VA - Simply Brasil 4CD 2006 (FLAC) torrent

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Simply Brazil brings the magical rhythms and legendary songs of Brazil's golden era of samba and bossa nova together in a 4CD set, complete with notes on the history of Brazil's greatest export: music!

Track List

CD 1: Bossa Chill

1 - Aparecida - Garota De Ipanema
2 - Nelson Sargento & Galo Preto - As Rosas Nao Falam
3 - Grupo Itapua - Falsa Baiana - Samba Do Aviao
4 - Luis Teixeira - Manha De Carnaval
5 - Maogani Feat. Joyce - For Hall
6 - Xavier Osmir - Agua De Beber
7 - Simao Morto - Chega De Saudade - No More Blues
8 - Paula Santoro - Corcovado - Quiet Nights Of Quiet Stars
9 - Grupo Cabana - Desafinado
10 - Paula Santoro & Hugh Burns - Dindi
11 - Paula Santoro - Meditation - Meditasao
12 - Grupo Cabana - Once I Loved
13 - Grupo Cabana - Wave - Vou Te Contar

CD 2: Bossa Grooves

1 - Marcos Valle & Victor Biglione - Os Grilos
2 - Agenor de Oliveira - Carioca Da Gema
3 - Rodrigo Lessa - Patifaria
4 - Rio Combo - Sway
5 - Grupo Cabana - Dreamer - Vivo Sonhando
6 - Simoa Morto - Anos Dourados - Looks Like December
7 - Rio Combo - Samba Pa Ti
8 - Paula Santoro - Triste
9 - Paula Santoro & Hugh Burns - Useless Landscape
10 - Simao Morto - How Insensitive - Insensatez
11 - Aquilo Del Nisso - Bananeira
12 - Simao Morto - O Grande Amor
13 - Paula Santoro - The Girl From Ipanema

CD 3: Samba Chill

1 - Grupo Itapua - Vatapa
2 - Grupo Itapua - A Luz De Tieta
3 - Aparecida - Esperanca
4 - Grupo Itapua - Flor De Lis
5 - Grupo Itapua - So Quero Um Xodo
6 - Francisco Timoteo - Saudade de Bahia
7 - Rio Combo - Summer Samba (So Nice)
8 - Gustavo Marques - So Danco Samba
9 - Grupo Itapua - Sampa
10 - Grupo Itapua - Leaozinho
11 - Grupo Itapua - Ventos De Verao
12 - Grupo Cabana - One Note Samba
13 - Elton Medeiros - Nao Te Esquecas de Mim
14 - Grupo Cabana - Favela
15 - Grupo Itapua - Voce Nao Entende Nada
16 - Francisco Timoteo - Samba De Minha Terra

CD 4: Samba Club

1 - Rio Combo - Mas Que Nada
2 - Paulo Moura - Um A Zero
3 - Francisco Timoteo - Macumba Macumbe
4 - Marcia Maria - Aqui Oh
5 - Oswaldo Pinto - Me Leva Ao Carnaval
6 - Francisco Timoteo - Maracangalha
7 - Grupo Itapua - Tigresa
8 - Familia Roitman - A Cabeca
9 - Trio Calafria - Partido Em Tres
10 - Aparecida - Samba De Uma Nota So
11 - Marcia Maria - O Trenzinho Do Caipira
12 - Francisco Timoteo - Capoeira Do Vento
13 - Marcia Maria - Minorias
14 - Dorina - Eu Canto Samba
15 - Rio Combo - Brazil (Aquerela Do Brazil)



So what do you visualise when someone says ‘Brazil’?

Warm beaches, sunshine, ice-cold beer, friendly people of every possible hue and origin, palm trees, the Christ Statue, the Amazon jungle, the wide-open plains of the Pantanal, the snow-covered hills of Lencois, football….

Something of everything, right? The country’s so vast that you might just as well ask someone to visualise ‘America’: you’d probably get the same, disparate bunch of observations.

And of course, what’s true of the country and the people is also true of the music. There’s samba, of course. And bossa nova. But there’s also country and western, R&B, soul, funk, (very good) rock, jazz, folk, every genre of modern club-dance music: in other words, pretty much everything you’d expect from a country made up of indigenous peoples, Africans, Mediterraneans, North Americans, Asians, East Europeans, Japanese and Chinese, Arabic and Sephardic races, Caribbeans and North Europeans.

To name just a few….

But in keeping with the tradition of our ‘Simply…’ series, we obviously have to make some cuts somewhere, otherwise you’d be purchasing a 20-volume set. So here’s a selection of the most celebrated, the most precious and the most unforgettable songs in the samba and bossa nova traditions – probably the most ‘Brazilian’ of all Brazilian music.

Although it’s generally accepted that samba’s roots lie in the African slave populations of the northern state of Bahia’s giant 19th-century sugar plantations, the music really only took off in the 1920s, by which time slavery had (only recently) been abolished in Brazil. Many freed Africans had headed out of Bahia down into the southern states and, most particularly, into the state and city of Rio De Janeiro. For several decades Rio had had a Carnival, but until the ‘20s it was a very sedate affair, dominated by middle- and high-brow musical and cultural preoccupations and, frankly, only a little more exciting and spectacular than a vicar’s tea-party.

But the introduction of African percussion and rhythm changed all that. What had originally been ballads, ditties and airs based on Italian, Portuguese, French and English musical traditions, became marches and dances. One of the most scandalous at the time was the ‘maxixe’, a couples-dance that was little more than a waltz in double-time, but with a little innocent hip-swivelling here and there. But to read the horrified newspaper reports concerning the first Carnival parades that had featured the dance, you’d think they were describing some sort of Romanesque, bacchanalian orgy!

Of course, times change, and E.M. Forster’s famous dictum that ‘the past is a foreign country’ was never truer than when considering Brazil. Brazilians don’t have the same sense of nostalgia that Europeans do. For the average young Brazilian today, there’s everything to play for in the future, no real reason to conserve past traditions unless they have a practical purpose. But there is another quality in the Brazilian psyche, something far stronger than mere nostalgia: they call it ‘saudade’. It’s impossible to translate perfectly, but has a sense of nostalgia for something perhaps invisible but tangible, something lost and yet still within the grasp of all.

Brazilians all agree that they can grasp that essence at least in their music, and perhaps most of all, in the forms of samba and bossa nova.

Samba came first. It was a combination of African percussion and European melody and instrumentation, sometimes instrumental only (as in the case of ‘samba-choro’), but usually vocal. The lyrics would cover everything from love and politics to death and birth, social and cultural issues, you name it – pretty much like a magical combination of calypso, blues, New Orleans Jazz and classical music.

Bossa nova developed out of samba in the early 60s. Musically, it was strongly influenced by the cool jazz movement developing on North America’s West Coast, and so the ‘New Orleans’ element mentioned above soon began to sound old-hat and perhaps even a bit corny, and was quickly dropped from the mix. Culturally, it was influenced by the new-wave cinema movement emerging from Italy and France, and by a general increase in wealth, improved communications, and domestic conveniences like television, washing machines and the rest (at least for the privileged few, if not for the thousands of Rio’s shanty-town dwellers). Politically, Brazil was under the thumb of a military regime, and so the more politically-inspired bossa nova songwriters and performers, like Chico Buarque, Nara Leao, and others found themselves in an uncomfortable position with the authorities, for whom change of any kind (or even talk of change) was anathema.

We’ve sequenced this essential collection of samba and bossa nova into four separate volumes, with an eye to helping the newcomer make sense of the initially bewildering array of riches on offer.

But the divisions aren’t based on any hard-and-fast rules, much less on any established musical orthodoxy. So feel free to mix-and-match. Play half of Samba Chill, then switch across to Bossa Grooves, for instance. The overall spirit will feel familiar wherever your laser alights.

The main thing is to revel in the abundance of inspiration, to luxuriate in the endless diversity and surprise of Brazil, and her greatest export: music.

John Armstrong