If all goes well, by the time this post goes online, I’ll be on my way for a week of vacation. So most likely I’ll skip BMoF next week, unless I get a decent enough internet connection. Anyway, two weeks ago I had a post on Baden Powell, but since then I'm still obsessing about his music; so now there are a few more songs that absolutely *must* be shared with you all. The first is ‘Samba em Prelúdio’, also a Vinicius de Moraes & Baden Powell creation, but from before the Afrosambas period; it was composed in 1962. This song has been very dear to me for many years, possibly after I saw the French singer Patrick Bruel singing it on TV, when I lived in France as a teenager; he was then the idol of all teenagers, and to see him singing a *Brazilian* song, it was just irresistible (check here for a duet of Bruel and Chico Buarque for this song -- not the best possible version, but still interesting to check).
But beyond teenager infatuations, this just really is one of the most beautiful songs of the whole Bossa Nova repertoire. The melody is marvelous, and as for the lyrics, it has the characteristic Vinicius de Moraes approach to love and romance: dramatic and intense, love-you-till-the-end kind of thing (“Without you, my love, I am nobody”). I’m posting it in a version by the young jazz star Esperanza Spalding. Non-Brazilians usually have a really hard time getting the accent right when singing such songs, so mostly I don’t really like gringos singing Brazilian music in Portuguese (you really need to get the accent right for the rhythm and delivery to work out), but Spalding does a good job here. She has a passion for Brazilian music, and has recorded many other Brazilian songs.
The second song is called ‘Prelúdio’ (clearly Baden liked the whole idea of preludes), and is a truly impressive demonstration of his talent as a guitar virtuoso. He plays both the rhythm and the melody on the same instrument, and from just listening to it you could swear there are at least two guitars being played by different people (other people who also blow my mind doing this are Stanley Jordan and Tuck, of Tuck & Patti). It is a beautiful, delicate piece, in many senses closer to classical than to folk music.
Well, qualitatively at least this is more than enough to keep everybody busy for two weeks; I suppose you won’t even notice if I skip next week’s BMoF.
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