Today I’d like to talk about Bebel Gilberto, the Brazilian musician who has probably had the greatest international exposure in the last 10 years. She is the daughter of the legendary João Gilberto and of singer Miúcha, who in turn is the sister of Chico Buarque. So Bebel obviously grew up in a very musical environment; at age nine, she performed at Carnegie Hall with her mother and Stan Getz (by the way, just a clarification: she has no family connections with Astrud Gilberto, who was the first wife of her father).
Still, it took Bebel quite a few years until she found her own style. Without a doubt, the turning point was the release of Tanto Tempo in 2000, where she introduced a novel style which is sometimes described as ‘electronic bossa nova’. It consists of the characteristic smooth and subtle bossa nova singing (a gender in which her father is still the master), but with an electronic, ‘loungy’ instrumental background. Many of the songs she records are also bossa nova classics, such as ‘Samba da Bênção’. I have to confess that, for a long time, I thought that her music was ‘Brazilian music for gringos’ (just as Astrud Gilberto in the 1960s), but lately, as I became more favorably disposed towards lounge music in general, I’ve come to enjoy it a lot.
Let me post two songs here, ‘Bananeira’ from Tanto Tempo and ‘Aganjú’ from her 2004 album Bebel Gilberto. The first is a classic, composed by João Donato and Gilberto Gil in the 1970s, which is also internationally known in Sérgio Mendes’ version (not very good...); the second is composed by Carlinhos Brown, one of the most prolific and active Brazilian musicians of the last decade; he was, among other things, one of the Tribalistas together with Marisa Monte and Arnaldo Antunes (extra genealogical bit of information: Carlinhos Brown is, or at least was, married to one of Bebel’s cousins, one of Chico Buarque’s daughters). By the way, ‘Aganjú’ was for a while the favorite song of my daughters, which means that they were ahead of me in discovering Bebel Gilberto’s charms (^_^)
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