Carmen Miranda – Os Carnavais de Carmen (2006)

Well, dear readers, Carnaval is here again.  I am skipping it this year, since I recently rejoined the Jehovah’s Witnesses after my lapse, and promised Prince that I would spend a few days handing out fliers with him and the guy from The Revolution who always dressed like a surgeon on stage, Dr. Fink.  Maybe he will wear the hospital scrubs and mask while we go out, and it will feel like our own kind of private Carnaval, and I’ll feel less sad.

So this post goes out to all the other people who are missing Carnaval.  Because if you are within spitting distance of Carnaval right now, you should get off the damn internet and go outside.

Carmen Miranda deserves a more verbose entry on this blog than I can give her today.  The story of her life and career is so rich, complex, and fascinating that it often serves today as a didactic lesson on Brazilian history and culture.  But I’m not feeling teacherly this evening.  For now, suffice it to say that she was a tremendously talented woman, and the reigning queen of samba for many years in the 1930s.  She also featured in many musical comedy films of the day – one of which features prominently in the CD presented here – before she left for the US to star in Broadway shows and, of course, Hollywood films.This collection was released as a companion to the biography penned by Ruy Castro.  I haven’t read Castro’s book but I’ve no doubt that it’s excellent.  (His book on bossa nova is great fun, even if I suspect some of it is rather apocryphal, and I was just given a lovely Christmas present of his newest book on the golden age of samba-canção, which I am looking forward to reading.)  Castro gets to take all the credit at the excellent song selection here and on the other three discs that came out at the same time.  I’m not sure why they weren’t put out as a boxset, and in fact I find it rather irritating: one of the four discs has eluded me for several years now.

For the samba aficionados among us, a glance at the track list with the composer credits gives a clear idea of what we’ve signed up for.  Assis Valente, Lamartine Babo, Noel Rosa, João de Barro, Hervé Cordovil, Benedito Lacerda… Not much to complain about there.  These are all Odeon releases from the period after she left the Victor label.  Here’s one of my favorites from this set, Assis Valente’s “Camisa Listrada”

And she has guests to duet with like Silvio Caldas, Barbosa Junior, and – most famously – her sister Aurora.  She sings with her sisters Cecilia and Aurora on “Alô, Alô Carnaval”, a song from the film of the same name which is sadly the only one of her Brazilian-made films to survive the ravages of time.  There is a very famous, iconic scene in it where Carrmen and Aurora sing “Cantores do radio” in matching sparkly suits.  It is up on YouTube but the audio is barely listenable: somewhat disgracefully, it seems as if nobody has done a proper restoration of this film yet.  They did record it as a 78 single, which appears in this collection, so here’s an awesome still image and you can just play the CD and look at it:

Isn’t it great?

Some other musical highlights are Beijo Bamba, Balancê, A pensão da dona Stella, and her aforementioned duet with Silvio Caldas, Onde Você Vai, Maria? – for which I really wanted to post a YouTube clip but – shock and horror – it doesn’t exist on YouTube yet!  I guess you will just have to track down this CD or an approximation of it floating around the interwebs in the form of a random link somewhere…