João Donato – A Bad Donato
Original release 1970 Blue Thumb Records BTS-8821
2023 Verve/UMe B0037860-01
Verve By Request Series 180g Gatefold reissue
Genre: Jazz, Latin, Funk / Soul
Style: Jazz-Funk, Fusion
Is this the Brazilian “Electric Mud”?
The front cover features the congenial João Donato seated in an uncharacteristically menacing pose with a thousand-yard stare, while the back cover features him in what looks like a dunce’s cap, but which is maybe just Blue Thumb label chiefs Bob Krasnow and Tommy Lipuma’s clownish idea of “a hippie”, with sandals and a beaded necklace. Willie Colon on the front, Chacrinha on the back. The designer for the cover was actually Tom Wilkes, who has done a ton of iconic album covers, including the provocative Ike & Tina album “Outta Season” and the misleadingly stupid cover for Lee Michaels’ album “Carnival of Life” which led many people to presume it was a comedy record. You can’t win them all.
The record finds Donato, who had been based in the U.S. for some time by this point, branching out beyond his piano-based work in bossa nova and emphasizing modulated organ and electric keyboard sounds. The band is brash, a little bombastic, and very groovy. The vibe is no longer late nights in Copacabana’s Bottles Bar, but body-painted go-go dancers in cages.
I think most in the rare groove crowd love this record, and there’s a lot to like. Arrangements by Deodato, drums by Dom Um Romão (among others), guitar by Oscar Castro Neves. And also a lot of American studio and jazz cats, some of whom had flirted with Brazilian music like Bud Shank. But the majority those had backgrounds in big band orchestras. Each track features two drummers, giving it a somewhat jam-rock feel at times. The Mosquito has a traditional blues structure, a very unusual choice for Donato. I think the glue welding all these things together was producer Emil Richards, whose biggest CV items are as a prolific film scorer and composer for Hollywood. The resulting aural palette is somewhere between the excitements and absurdities of a Lalo Shifren soundtrack crossed with a Melvin Van Peebles exploitation adventure.
And, for some listeners as well as for me when I first encountered it, it seems pretty adventurous. It’s certainly fun. And legitimately funky, in a Hollywood kind of way. The whole album clocks in at a scant 28 minutes with most songs hardly surpassing the two minute mark, which reinforces the “library” quality of the material making it suitable to insert as the background to some celluloid heist, caper, or chase scene. The major exception is the five-minute “Lunar Tune” which is just long enough to be a little exploratory. It sounds a bit as if Miles Davis suddenly had a good mood in 1970, which then spiraled into a manic episode. Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock go-go dancing in a cage. I like it a lot.
But for all the fun and even joy that this record might bring you, it’s a bit like an amusement park diversion. It’s fast-paced and short enough that you may want to take the ride again as soon as it finishes, to get back that rush of adrenaline and dopamine, but there’s nothing particularly deep about the experience. It’s the least Brazilian of any João Donato record. It doesn’t have the special flavor of coolness that made him unique. If you want to know what Donato was really capable of in the 70’s, compositionally and instrumentally, then you need to turn to 1973’s “Quem é Quem” and his 1975 collaboration with Gilberto Gil, “Lugar Comun”. On those albums, there was no clowning around.
If you want an illustration of this, the opening track “The Frog” on this album was also recorded for Quem É Quem. They’re both cool, but the second version is very much more evocative of Donato’s musical personality.
1. The Frog
2. Celestial Showers
3. Bambu
4. Lunar Tune
5. Cade Jodel? (The Beautiful One)
6. Debutante’s Ball
7. Straight Jacket
8. Mosquito (Fly)
9. Almas Irmãs
10. Malandro
The 2023 remaster from the Verve On Demand series sounds fantastic, so that’s worth consideration. The short running time always helps vinyl and this case each side is very short indeed. Details on the process below:
