Insipid performances
Yink | San Francisco | 04/09/2010
(2 out of 5 stars)
"These performances were "a view", the most banal and schlock-ridden view, on the music of the great Jobim still available in the Verve catalog. Syrupy orchestration and indifferent soloing charactize all performances, which are largely unattributed in the skimpy booklet. (For some reason, Veloso's are marked as such.) Mastering is poor, rendering the lyrics largely unintelligible, and there are no translations. I suppose this collection has the value of conjuring up the martini-soaked heyday of the bossa nova craze in urban America, before the riots and a clear awareness that the rest of the world existed aside from military duty. Jobim's music continues to be something we paste together from other people's albums, and now YouTube (Stan Getz, Wayne Shorter, Milton Nascimento etc etc etc come to mind, even Santana. I just saw a very interesting performance online the other day between Jobim on piano and Gerry Mulligan on clarinet, recorded in NYC in the Fifties: excellent); well, in these digitalized days, get out your MP3 apparatus and leave this flabby product alone."