The connections between Brazilian music (Bossa Nova in particular) and jazz are well known, but most Brazilian musicians following a more jazzy approach (as opposed to Brazilian folk music with light touches of jazz) are based abroad (e.g. Eliane Elias). Jazz is not exactly ‘music for the masses’ in Brazil. One interesting exception was a jazz band of the late 1980s, early 1990s: Nouvelle Cuisine. Their first album (1988) featured a collection of jazz standards such as ‘My funny valentine’, ‘Embraceable you’, ‘Lullaby of birdland’, which is something quite unusual for a Brazilian band (I am not aware of any other such albums). In later albums, they continued to record jazz classics but veered more and more towards the classic repertoire of Brazilian folk music.
I was a big fan of their first album already back in the day, and listening to it now, it strikes me how jazzy and yet how unconventional the arrangements are (for jazz standards, that is). I hadn’t thought of Nouvelle Cuisine at all for many years, but the other day I heard ‘Lullaby of birdland’ on the radio (the Ella F version), and had to think of my first acquaintance with this song thanks to Nouvelle Cuisine. So let me post here ‘Embraceable you’ (I love this version, but my very favorite version is probably Cleo Laine’s), ‘Lullaby of birdland’, and to illustrate what Nouvelle Cuisine did with classics of Brazilian folk music, ‘Flor de Lis’ (from a later album), the first hit of my beloved Djavan (for the sake of comparison, here is the original).
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