This week we had the pleasure of welcoming Jerrold Levinson for a workshop in Groningen. I had never met Jerry in person before, but I had anticipated great conversations on music, given his influential work on the aesthetics of music. Well, as it turns out, it was even better than expected (and would have been better only if we had had more time to talk). It involved in particular some brief duets at restaurants in a variety of languages (English, Portuguese, French, even a bit of Spanish).
One of these songs was the bossa nova classic ‘Desafinado’: me in Portuguese, Jerry in English. And so the choice of what to post here at BMoF this week was pretty obvious: here is ‘Desafinado’, in the classic version from the Getz/Gilberto album, and the English version, ‘Slightly out of tune’ with the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald (live at a TV show). Incidentally, I find that the English lyrics, and Ella’s interpretation, give the song an ‘upbeat-ness’ that is extraneous to it, as it is basically a melancholic song about somebody who is accused of singing out of tune by his lover (and this causes him ‘immense pain’). Still, perhaps the way to think about it is of ‘Slightly out of tune’ as almost like a different song altogether, and a great one at that.
(And here is to hoping for more such duets involving Jerry and me in the future.)
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