Desculpe...

Celso Fonseca & Ronaldo Bastos, Juventude/Slow Motion Bossa Nova: Samba É Tudo

First off, apologies to everyone... It's been a hectic month of getting sick then getting better, and working on various side projects including (but not limited to) writing the music for a play, working for a newspaper, getting a chapter of Free Culture up and running at Middlebury, trying to get my j-o-b on, getting hopelessly addicted to Arrested Development, a remix of some haitian folk song recordings I found, and to be honest, the reality of the fact that sometimes other music grabs my interest for a while. But I'm back! So let the festa begin...

Well, say what you will about Brazilian lounge or chill, or whatever you want to call it. I've had my moments of frustration with the preponderance of uniformly uninteresting interpretations of music that was pioneering 50 years ago. Yes, bossa nova lends itself to contemporary rhythmic re-workings, precisely because it was so ahead of the curve to begin with and we're just beginning to catch up with it, but that wasn't free licence to put a samba guitar riff behind everything. Not to mention those reworkings tend to ignore everything that has happened in Brazilian popular music since bossa nova.

That being said, this album has its moments. Some are interesting, some are dull, some are English(!). But the whole thing has a musicality that is lacking in a lot of the bossa nova reworkings I was discussing above, which should come as no surprise given Celso Fonseca's musical apprenticeship.

If you happen to be lucky enough to own a copy of Gilberto Gil's MTV Unplugged DVD, you'd see that he has a pretty stellar rhythmic guitarist in the background... That is Celso Fonseca. A regular on Gil's albums of the last 15-20 years, Fonseca lends more of a solid guitar foundation to Gil's rhythmic nylon musings.

This album is one of several that is far more heavilly marketed in the U.S. than it is in Brazil. Take that for what it's worth, but I won't make excuses for the fact that this is a great track off of a solid album.

By the way, lately I've been peeping the Nonesuch Creators @ Carnegie series that NPR has up on their website. I finally caught large segments of the Caetano/David Byrne collaboration I so regretfully missed while I was in Brazil. A Foreign Sound had just come out, and Caetano traveled stateside to do one show in New York. Luckilly, I caught Caetano in Salvador at the Teatro Castro Alves, two blocks from Bethania's place (who I also saw about a month earlier)!