers. Their leaders produce a stylised comparison between Brazilian slaves, who had to fall back on drums because their Catholic masters repressed their African voices and religion, and slaves in the United States, who learned from their masters’ Protestantism and developed their voices into gospel. Brazilian blacks, they believed, took to samba, with all its accompanying licentiousness, while in the United States blacks developed a civil rights movement and churches which have come to exude prosperity. Burdick writes of a ‘musico-racial theology’ which exalts the black body for its special aptitude for producing the sounds associated with gospel. Only in this disembedded identity is Burdick's longed-for religion-race-music synthesis achieved. The gospel singers are the only ones of these three groups who emphatically link their musical and religious life to an anti-racist commitment, yet interestingly that commitment is focused on their churches, not on the society around them: they see black churches in the United States with their world-famous singing and wonder why in Brazil's evangélico churches, the leaders are overwhelmingly white or light-skinned. Identity-led musical politics turn out to be an internal church affair.

Burdick explores the theme of music and collective identity and also writes very interestingly about the distinctiveness of the North American black singing and speaking voice or accent, which is absent in Brazil. He alternately curbs his enthusiasm and allows it to carry him away. His last descriptive chapter speaks of a Movimento Negro Evangélico which sounds even less like a social movement than the Movimento Negro itself, which is more like a network and a set of diffuse feelings or commitments. Yet in the end his book is admirable less for its judgements than for the author's feat of bringing these themes together. Evangelical Protestantism in Brazil has grown to the point where its multifarious character should be recognised, resembling a vast national institution within which all sorts of interests, values, tastes and traditions, often more palatable to some than others, find a place. Music is clearly a prominent and, again, multifarious aspect of this phenomenon.

It is a shame that this book, like most academic publications on the media, is not accompanied by a CD, an almost surreal but absolutely standard omission. Alternatively, a website with some illustrative material would bring a new dimension to the work and also help the reader. That apart – and the problem may have an explanation in copyright law – the one other aspect of the book which gives me difficulty is the intrusive abundance of incidental information about Burdick himself and the scenes of his conversations with the rappers and singers. It is not really necessary to know that an interview or event took place on a hot day or a rainy day, or on someone's sofa. Furthermore, although it is disarming to hear him tell us how his own ideas were challenged by this or that conversation with his interlocutors, I am not sure it is necessary. Yet at the same time, although Burdick does overwrite somewhat (‘I am hypnotized’ is at one point his opening comment on a rapper's performance), we should perhaps be grateful that this enthusiasm for conveying the feel of the scene takes the place of the mannered over-theorising which characterises much contemporary writing on musical and identity-based themes. Overall, this work is an admirable achievement.