Jorge Ben – Ben (1972) {Salve Jorge! boxset}

A1 Morre O Burro Fica O Homem 2:09
A2 O Circo Chegou 2:46
A3 Paz E Arroz 2:48
A4 Moça 4:57
A5 Domingo 23 3:48
A6 Fio Maravilha 2:13

B1 Quem Cochicha O Rabo Espicha 3:25
B2 Caramba 2:21
B3 Que Nega E Essa 3:34
B4 As Rosas Eram Todas Amarelas 3:45
B5 Taj Mahal 5:30

For me, this has always been the Holy Grail of Jorge Ben albums. A sentiment fueled largely by its scarcity since the time I got into the man’s music — This was one of the last of the classic Ben albums I managed to hear. I finally got my hands on it by way of an ex-girlfriend, and (not unlike the girl herself) it was damaged goods — the disc was scratched up and skipped, the cover artwork had long disappeared. But (not unlike the girl herself), it was better than nothing, and I made a personal copy of it anyway, skips and all. The vinyl for this baby has long been out of my price range (until I am lucky enough to find one at a random record stall), so this particular title is one of the main reasons I bought the Salve Jorge boxset.

A set of eleven songs, all written entirely by Jorge Ben, with unfortunately uncredited musicians after the departure of Trio Mocotó. Whoever it is playing the fretless bass on this album is just incredible. Crisp production and arrnangements by Paulinho Tabajós (with some help from Osmar Milito on a few tracks), this is probably the sparest, most stripped-down album of Ben’s discography. For all its wonderful glory, there are actually few ‘staples’ on this album that would continue to appear in Jorge’s live performances and various collections, with the major exceptions of Fio Maravilha (here presented in an extremely laid back, downbeat interpretation), Caramba!, and the earliest version of Taj Mahal which has an “Eastern-sounding” acoustic guitar solo in the middle of it.

Also, if you play the song Domingo 23 backwards, you will here references to the future death / murder of Michael Jackson, using imagery from the film BEN for which Jackson sang the theme song, also released in 1972.

Saravá Jorge, filho de Ogun!

Oh, and this is most likely my last blog post of 2009, so … HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! Thanks to all the readers of this blog — especially those of you kind enough to take the time to leave comments! Lots of light and inspiration to you all in the new aeon.

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44 Comments

  1. Happy new year, my friend, thanks for all the music flowing from your blog, and the heartfelt reviews you write as well.

    See you in 2010

    take care

  2. Great share, many thanks!
    Happy new year to you!

  3. Te desejo um ano de muitas letras …melodias…Acordes…Ritmos…e Arranjos!!!E que você transforme o seu Ano de 2010 inesquecível!!! bjs

  4. Excellent share, thanks a lot.
    Happy New Year!

  5. I love the Jorge Ben posts! Thank you! The flac link on this one is invalid.

  6. Happy new year and thanks a lot!
    …. But the link to FLAC version doesn't work… Could you fix it, please?

    Thank you again,
    Marco

  7. You are an absolute legend. End of.

  8. You're a legend.

    BTW the flac link is dead. Fortunately I'm lucky enough to own the LP, so no sweat if you're busy.

  9. olá galera! I just got back from a few days of sun and fun and time away from computers and the interwebs. Sorry to see people are having problems with this post!

    Seems to have been a 'take down' on the link. I am working on getting it up on another host. Hang tight.

    Hope 2010 is treating you all well!

  10. Thanks for all your work you put in, you blog has been a mainstay for me this past year. Jorge makes me really wish I could understand Portuguese.

  11. Okay, the links have been fixed. They are in two parts now in RAR.

  12. Dude, are you Brazilian? I accidentally found you when looking for some info on a Milton Nascimento's record, and was impressed by the depth of your knowledge. If you're a foreigner, I must say this: good job! I constantly try to show my friends (the open minded ones) Milton Nascimento but it's hard to choose a record. That one with Herbie Hancock, Airto Moreira, etc, and the other one with Wayner Shorter are the ones they know best, but they aren't among Milton's best records… not at all.
    Anyway, I'm Brazilian myself and also a big Jorge Ben fan. But I'm more into A Tábua de Esmeraldas.
    Cheers!

  13. oh, but by the way, jazz fusion isn't the devil's music :P, unless the devil is really cool. i mean, there's a lot of crap in jazz fusion, and perhaps it's more famous for that, but it's the same for progressive rock for example – lots of crap, but good stuff here and there. There's crap in every genre anyway. That gato barbieri record you posted some time ago is kind of a latin fusion thing, and it's awesome!

  14. Agora ta funcionando! Muuuuuito obrigado….. e fico na espera dos outros…

    Marco

  15. hey thanks Raphael for the "pretty good, for a gringo" compliment. 😉 Seriously though, your kind of feedback means a lot to me.

    Milton can be a hard sell for some people, and his released a lot of crap records that doesn't help the zealot looking to convert their friends. The record up here is a good choice, but so is Gerais from 1976, or the Clube da Esquina album.. but it really depends who we are trying to 'pitch' him to. By the way, I was lucky enough to see a Lô Borges/Milton Nascimento 'reunion' show last year and, even with my low expectations, it was pretty awful. It wasn't Milton's fault though — his contribution to the show was the high point, even if his voice is sounding more frail these days he still casts a spell on an audience. The problem was Borges, whose best qualities in the 70s were that he was kind of like an amateur songwriter in love with British rock who wrote some catchy tunes and had a lot of amazing musicians like Milton, T.Horta, Wagner Tiso, etc, to flesh them out and make them sound cool. Take away that context and he's just kind of mediocre. The show was dominated by his material, with Milton only joining in for the last 1/3rd of the show.

    Did I say fusion was the devil's music? Perhaps I did. If so I was just kidding around… sort of. But I know what you are saying, and I am a defender of good progressive rock also. I used to enjoy saying that 90% of pretty much anything is crap. Except this blog, of course.

  16. oh and Raphael, yes A Tábua is the best of the bunch. In fact, after his debut album and África Brasil it was the third album of his I had ever heard — I found a vinyl copy on the streets of São Paulo for about $2 when such things were still possible in the universe…

    In response to another comment (maybe on the Negro é Lindo post), I am not sure what I think of the mastering yet on this box. It seems unnecessarily loud, like most remasters these days, but since the holidays I have not had a chance to sit down and do any real 'critical listening' or comparing to older pressings.

  17. Hehe, no problem.

    Yeah Milton is hard to sell, even when I myself first listened to some of his stuff I kind of didn't get it, but nowadays he's simply the best to me (from the 60's and 70's anyway). I let my Danish friend (I live in DK) borrow "Clube da Esquina" and he thought it was too psychedelic, so I lost all respect for his taste and never tried again :P. We play Cravo e Canela in a band though, he loves that one.

    I think most of the 60's/70's artists who lived long enough to see the 80's turned crappy.. I mean, no disrespect, but I think there's only a handful of records I like from that decade, and very few managed to released good stuff after it.. so it's not just Milton.
    And I'm happy to hear that I'm not the only one who thinks Lô Borges is mediocre. My friends don't share that opinion because of Clube da Esquina. Really, to me he's just lucky, if he wasn't for Milton he'd never have gotten any attention. Kind of a Ringo Starrish sort of luck. Well he did help Milton with a couple of songs, but yeah. A few good regular songs and that's it. Nothing as revolutionary as Milton's. Even that piano playing at the end of the great "um girassol da cor…" shows how cheesy he could be. Beto Guedes at least had a couple of good solo records. I wish I had seen Milton live though, his voice is different but it's Milton! Toninho Horta or Wagner Tiso would be a dream as well.

    Prog rock rules. Som Imaginário is a good example. So are Yes's first records.."Close to the Edge" is a masterpiece.

    A Tábua so cheap? That is rare, I think there are some specialized vinyl stores in São Paulo and they're all incredibly expensive. It's the same in Denmark though, and here it's rare to find Brazilian records. I did buy Clube da Esquina 2, Milagre dos Peixes ao vivo, and a few Egberto Gismonti records last year though. Other than that,I only have Ebay.

  18. Great blog, great entry. i say that as a mayor jorge ben fan in Argentina. I have the only sama rock group in my country.
    Nice to meet this blog! if you're interested, you can hear my music on my blog.
    Happy 2010

  19. Is there any way you can post the remaster of A Tábua de Esmeraldas? I have the older CD, and I always found that the mastering had some muddy artifacts related to jitter. I'm curious if I might be wrong and that has to do with the master tape itself.

    Great blog. Thx for the translations as well.

  20. thanks onandonandon..
    Don't worry, A Tábua is coming! But be patient, I am probably going to work my through sequentially now.

    I have the original CD press of that one too, but I haven't had a chance to compare the two yet.

  21. I just checked out your FLAC rip of Ben through my Odyssey mono blocks and Magnepan speakers and I'm pretty happy with the sound. It sounds better than any source I've previously heard.

    Apparently, there is a 14 CD set with 2 CD's of outtakes. I might have to track that down. Thanks again.

    -AG aka onandonandon

  22. hey there AvantGrape, nice to hear you tested this out on such a nice system, and even nicer to hear you think it holds up!

    oh, and this is FROM that 14-cd set. If you can keep a secret, you might get your wish and be able to track it down here in its entirety over the next few weeks… If it wasn`t for my perfectionist streak it would be all here already. 😉 P.S. The outtakes set (actually containing a lot of B-sides and rare cuts that appeared on various compilations, but non-album cuts nonetheless) is really, really, really worth it. Be patient.

  23. 🙂 Cool! Being from the U.S., I doubt I've any many, if, any of Ben's B-sides. I wish more people knew about Ben over here. He's certainly up there Stevie Wonder or any other popular artist we have here in my book.

  24. Acho q vc Flabbergasto é brasileiro, entao não gastarei meu ingles…

    Cara, este link foi detonado no rs. Vc poderia reposta-lo no megaupload??? É bem melhor!!!

    E continue com esta maravilhosa postagem dos discos remasterizados do JB…

    Ah, o disco d 63 está sem artwork. Apenas estao as musicas… Vc poderia reupa-lo com as capas???

    ABRAÇAO E PARABENS PELO BLOG!!!

  25. AGUARDO SUA RESPOSTA SOBRE O NOVO LINK!!!!

    ABS!

  26. Many thanks for all those uploads.
    There seems to be a password for this one (the mp3 version)?
    Does anyone has the pass?

  27. I'm just about to dig in this Ben record as recommended by a friend who pointed it to me as we were discussing Negro E Lindo. Seems there's a melancholic undercurrent in this period in Ben's music, we'll see. Just wanted to say thanks in advance. Tough words on your ex-girl, hope she's not areader!;)

  28. In response to another reader, I disagree that Lo Borges is or was mediocre. His self titled debut is a great, great record (not to mention Club). It really creates a world of its own. To me his songs are more like sketches. Unfinished drafts that seem to float, hard to pin down. And that's a great thing. They're loose and mysterious. I like that. I haven't heard his work after that so It's hard to say, but just based on the "trainers" record I have a high opinion of the man, a record that can't possibly be the work of his sidekicks.

  29. Thank you so much for all the Jorge Ben. He's blowin my mind right now. A service to humanity.

  30. too bad the links are dead . thank you anyway

  31. hey. your blog is fantastic, flabber. thank you for the uploads. the 320 kbps link of the ben album (1972) is invalid. waiting for the fix.

  32. please fix that link.

  33. A few words of gratitude for that hard work that goes into this blog would do a lot more to motivate me to fix dead links. Those of you who can only be bothered to COMMAND me to 'fix that link' — Fuck you.

  34. ^^lol well put. takes a lot of time and effort if not then everybody would have their own blog uploading shit for free. Thank you for this album ive been looking for it in FLAC! oh and is the Salve jorge boxset really worth it? im giving it some serious thought.

  35. just downloaded the FLAC and could not be happier in life. thankyou

  36. why did you post links to RAR's without posting the passwords?

    you might as well have not linked them at all

  37. READ THE COMMENTS, ASSHOLE

  38. great stuff..love your blog

  39. Great stuff! Love your blog.

  40. Qual é a senha para descompactação?

  41. João, a senha tá escrito no lado direito —>

    (entretanto, é "vibes" )

  42. maravilhoso blog, obrigado. Pode upload de novopor favor?

  43. I have been listening to Jorge Ben a lot lately and this blog is just amazing. Thanks for all the nice albums uploads and the interesting readings.

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