fantastic album - have been an avid fan of bossa nova music for years... and sergio mendes has always an amazing musician! love this album a lot!
the very best of sergio mendes and brazil 66 - this album is amazing. retro, spicy and just flat out good.
One of the greatest musical groups ever! - I just recently discovered Brasil 66 when I heard Pretty World on a jazzy oldies type station. I knew instantly that the singer was someone special & a master singer. Now I m listening to many of their songs and I never get tired of them. Their music is just pure, clean, good, real music! It is free from technical gimmicks or anything heavy or unnecessary. Their music is so happy, innocent, and fun. I LOVE IT. I can t get enough of it! They re definitely my favorite right now. The best thing about Brasil 66 is Lani Hall. What a great singer she is. Also the jazzy bossanova instrumentals are refreshingly different from anything I ve listened to before. I m looking forward to getting better hi-fi equipment so I can hear them in all their glory. I bet they sound really great on a tube stereo system.
Love this CD! - I listen to this CD when I go for my evening walks. It s wonderful music to walk to (and dance to!). I am absolutely crazy about Sergio Mendes & Brazil 66!. My favorite song on this CD is Sometimes In Winter. It s a beautiful, haunting song. All the songs are great, but that is the best.
The K-Man was right. - This CD is a timeless, time-capsule treasure trove of pure pop pleasure. Sergio Mendes is a bossa nova Bacharach - not just because he covered both types of music, but because he shares whith the American an interest in revivifying the aesthetic of Tin Pan Alley, tempering it with a 60s pop melancholy (both especially cherish the inherent sadness of brass), and, in Mendes case, cooling it with jazz discipline gleaned from his association with Jobim. The half century of melodic miracles on this CD may be divided into three types:1. Cover versions of pop standards so annoyingly familiar you never want to hear the originals again. Mendes takes songs by the likes of the Beatles, Bacharach, Jimmy Webb and Simon & Garfunkel, re-arranges and re-imagines them in a samba mode, convincing you that they were originally written in Brazil after all. The Fool On The Hill nearly collapses under its visionary excess, Day Tripper becomes alive through slick jazz rhythms, What The World Needs Now throttles at a frightening pace, Cheslea Morning and Night and Day exude sunny Rio rays, Norwegian Wood brings out the yo-yo intensity buried in the original.2. Arrangements of bossa nova classics by Mendes old jamming cohorts. These are less radical than the above, and the attempts by anonymous, if proficient, session singers to replicate the idiosyncratic Astrud/Joao vibe don t always work, but the subtle reworkings offer new takes on old favourites - Bim Bom is especially definitive, Mendes mining the wistfulness in the most frivolous of songs, sensing the music s soul in the piano. One Note Samba , which segues here into Spanish Fly , shouln t work, and doesn t, but is invigorating nonetheless.3. Less familiar covers and original songs (written by Mendes and friends), which rarely equal the emotional depth of Jobim or Bonfa, but offer groovy bliss, warm generosity, bouyant fun and reflective sorrow in equal measures. Sometimes In Winter is a pretentious epic with the most glorious melodic bridge, Pretty World is one of the few songs that knows what being rapturously in love actually sounds like, Cancao Do Nosso Amor and Pradizer Adeus know the same despondancy that provoked Jobim s Insensatez .This division is, of course, arbitrary and artificial - unique production, settings and instrumentation mean each and every song sounds like a Mendes original. Cosmo Kramer was right - some people can still go wild for Sergio Mendes.