Category: Uncategorised

Strictly speaking I shouldn’t bother with this. At least not in my current series of posts on Jobim’s solo albums. So, strictly speaking this isn’t part of that series. But as it was on the list of solo albums I started off with, and remains on the Wikipedia list of Jobim’s solo albums, and is included as part of a five album/CD set … I’m going to write it up now anyway.

The arrangements are by Lindolpho Gaya (?) and Eumir Deodato, the latter also playing piano. Other than the presence of his picture on the cover, and the allusions to his name, twice in the albums title/subtitle, the only other things that might locate this in a series of Jobim-related posts are the inclusion of two of his compositions, and the presence of Edison Machado on drums, who played the same role on Jobim’s genuine debut, just a few years earlier.

Anyway, (kind of) moving on from the Jobim series I’m currently writing up, let’s dive into this on its own merits. But, before we do that, let’s address this mis-attribution issue. How and why has this come to be thought of as a Jobim recording? Basically it’s down to the US music biz marketing folk. The Brazilian original, on the Elenco label, told a more honest story (see the two pics below).

As can be seen, the original idea was to use Jobim as the ‘familiar face’, and via his success or celebrity, introduce new Brazilian talent to a wider audience. With typical marketing department crassness, however, this morphed into outright misrepresentation, in pursuit of sales.

Initial US releases not only plastered Jobim’s name everywhere, but credited him as both pianist and guitarist, despite the fact he isn’t on the album as a player at all, but rather as the composer of just two of the twelve tracks.

And even those two tracks are presented here under their English titles, for the US market: Eu Preciso de Voce becomes Hurry Up and Love Me, and Samba Torto is renamed Pardon My English (and both are arranged by ‘Gaya’, about whom I know nothing).

The contrast between the more exotica flavoured opener, Hurry Up And Love Me, which is rambunctious, and the more authentically mellow and laid back bossa nova vibes of tracks two, If You Went Away, and three, the latter the slightly more upbeat jazzy waltz Seu Encanto (or The Face I love), both composed by Marcos Valle, and both arranged by Deodato, is very striking.

Deodato’s arrangements are much more in keeping with the Jobim/Ogerman style, as heard on The Composer of Desafinado Plays.

After Jobim, the two artists/composers most likely to be known outside Brazil are pianist and arranger Eumir Deodato, whose arrangements on this disc are – as just noted above – terrific/very authentically bossa nova, and the then very young Marcos Valle. Other featured artists include Baden Powell, Luiz Eca and Roberto Menescal, and others. Baden Powell’s classic Berimbau gets a good outing, with a pretty fabulous Deodato arrangement, more dramatic and even cinematic than typical of the rest of the album.

Track seven brings Jobim’s work back, but in an odd arrangement, whose exotica stylings – parping low-register brass! – tip over into the overtly comical. Not your typical Jobim stylings at all. This is, I suspect, the mysterious Gaya again. Once again the contrast when we return to the more authentic bossa stylings of Durval Ferreira’s Chuva (Rain) are very striking. This latter number is also notable for the unusual use of harmonica as a melodic lead voice.

A Jobim purist might be annoyed by the con-job of passing this album off as a Jobim solo disc, and it is in itself a bit of a mixed bag, not just on account of being the work of multiple composers, but that of more than one – and quite differing in style – arrangers.

The Deodato arranged stuff is, fortunately, both more plentiful and just plain better/more suited to the material. All of the compositions are presented here, as indeed are the all-Jobim selections on his Composer Plays debut, as instrumentals. And whilst not quite of the uniformly high standard of Jobim’s own such stuff, the other material here does share enough Brazilian bossa/samba DNA to be worth having.

So, bit of a mixed bag, and definitely neither essential, nor a good place from which to start an appreciation of Jobim’s musical genius. But still worth having if you’re a lover of this style and era of Brazilian music, as I am.

Jobim’s solo debut kicks off with an instrumental version of what is undoubtedly his best known number, The Girl From Ipanema. [1] Oddly, though, the album is billed with reference to another and different hit he composed, Desafinado. I’m guessing that the latter had already been a pretty big hit, for someone else?

Just as it might be hard to credit why the album might be billed under a less obvious/famous choice of song, until one knows the history of way back when, it’s even harder to appreciate now, how fresh this music sounded at the time it first appeared. It truly was nova, new.

Up till this point Jobim had been a back room boy, so to speak. That’s not a sexual euphemism, by the way, but a reference to his behind the scenes role as composer, and whatever else (arranger, studio musician, etc.), working on other people’s recordings.

It’s also interesting that the album is entirely instrumental. Jobim’s lyric for Desafinado, the headline song promoting this disc, was all about having a weak off-key voice! Like Donald Fagen many years later, Jobim was, perhaps, a reluctant vocalist! [2]

Amazingly, every single tune on this disc – from opener Ipanema via Insensatez and Samba de Uma Nota So to Desafinado itself – has become part of the contemporary jazz canon. Whether all the compositions were already hits back when Jobim released this album, I don’t know. I suspect probably not.

But such is the respect and love for his work, that every single track here has been played countless times, at jazz gigs and sessions around the world. And they continue to be performed and enjoyed.

O Morro Nao Tem Vez (Favela), possibly one of the ‘lesser’ tracks – not at all in terms of quality, rather in terms of fame – exemplifies the spare, pared down nature of bossa nova, in the hands of the master. This number is followed here by the better known but equally minimal yet lush Insensatez. Every piece is a gem.

The clichés of easy-listening loungecore decadence, or elevator muzak, something ubiquitous and ‘cheesy’, which have come to haunt this genre – not something I’ve ever had any issues with, personally – are, I suppose, a shame. As they have the potential to mean people won’t recognise this fabulous music for what it really is, achingly sublimely beautiful, laced with saudade.

Jobim (and countless others) would revisit these pieces time and again over the years. Perhaps there are legions of tired renditions of some of this stuff? But they are certainly not to be found here.

The cast of players include American jazz cats such as double-bassist George Duvuvier, locking in with Brazilian baterista, Edison Machado. And Jobim’s signature penchants for flute and trombone are entrusted to Leo Wright and Jimmy Cleveland. Great players making great music.

Also worthy of note is that way back here, in ‘63, we find Claus Ogerman already supplying the luscious yet spare string arrangements. Jobim and Ogerman continued to collaborate for much of their whole lives.

For those with ears to hear, this is an incredible debut. A motherlode of music that countless extremely talented artists and performers have mined for years, never coming close to exhausting the magic these compositions can potentially reveal.

When it comes to the platters that really matter, this one is history in the making, and is totally essential.

NOTES.

[1] According to the Wikipedia entry on the song, The Girl From Ipanema is the second most recorded song of all time, just behind The Beatles’ Yesterday.

[2] We can hear him vocalising along to his piano solo on Vivo Sonhando, bless him!

Not happy with Identity, Teresa demanded that we watch another movie (which she fairly promptly fell asleep to!). That wound up being Secret Window, starring Johnny Depp.

Depp’s very popular, I believe. I know he can act (Dead Man, Fear & Loathing). But many films he’s in are too trashy for me (Pirates, etc.), and those perfume ads he does? Eugh! This odd little movie finds him a bit confused as to how to play his part.

Madly enough, straight after Identity, the opening sequence is shockingly deja-vu-ish: sleety snow replaces the rain, but we wind up at another dark, sleazy motel! This opening scene suggests a troubled mind.

Depp is Morton Rainey, a writer in the process of getting divorced, living in a remote and beautiful log cabin style luxury home out in the woods by a lake. Living a lazy bohemian life, with an elderly maid, and writer’s block.

Visited by a hat wearing hick, John Shooter, played by John Turturro, who accuses him of plagiarism, we quickly realise, as Mort tries to deal with the strange scenario, that he’s not a well man. In the end, then, the central conceit of Secret Window is very like that of Identity. Only where the chief character in the latter has multiple others to contend with, Mort just has the one, Shooter.

The denouement is both kind of obvious and predictable. Although, that said, it could go one of two ways. The way it goes is… well, that’d be spoiling it, wouldn’t it?

Watchable, but far from classic, and certainly not essential. Although I score them the same, I think of the two Identity is, perhaps, marginally better. But there’s not much in it.

We watched this last night. Quite a star-studded cast. John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Jake Busey, Rebecca DeMornay, Alf Molina. Set on a very rainy night, a bunch of random folk wind up in a motel. And then people start being murdered.

Although it gets off to a quite compelling start, once underway, the first two-thirds of the film are quite familiar territory, in some respects. But there is an undercurrent that’s kind of perplexing, suggesting we might be heading towards a supernatural thriller.

But we’re not, thank goodness! But it’s not far off that. There is a major twist, which kind of turns things upside down, or inside out. I won’t give it away. By the time the film ends, I was both impressed with, and simultaneously somewhat disappointed by, the various turns the movie took.

I liked the rainy setting, and the whole grim dark ambience. The cast and direction are good. It’s pretty dark and violent (my wife Teresa didn’t like it, because of the latter). As it recedes from me, I start to feel it wasn’t quite all that. A good ride whilst watching, with one quite clever idea, but otherwise quite formulaic.

So… downgraded from four to three stars. Entertaining but far from essential viewing.

Released as a double album in vinyl days of yore. Disc one, Giant Steps, is, oversimplifying rather, an electric band blues album, whilst disc two, De Ole Folks At Home, is a solo acoustic ‘roots’ affair.

Recorded/released c. 1969, both albums are brilliant. Taj Mahal’s band at this time features Jesse Ed Davis on lead/rhythm guitar, Gary Gilmore on bass, and Chuck Blackwell on drums. Taj is superb as the band leader, and the guys are simultaneously tight and loose, so to speak. Musically perfect, in that ‘sweet spot’; the Goldilocks zone, neither too little nor too much.

Both albums mix covers and originals. And some are very trad, esp’ on ‘disc two’, whilst others are interesting adaptations of more modern pieces (Bacon Fat is by Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson of The Band). The energy of Giant Steps is joyful and infectious. The nostalgic introspection of De Ole Folks is warmly reverential, but also refreshingly diverse and invigoratingly raw and fresh.

Really stunningly good music, of a type you don’t hear enough. So much more refreshing and diverse/eclectic than most stodgy modern blues and blues/rock. Taj Mahal is criminally underrated. Like Ry Cooder, with whom he played in The Rising Sons, he’s both ethnomusicologist and superb performer.

Essential listening for awakened ears/minds!

With ITV having both ‘Des’ and The Real ‘Des’ viewable on their on-demand streaming service currently, and having watched both recently, I thought I’d revisit this much older film on the same subject.

Cold Light Of Day is remarkable for several reasons, one being how much nearer to the crimes it was – Nilsen was arrested in 1983, the film came out in 1989. The other is that the director, Fhiona Louise was only 21, and still a student, when she made it. Knowing this, it’s really quite impressive.

But it must be admitted that, compared with the slicker bigger budget films made since, and all the new information that’s come to light – much of the more recent Nilsen stuff owes lots to the work of Brian Masters, who isn’t in this film at all; it depicts events prior to his involvement – this is a flawed depiction of the historical events.

But thanks to how close to those events it is, first it looks more authentically period, and second it’s impressive in how close it gets, given the more limited knowledge of it all and the only semi-pro nature of the production.

One of the most obvious markers of this as a semi-amateur work, in addition to the almost non-existent budget, is the rather overdone acting. Bob Flag* is excellent as Jordan March, the Dennis Nilsen character. But Geoffrey Greenhill, as Inspector Simmons, is – ironically- the worst offender! Or maybe the fuzz really do/did shout and bully suspects as he does?

Given that this was made by a 21 year old student, and almost certainly on a budget that wouldn’t cover the hot beverages on a normal movie, it’s actually extremely impressive. But, at the some time, given we’re all used to much higher production standards, it’s difficult not to find it a tad underwhelming, as well.

Still, it’s worth seeing.

*Bob Flag’s performance is what makes this film, frankly. Intriguingly he was the face of Big Brother in the John Hurt 1984 (a non-speaking part!). And he was a musician (possibly even a drummer?), on and off, as well as an actor. See him being pretty gonzo here.

Most Stones albums have one or, very often, two bona fide classic tracks, per disc. Usually these are also the hit singles.

Let it Bleed is slightly unusual in that it’s overall stronger than many of their other late ‘60s early ‘70s records, and still has the expected pair of classics – Gimme Shelter and You Can’t Always Get What You Want – but they were neither of them hit singles.

It also belongs to the transitional period over which Brian Jones was tragically unravelling. He was fired from the band as a result of drug-induced unreliability, and died, by drowning, shortly thereafter. A terribly sad waste of talent. And a sign of the times.

Mick Taylor joined, as his replacement. The album was pretty much finished, so Taylor only appears on two tracks. Keith Richards doing the lion’s share of axe duties. Whilst Jones was famously both a guitarist and multi-instrumentalist, Taylor was more a six-string specialist. So it could be argued that the Stones’ sonic palette shrank a little with the loss/passing of Jones.

But Let It Bleed doesn’t support such an idea, largely thanks to the presence of a sizeable roster of guest musicians. These include Byron Berline, countrifyin’ things on Coubtry Honk, with his fiddle, and Ry Cooder, whose mandolin on Love In Vain adds to the minestrone of Americana influences …

Thanks to much stronger supporting material throughout – sometimes the non-hit Stones stuff can, to me, be very variable quality filler – like Love In Vain, Let It Bleed, Midnight Rambler, even the jammy feeling You Got The Silver, Let It Bleed is more consistently strong than a good many of the other Stones albums over this classic era.

Up there with the best of The Stones, and definitely recommended.

PS – One funny little footnote is that the cake on the cover was made by the then unknown chef, Delia Smith!

Excellent.

It seems my penchant for ‘true crime’ is, pardon the tasteless pun, alive and kicking.

Whilst the direction of Manhunt is not especially remarkable – the subdued almost monochrome grey-ish palette is standard practice in English crime thrillers nowadays (for obvious reasons, climatic and subjective) – that’s actually a strength. It’s understated in a perfectly appropriate businesslike and very functional manner. Exactly right for a police procedural; PC plod going about their business!

The cast of this drama are uniformly (can’t seem to staunch the flow of puns!) superb. Martin Clunes, as SIO Colin Sutton, heads up a roll call of actors most of whom are not previously known to me, with one or two exceptions (such as Sutton’s long-suffering partner*, played by Claudie Blakly, and…?).

At one point, Sutton is about to fly to Spain for a family wedding, and we see him reading Wicked Beyond Belief, which I’ve only recently read (see my review here). It’s a great credit to Sutton and co. that this killer, Levi Bellfield, was caught so much sooner than Peter Sutcliffe. It seems lessons have been learned.

It’s also very interesting to see what has evolved technologically and what hasn’t, in terms of detection. The ubiquity of cameras brings new avenues of pursuit, but the evidence this yields – vehicles used by the perp’ – still requires masses of slogging through databases and wearing out of ‘shanks pony’/shoe leather!

Obviously computers, and forensics have all developed massively since Sutcliffe’s reign of terror. But it’s fascinating to see the parallels in the Bellfield case, regarding how hard it can be to amass the required amount of evidence to make the crucial arrest.

As with Michael Bilton’s excellent book on Sutcliffe, the approach here is to follow the coppers, not the killer, which I can see has a certain advantage, morally speaking, over the potentially more salacious and prurient voyeurism of following the murderer.

In the Sutcliffe case, it was (if I recall aright?) just one car that the rozzers needed to trace. Here they discover that the perp’ used numerous different vehicles. And yet they were able, thanks to all the CCTV footage, to do much better this time around, than back in the Sutcliffe investigation.

I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with the series. As I’ve watched three episodes, and it seems to have finished. But I also see it being advertised as ‘starting on Monday’, and there seems to be footage in the trailer suggesting something different from what I’ve watched online.

Anyway, what I’ve watched is well done, and both enjoyable and interesting viewing.

*A theme in WBB is the toll this demanding work takes in the marital lives of coppers.

This movie tells the story of the infamous ‘butcher baker’ of Anchorage (Alaska), Robert Hansen. John Cusack plays the killer.

Sadly, as with most movies of this sort, they take great liberties with the story, for the sake of making a slicker movie. I can see why film-makers do this stuff, but it is a shame. And it has the effect of potentially muddying knowledge of the real events.

Incidentally, for me personally there’s a big dose of irony here, in that the main copper is played by Nicolas Cage. And I recently lamented the fact I keep watching movies with him in, despite many of them being appalling turkeys. This is fortunately one of the better ones.

The film starts with a scene that’s fairly true to life, when ‘the one that got away’, Cindy Paulson, er… gets away. Cindy, played by Vanessa Hudgens, was coached on the role by Paulson. From there on in a rather complex fiction is woven around her, which is where the film diverges from fact into fiction.

This whole thread reaches a kind of climax in a scene where ‘Bob’ Hansen and ‘Sgt Jack Halcombe’ (Cage’s cop, somewhat based on real fuzz Glenn Nothe) are both hunting Cindy, in a sleazy nightclub/sex-joint. It’s a clever conceit, because that’s what got Hansen off, hunting his victims like he hunted game.

The bleak washed out Alaskan settings lend themselves to the cold grey near monochrome aesthetic the film favours. The Frozen Ground works very well as ‘good watching’; well shot and structured, with a decent cast. It’s a shame they fiddled with the facts as much as they did, and somehow the depth and length of the case, despite being referenced numerous times, feels weaker than I’d have liked.

Cusack, a very capable actor, is pretty good as Hansen, but I think they ought to have had more about how and why he wound up doing what he did. His characterisation here is a bit thin. And only having the thinnest of allusions to his raison d’etre adds to that lack of depth.

The top line cast are good, but the lower ranks, in the fleshpots scenes in particular (these include rapper, Fiddy-Cents!), struck me as a bit formulaic. Apparently The Frozen Ground was a flop when it came out. But it’s proved popular on subscription channels. Far from perfect, it is pretty decent, and I like it.

Phil Collins was a busy little body in 1976! Trick Of The Tail and Wind & Wuthering with Genesis, and this opus de fusion.

It’s funny, because, apart from Phil Collins the other players – John Goodsall (guitar), Robin Lumley (keys) and Percy Jones (bass) – aren’t exactly household names. And yet they play with the fire, chops and intensity of jazz-rock-fusionistas of the first rank.

Perhaps the biggest and most obvious potential criticism might be that at numerous points the influences are very transparent. It’s a heady mix of Weather Report, Mahavishnu and suchlike. The thing is, it’s so well done, that I don’t frankly care about this. It simply means if you like that other stuff – and I do – here’s more, in a similar vein.

In fairness to these guys, however, I should add that despite wearing their inspirations on their sleeves, this still remains a unique, or rather, more accurately, a spirited enough combination to stand on its own.

The intensity levels are sky high, stratus-pheric, one might even say. Part of me feels, listening to it now, aged 49, that this level of energy really makes this young man’s type music. And I think to some degree that holds. But then again, Brand X are still going! And they – any surviving original members, that is – must all be late 60s, early 70s?