Tracks: The Girl from Ipanema // Doralice // Para Muchuchar Meu Coracoa // Desafinado (Off Key) // Corcovado (Quiet Night of Quiet Stars) // So Danco Samba // O Grande Amore // Vivo Sonhando (Dreamer)
Well this is a lovely little album. A poorly-packaged album, perhaps, what with the tendency for the little information booklet to fall out of its little cardboard flap every time I pick it up (curse you Verve Masterworks!), but the music itself is quite lovely. The two songs that most people probably know from this album are “Corcovado” and “The Girl from Ipanema”, the one a lounge standard and the other a lounge standard that went to number 5 on the Billboard pop charts, but thankfully the rest of the album is pretty good too. This isn’t really surprising, since this album is generally held up as an artistic high-water mark not only of bossa nova, but of jazz in general. That it was also a massive commercial success is just icing on the cake.
So what is the deal behind this album, you ask? Do you really care? Is anyone even reading this? According to my web logs most of my traffic comes from people Googling the album cover of Birth of the Cool. On that note, I’ve earned the right to be glib. Basically, the deal with this album is that Stan Getz, having been bitten by the bossa nova bug back at Jazz Samba, eventually decided to do the next logical thing and collaborate with the inventors of the genre. So we have Antonio Carlos Jobim, both a nifty pianist and the most prominent songwriter in the genre*, and we have Joao Gilberto, the innovative guitarist and singer who hatched the bossa nova rhythm by locking himself in a room for six months and fiddling with his guitar, and they play a clutch of their songs while Getz takes some very lovely solos alongside them. Joining the trio we have Tommy Williams on bass, the awesomely named Milton Banana on drums, and, for two tracks, Joao’s non-professional wife Astrud singing very
The results are of course quite charming. Everyone knows “The Girl from Ipanema”, with it’s little “bim-bom-bim” intro and indelible melody line, but it’s just the highpoint on a uniformly excellent album. (What’s that? You don’t like “The Girl from Ipanema”? Go to hell). The two tracks with Astrud are the stand-outs, but one gets the sense that this was just Stan Getz displaying business savvy in insisting on having a pretty girl sing in English on the two strongest songs. None of the other songs really jump out and slap you in the face with their brilliance, but then that isn’t that kind of album. The melodies are sinuous and subtle, working their way under your skin, and the rhythms just sort of bobble along in this happy little way. Each song starts with a little vocal section, and then you have the solo, and then maybe you have another little vocal packed away in there somewhere. All very nice. As a result, the tracks sort of blend into one another, but if you play any one of these songs by itself its individual genius soon becomes apparent. “Desafinado” is of course marvellous, “So Danco Samba” is just such silly fun, and Stan Getz delivers truly wonderful solos on both this and “O Grande Amor”. In fact, Stan Getz really shines through most of this album – he was already the best thing about Jazz Samba, and he’s obviously just gotten better with time – although if Getz/Gilberto belongs to anyone then it’s definitely Gilberto, who really is a beautiful (albeit very stoned-sounding) singer. Although having said this, Gilberto is all over “Doralice”, and that’s the one song on the album I’ve really not got much time for. O accursed “Doralice” :( Then again, it does stop the album from getting monotonous – if nothing else, Getz/Gilberto is a very well-paced album.
In the end, there isn’t much I can say about this album. The best word to describe it is probably “Charming”. It has such an unassuming quality to it, as though the whole thing were being tossed-off in an afternoon with no thought given to the possibility that it might become a success. “Casual genius”, you might call it – which is probably the defining trait of the genre. The result is an album that sounds like three AM in a swanky nightclub when everyone has left except for you, the band, and the girl that you’re dancing with.
I'm kind of mad that I was wrong about "Agua de Beber" being on this one, though. I love that song.
9.5/10
Download: Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto - O Grande Amor MP3
*incidentally, in the interim between reviewing Jazz Samba and getting around to this, I checked-out a couple of other bossa nova projects. Jobim's album with Elis Regina, Elis & Tom, is really good and definitely recommended. The same goes for Regina's Aquarela de Brasil from 1969, and for Elizete Cardoso's Cancao do Amor Demais from 1958. I also recall Jobim's The Composer of Desafinado, Plays being decent, too, with instrumental versions that are really heavy on the lush strings. I have now exhausted my knowledge of bossa nova completely.
No comments:
Post a Comment