Results for "Antonio Carlos Jobim"

Aubrey Johnson: Unraveled

by Dan Bilawsky
March 27, 2020

Serving as a statement of elucidation, exploration and emotional reasoning, Unraveled lays bare a unique soul while presenting a clear-headed means of disentangling complex artistic threads. It's an album that's as sophisticated as it is accessible and as personal as it is universal in its line(s) of thought. In short, it's a debut destined to stand ...

Ian Shaw, Iain Ballamy, Jamie Safir: What's New

by Chris May
March 22, 2020

What's new? Not the dozen songs on this enchanting trio album. Most of them have been around for well over fifty years and people will likely still be enjoying them in another fifty. The composers include Duke Ellington, Richard Rodgers, Burt Bacharach, Jimmy Van Heusen, Michel Legrand and Leonard Bernstein. Musically sophisticated and lyrically literate, the ...

Getz/Gilberto: Mystery Solved

March 7, 2020

For years, I've been answering the same email question posed by readers about a photo taken at the famed Getz/Gilberto recording session in March 1963: Is the man in the middle who's wearing glasses producer Creed Taylor? And I've routinely replied no, it isn't. Many responded by saying, “It must be." I've assured them it isn't, ...

Andrea Brachfeld: Brazilian Whispers

by Dan Bilawsky
February 23, 2020

While Brazilian Whispers marks Andrea Brachfeld's first thorough exploration of the titular stream of sound, you'd never know it from the results. Teaming up with Bill O'Connell, her longtime pianist and sounding board, the veteran flutist, who's typically engaged in Afro-Cuban affairs or straight ahead suggestions, sounds like she's been playing this music all her life. ...

The DIVA Jazz Orchestra: DIVA + The Boys

by Dan Bilawsky
February 18, 2020

The all-female DIVA Jazz Orchesta has a boy-meets-girls story threaded into its origin, as drummer Stanley Kay served as the impetus behind the group's formation. Therefore, it's only fitting that the ladies have a few gentleman over to join them for some high times in the music every now and then. This eight-song set, ...

The DIVA Jazz Orchestra: DIVA + the Boys

by Jack Bowers
February 11, 2020

After more than twenty-five years as one of the world's most renowned big bands, drummer Sherrie Maricle's superlative all-female DIVA Jazz Orchestra invited a quartet of “the boys" onboard to help ensure the ensemble's twelfth album's success. Even though DIVA needs no consorts to affirm its unremitting mastery, it is nonetheless pleasurable to witness these talented ...

Antonio Carlos Jobim

Born: January 25, 1927

It has been said that Antonio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim was the George Gershwin of Brazil—and there is a solid ring of truth in that, for both contributed large bodies of songs to the jazz repertoire, both expanded their reach into the concert hall, and both tend to symbolize their countries in the eyes of the rest of the world. With their gracefully urbane, sensuously aching melodies and harmonies, Jobim's songs gave jazz musicians in the 1960s a quiet, strikingly original alternative to their traditional Tin Pan Alley source.

Jobim's roots were always planted firmly in jazz; the records of {{Gerry Mulligan = 9681}}, {{Chet Baker = 3578}}, {{Barney Kessel = 8339}} and other West Coast jazz musicians made an enormous impact upon him in the 1950s. But he also claimed that the French impressionist composer Claude Debussy had a decisive influence upon his harmonies, and the Brazilian samba gave his music a uniquely exotic rhythmic underpinning. As a pianist, he usually kept things simple and melodically to the point with a touch that reminds some of Claude Thornhill, but some of his records show that he could also stretch out when given room. His guitar was limited mostly to gentle strumming of the syncopated rhythms, and he sang in a modest, slightly hoarse yet often hauntingly emotional manner.

Elis Regina and Antonio Carlos Jobim: A Musical Love Story and a Timeless Recording

by Victor L. Schermer
February 6, 2020

One of my all-time favorite albums and desert island picks is Elis and Tom (Phillips, 1974), featuring duets by the legendary Antonio Carlos “Tom" Jobim and Elis Regina, an iconic Brazilian singer lesser known in the U.S. who a few years later died of a drug overdose at the age of 36. I'm writing about it ...

Mette Juul: Finding the Musical Sanctuary of Change

by Jakob Baekgaard
January 31, 2020

Since she released her debut Coming in from the Dark in 2010, Danish jazz singer and songwriter, Mette Juul, has been on a path of discovery that has seen her in collaborations with many prominent musicians, including drummers Alex Riel and Rodney Green, bassist Jesper Lundgaard and trailblazing trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. Her latest albums Change (2019) ...

Marcos Valle: Braziliance!

by Chris May
January 31, 2020

First released in 1966 on Warner Bros., Marcos Valle's third album was his debut US release. An instrumental set, it is packed (if a 29-minute album can be so described) of great tunes composed by Valle with his brother Paulo. Like Antonio Carlos Jobim's own-name US debut, The Composer Of Desafinado Plays (Verve, 1963), another instrumental ...