Best Latin Group Ever! - Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 is my absolute favorite Latin group. Their music makes you want to dance and sway. Their renditions of Beatles songs is wonderful and really unusual. Together with Bossa Nova and other Brazilian beats makes this a great CD.
Great Music- Not So Great Sound - Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 were a hot act in the 1960 s... pumping out hit after hit of music with a enique Latin twist. All of the songs hold up well today... the music is still 100% enjoyable, in spite of the less than great recording quality. If you listen in your car it ll probably sound OK... but if you listen with higher quality music reproduction system, you ll hear the flaws, I took away a star due to the poor audio quality
Too many covers? Bah! - Almost every track on this 4-sider (neat how 4 lp sides now take up just one CD) got plenty of radio play in La La Land when I was growing up so this really is a greatest hits album from my youth. And who cares if they re covers or not? They re excellent covers. Great arrangements. Terrific vocals. Top notch players. Love it!
The Sturdy Brazilian Pop of Brazil 66 Ages Well - The pop music of Sergio Mendes and Brazil 66 has aged well over the past 40 years. Brazil 66 quartet fronted by a pair seductive female singers, Lani Hall and Janice Hansen who sang American pop music and contemporary Brazilian bossa nova and samba music in the Portuguese language of Brazil. Hall and Hansen s lilting, frothy vocals gave Brazil 66 it s distinctive signature sound. Four decades later the pop/jazz/Brazilian fusion music of Brazil 66 sounds suprisingly fresh, while a lot of the critically lauded experimental music of the Sixties sounds...well.. quaint by comparison. It s a credit to the vision of Mendes who assembled a band of great players like guitarist John Pisano and others musicians schooled in the Afro/Brazilian and cool jazz traditions. Those who once dismissed Mendes as a musical lightweight with a gimmicky bossa nova sound have been proven wrong. Mendes music anticipated much of today s world fusion music that combines conventional pop music with the exotic percussion and swaying tempos of third world music. Today s Menedes fans are hipper than the cocktail hour core Brazil 66 Sixties fan base. The newer Sergio Mendes devotees are twenty and thirty somethings raised on punk and post-punk. It s the same musically sophisticated audience that rediscovered a a host of overlooked world music icons including, the French pop of Serge Gainsboro, the samba music of Carlos Antonio Jobim, the eccentric psychedelic music of Os Mutantes, the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti and buoyant ska rhythms of jazzy Jamaica s Skatalites. To their credit, these younger fans have created a demand for re-release of material by these overlooked artists, including Sergio MendesThis album, Four Sider has more songs than any anthology, BUT song per song Four Sider is not as consistently sumblime as another Brasil 66 anthology, Classics Vol. 18. Four Sider s inclusion of weak cover versions of songs like, Buffalo Springfield s For What It s Worth or Otis Redding s Sitting On the Dock of the Bay may test the patience of a novice fan. Classics Vol. 18 avoids some of Brazil 66 s less inspired music. On the other hand, the internet bible of music criticism AMG, has selected Four Sider as the best Mendes anthology. It s a toss of a coin...Four Sider may have four more songs than Classics Vol. 18, but not necessarily songs of the 24 karat variety. The choice is yours. As a footnote, in 1992 Sergio Mendes released a solo album, the Brasilerio which has become a cult masterpiece of Afro/Brazilian roots music. Fans of Mendes should check out that CD, as well.
some refreshing sixties sounds, but... - I can t help but think of Mr. Mendes, Herb Alpert, and Jerry Moss meeting every night for dinner and drinks to discuss the future of Latin music in the U.S., various audiences ripe for Latin crossover, good people for Sergio to get to know, etc. There really is an undercurrent of business on this record, like the club/disco music unleashed by many folks a decade later. Still, much of it is enjoyable because it is so reminiscent of a certain period in the sixties.OK I guess I m in the minority on this one.