Marcos Valle – Vila Sésamo (1974)

Marcos Valle & Trio Soneca – Vila Sésamo
Soundtrack to the Children’s TV Series based on Sesame Street
Originally released on Som Livre 1974

This is credited to Various Artists but its a Marcos Valle record, basically. It’s a soundtrack record developed for the Brazilian adaptation of Sesame Street, produced in collaboration by the Children’s Television Workship of the US, and TV Cultura and Rede Globo in Brazil. It first ran from 1972 to 1976 and had SONIA BRAGA in its cast! All the music was composed by musician/surfer/MPB-bossa nova star Marcos Valle.

Oh the days when children’s television was conceived and created by people under the influence of hallucinogenics, how I miss thee:

Marcos Valle singing the “Garibaldo” theme music (Big Bird character…)
here

I thought the US Big Bird was kind of scary. This one bares a striking resemblance to a one-eyed Phyllis Diller.

However, Grover, who I always found annoying in the American version, with a voice just shy of nails on chalk, was in Brazil a trench-coat sporting, horse-riding, guitar-wielding malandro… Even his name was cooler — GROOVER. He was smooooth, he was cool, he was… groovy. He was singing in the rain.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B
Okay, I will admit I never actually made it through all of either of those clips… Still, though, you get my drift..

Then there is the strange case of golden boy Marcos Valle — here is a brief bio. I didn’t write this.

Marcos Valle was born in Rio de Janeiro, and took piano and music theory lessons as a child. As he grew older, he developed a taste for live music at bars and clubs, where he’d listen to jazz. In 1961, Valle, Edu Lobo and Dori Caymmi grouped for a few presentations. With his brother, Paulo Sergio Valle, he wrote a number of hits and made his first album, “Samba Demais”, in 1964. He headed to the United States in the following year, where Walter Wanderley successfully recorded “Samba de Verão”. “Preciso Aprender a Ser Só” and “Terra de Ninguém” are also from that period, as well as “Samba de Maria”, “O Amor É Chama”, “Viola Enluarada” (recorded with Milton Nascimento), “Dia de Vitória”, “Gente”, “Seu Encanto” and “Ao Amigo Tom”. While in the States, Valle worked with Airto Moreira. In the 70s, he approached pop and soul music. Then, while writing soap-opera soundtracks, his hit list increased, including “Quarentão Simpático”, “Com Mais de Trinta”, “Mustang Cor de Sangue”, “Os Grilos”, “Freio Aerodinâmico”, “Que Bandeira”, “Black Is Beautiful”, “O Cafona”, “Não Tem Nada Não”. His career took a distinct pop turn in the 80s, and he managed to smash one hit or other. Marcos Valle was a composer from the so-called “second wave” of bossa nova musicians. His swingy, dance-driven style, supported by inventive grooves, easily fit the European dance floors, where his music became hip in the 90s, in the midst of the drum’n’bass fever, helping create a new style: the drum’n’bossa. His records have been re-issued and others have been produced, mainly through London based Far Out Records.

The songs are all lovely life lessons, songs about “difference,” about believing in yourself, about the parts of the body, addition and subtraction, animals. Really its hard to tell it apart from most lite pop albums of the early 1970s 😛 I have noticed my neighbors in my apartment building have less to say to me in the hallway since I started blasting this record at full volume at least a few times a week. Oh well, their loss.

Includes full art scanned at 600 dpi

Marcos Valle – Vila Sésamo (1974) at 320 kbs mp3

Marcos Valle – Vila Sésamo (1974) in FLAC Lossless plus .PNG art scans

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