From top left to bottom right:
Antonio Adolfo e Brazuca (1970)
João Nogueira (1972)
Paulo Moura – Fibra (1971)
Ray Barretto – Indestructable (1973)
Bobby Hutcherson – Now! (1969)
Alaíde Costa – Canta Suavamente (1960)
Some reups for all of you while I am busy with other things. Please report any erroneous links you come across, cheers.
OS COBRAS
O LP
Released 1964 on RCA (BBL-1290) in Brazil
Reissue 2005 Sony-BMG France
In GLORIOUS MONOPHONIC
01 – Quintessência (J. T. Meirelles)
02 – Nanã (Moacir Santos / Mário Telles)
03 – Depois de Amro (Orlann Divo / Roberto Jorge)
04 – Adriana (Roberto Menescal / Luis Fernando Freire)
05 – Praia (Orlann Divo / Roberto Jorge)
06 – Uganda (Orlann Divo / Roberto Jorge)
07 – The Blues Walk (C. Brown)
08 – 40 Graus (Orlando Costa ”Maestro Cipó”)
09 – Chão (Amaury Tristão / Roberto Jorge)
10 – Menina Demais (Orlann Divo / Roberto Jorge)
11 – Mar Amar (Roberto Menescal / Ronaldo Bôscoli)
12 – Moça da Praia (Roberto Menescal / Luis Fernando Freire)
Tenorio Jr. (piano)
José Carlos “Zezinho” (bass)
Milton Banana (drums)
Raul de Souza (trombone)
Hamilton (trumpet)
Meirelles (sax alto, flute)
Paulo Moura (sax alto)
Special Guests
Jorginho (flute)
Aurino (sax baritono)
Cipó (sax tenor)
Roberto Menescal (guitar on 10 & 12)
Ugo (vibraphone on 10 & 12)
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Lately, in my real job, I’ve been pushing my way through a chunk of writer’s block rough enough to leave your hands bleeding from the splinters. That results in a few adverse effects that involve you, blog reader: I have less time to put into writing for this place, and then when I do have free time it’s usually spent feeling like an idiot about the other stuff I’ve been working on.
But instrumental music is often the only music that I can write to when working on that “other stuff” and this record has gotten a few spins over the last month. It’s kind of a super group, Brazilian jazz all-stars affair, the result of the label RCA-Victor approaching composer and arranger Roberto Jorge to make a record with the regular heavyweights in Rio’s jazz scene congregating around the jam sessions at places like Little Club and Bottle’s. The result was a bold declaration of the samba-jazz sound at its best. On the rhythm section there’s the ubiqutuous Milton Banana – Brazil’s own Art Blakey – on the drum kit, and Tenório Jr. on piano, who was also ubiquitous until he was “disappeared” and murdered in Argentina while on tour with Vinicius & Toquinho in the mid 70s. Zezinho is on bass, about whom I can’t tell you much of anything besides that he frequently played with Erlon Chaves. In the way of horns, there is the brilliant Paulo Moura, whose passing a couple years ago was a huge loss for the world of music. The guy has probably a million album credits of everything from choro to prog rock, but here we get to hear him in the same group with Meirelles, a sax man every bit his equal. A lot of the arrangements are by Cipó, who worked with João Gilberto’s first band Garotos da Lua and also contributes one composition and a bit of tenor sax to this record. There are also a few arrangements by Carlos Monteiro de Souza.
This album really highlights the symbiotic relationship between jazz in the United States and samba-jazz, jazz-bossa or just jazz in Brazil. Flows of mutual inspiration were resulting in an amazing amount of innovation and great music on both sides of the equator. But like in many other contexts, the relationship was also lopsided and unequal. The infatuation of American jazz for bossa nova, Brazil’s biggest musical export, unfortunately overlooked the immense variety of possibilities presented by other styles of music, such as samba. If US jazz absorbed anything of samba, it was by way of bossa nova’s own mutations of it. With apologies for making a simplified, unilineal argument, I’ll do it anyway and say that samba was to bossa nova what the blues was to jazz: the latter would not have existed without the former. But the blindness to each other’s roots was reciprocal – the blues was not really in the repertoire of musical idioms available to Brazilians either, at least not in the early 60s. Both jazz and bossa were transnational, globalized music long before anyone used that kind of language to describe them, but when you push back into their roots you find yourself at the limits of the culturally specific. In spite of a multitude of sociological and economic similarities, a Mississippi sharecropper and a morro resident in Rio were speaking mutually unintelligible languages.
This is another record where singling out individual tracks seems almost superfluous, but their arrangements of a few classic tunes deserve pointing out. “Naña”, one of Moacir Santos’ most gorgeous and most recorded compositions, is immediately compelling with Tenório’s sparse deconstruction of the chord sequence opening the tune before the lush harmonies of sax, trumpet and flute come in on the main melody. Remind me some time to post Santos’ “Coisas” album here, as it’s essential listening that makes a lot of the “top 100” lists that people are always making. Incidentally, Moacir Santos played in a completely unrelated combo calling themselves Os Cobras, who made a one-off album in 1960 and then disappeared.
Another ear-catching track is a version of Clifford Brown’s signature tune, “The Blues Walk”, proving that these guys hold their own on straight bop. The album is infused with bop throughout, especially noticeable in Meirelles’s own composition “Quintessence” and “Praia” from Orlann Divo & Roberto Jorge, which still sound fresh. They may start out a bit reverent playing Brown’s tune, but the sense of playfulness and fun soon overtakes everything else. This is followed by the Cipó composition “40 graus” which except for its choruses bears more than a passing resemblance to the rocking samba-jazz-bossa that J.T. Meirelles was making with Jorge Ben at the time. It’s also the longest track here, clocking in at a whopping four and a half minutes. The record closes with a short pretty composition by Luiz Fernando Freire and Roberto Menescal (“Moça da praia”, apparently a favorite theme of the bossa crowd), who also features on acoustic guitar.
Using the original liner notes, translated into French for this pressing, it is possible to reconstruct who plays what solo on which tunes. Anyone who feels so inclined to do so is welcome to compile it and send it to me, and I’ll happily post it here. As for me, it’s time to get back to chipping away at that writer’s block.
password: vibes
Paulo Moura
“Fibra”
Released 1971
Reissue 2007 on Coleção Galeria / Atração
01. Fibra 2:35
02. Ana Lia’s Blue 3:26
03. Filgueiras 2:58
04. Samba de orfeu 3:33
05. Tema dos deuses 3:04
06. Vera Cruz 3:30
07. Aquarela do Brasil 3:20
08. Cravo e canela 2:47
09. General da banda 2:50
10. Bitucadas nº2 3:16
Obituary from the New York Times
July 18, 2010
Paulo Moura, a Force in Brazilian Music, Dies at 77
By LARRY ROHTERPaulo Moura, a virtuoso instrumentalist and a composer, arranger and orchestrator of numerous styles of Brazilian popular music, died on July 12 in Rio de Janeiro. He was 77.
Mr. Moura’s death was announced on his Web site, paulomoura.com. According to reports in the Brazilian news media, the cause was lymphoma.
A master of both the clarinet and the saxophone, Mr. Moura was known for his versatility, playing and writing music that ranged in style from jazz, chorinho, samba and bossa nova to classical. His first solo recording, released in 1956, was a version of Paganini’s “Moto Perpetuo,” and late in his career he wrote, performed and conducted “Urban Fantasy for Saxophone and Symphonic Orchestra.”
In 1992 Mr. Moura won a prize as best soloist at the Mozart Festival in Moscow, and in 2000 he was awarded a Latin Grammy for the recording “Pixinguinha,” live performances of a collection of songs associated with the composer of that same name, who is considered the father of Brazilian popular music.
Mr. Moura had a long connection to the great Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim. During the bossa nova boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mr. Moura played with Jobim and other luminaries of the genre, among them Sergio Mendes. As a member of the group Bossa Rio, which also included Mr. Mendes, he participated in a bossa nova night at Carnegie Hall in November 1962, and played on the American saxophonist Cannonball Adderley’s album “Cannonball’s Bossa Nova” that same year.
More recently he released a CD called “Paulo Moura Visits Gershwin and Jobim” and toured internationally with other Brazilian artists as part of the show “Homage to Jobim.”
“I used to rehearse by day at the Municipal Theater and play live at night on TV Excelsior,” Mr. Moura recalled years later when asked how he came to be involved with bossa nova. “The bus would leave Ipanema for downtown and pass through Copacabana, and sometimes I would get off the bus midway so as to be able to meet up with colleagues” like Mr. Mendes and Jobim.
Paulo Moura was born in the interior of the state of São Paulo on July 15, 1932, one of 10 brothers and sisters who were taught to play different instruments by their father, a saxophone and clarinet player, with the idea of forming a family orchestra. As a teenager he moved to Rio de Janeiro to enroll in the National School of Music, and he soon began playing in nightclubs and on radio stations there.
By the late ’50s, Mr. Moura had also won a spot as lead clarinetist in the orchestra of the Municipal Theater in Rio; he played a Debussy rhapsody at his audition. But at the same time he was working as an accompanist to visiting American artists like Lena Horne, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and Sammy Davis Jr. That dual situation persisted until 1978, when he decided to quit the orchestra and dedicate himself exclusively to a solo career.
Over the next 30 years he made numerous recordings. The last, issued in July 2009, was “AfroBossaNova,” a collaboration with his fellow Brazilian musician Armandinho. Mr. Moura also wrote the soundtracks for several Brazilian films and television series, occasionally appearing as an actor, and arranged music for Milton Nascimento, Elis Regina, João Bosco and other singers. In addition, for two years in the 1980s he served as director of the Museum of Image and Sound in Rio.
Mr. Moura’s survivors include his wife, Halina Grynberg, a psychoanalyst who also served as his business manager, and two sons, Pedro and Domingos.
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Obituary from the Folha de São Paulo
Obra de Paulo Moura ficará como exemplo de liberdade
Carlos Calado
Folha de S.Paulo . 14/07/2010A música brasileira perdeu um de seus instrumentistas mais brilhantes.
Morreu anteontem, vítima de linfoma (câncer no sistema linfático), o clarinetista, saxofonista, compositor, arranjador e regente Paulo Moura. Nascido em São José do Rio Preto (SP), ele completaria 78 anos amanhã.
Sua trajetória musical foi incomum. Filho de um mestre de banda de coreto, radicou-se com a família em 1945, no Rio de Janeiro.
Aos 19 anos estreou como solista da Orquestra Sinfônica Brasileira. Foi clarinetista da Sinfônica do Teatro Municipal carioca, mas a formação erudita não o impediu de cultivar sua intensa paixão pela música popular brasileira e pelo jazz.“Praticamente, me criei na gafieira”, dizia Moura, que na década de 1950 também tocou em bailes e emissoras de rádio, integrando as orquestras de Zacharias e Oswaldo Borba, época em que acompanhou cantores de sucesso, como Nelson Gonçalves, Dircinha Batista e Carlos Galhardo.
Já na década seguinte, frequentou o Beco das Garrafas, templo da bossa nova e do samba-jazz.
Como saxofonista do sexteto Bossa Rio, liderado por Sérgio Mendes, em 1962, tocou até no histórico concerto de bossa nova no Carnegie Hall, em Nova York, ao lado de Tom Jobim, João Gilberto e Luiz Bonfá, entre outros.
Em meio a uma carreira musical tão eclética, uma das contribuições mais originais de Moura surgiu em 1976, sinalizando seu reencontro com o universo do samba e do choro.
INOVAÇÃO
Depois de tocar por alguns meses com o sambista Martinho da Vila, gravou o inovador “Confusão Urbana, Suburbana e Rural”, álbum que contribuiu ativamente para reacender o interesse pelo samba-choro das orquestras de gafieira.Esse projeto também marcou de forma definitiva sua obra. Na época voltou até a tocar em uma gafieira da praça Tiradentes, no centro do Rio, despertando a atenção de outros músicos, que iam ouvi-lo.
Desde então seu crescente interesse pela rítmica brasileira gerou outros álbuns nessa linha musical, como “Mistura e Manda” (1983), “Gafieira Etc. e Tal” (1986) e “Pixinguinha” (1988).
Ainda na década de 1980, sua prolífica parceria com a pianista Clara Sverner, registrada em três álbuns com repertório erudito e popular, abriu caminho para preciosas colaborações com outros figurões da música instrumental, como Raphael Rabello, Arthur Moreira Lima, Wagner Tiso, Nivaldo Ornelas, João Donato e
Yamandu Costa, todas registradas em disco.
A associação mais recente, com o bandolinista baiano Armandinho, rendeu o CD “AfroBossaNova” (2009).
Num cenário em que ainda se insiste em criar fronteiras rígidas entre gêneros e estilos, a música do grande Paulo Moura ficará para sempre como um exemplo vital de liberdade.
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From Paulo Moura’s official website, about the reissue of this album:
Por fim, de 1971, temos “Fibra” – que já recebera uma caprichada
edição norte-americana em CD, em 2002, e uma brasileira, bem
parecida com as cópias piratas que vemos hoje em dia, sem data, sem
créditos aos músicos, com os nomes das músicas errados, etc. Neste
disco, Paulo Moura volta à formação com sete músicos e, além de seu
sax alto, temos novamente Oberdan Magalhães – sax tenor e flauta -,
Cesário Gomes, trombone, Wagner Tiso – piano e órgão -, Luiz Alves –
contrabaixo e violão -, além de Márcio Montarroyos, no trompete e
flugelhorn, e Robertinho Silva na bateria e percussão. O disco tem,
ainda, as participações de Tavito tocando guitarra em quatro faixas e
Milton Nascimento tocando piano em uma. “Aquarela do Brasil”, “Cravo
e canela”, “Vera Cruz” e “Tema dos deuses” são algumas das músicas
do disco que traz, ainda e de novo, “Samba de Orfeu”, “General da
banda” e “Bitucadas nº 2”, presentes em “Paulo Moura Hepteto”, mas
com diferenças de arranjos que músicos diferentes na banda sempre
impõem.
As capas originais dos LPs são mantidas nos novos CDs, acrescidas de
uma moldura que chancela o nome “Coleção Galeria” que a Atração
Fonográfica está dando a este relançamento.
Paulo Moura, como músico e comportamento artístico, é dono de uma
trajetória irrepreensível. Prefere todos, entre os vários estilos musicais,
o que vem permitindo, ao longo de sua carreira, tocar em gafieiras,
cafés, grandes orquestras, pequenos conjuntos e grupos de choro,
acompanhar e fazer arranjos para diversos e grandes nomes, como
Dalva de Oliveira, Elis Regina, Milton Nascimento e João Bosco, escrever
para orquestras sinfônicas, tocar em duo com violonistas – como com
Raphael Rabello, em 1992, e Yamandú Costa, em 2004 -, ganhar o
prêmio de melhor solista no Festival Mozart, em Moscou (Rússia, 1992),
junto com o pianista norte-americano Cliff Korman tocar Gershwin e
Jobim (1998) e promover o encontro entre as obras de Pixinguinha e
Duke Ellington (1999) e, mais recentemente, gravar com o cantor
pernambucano, Josildo Sá, o disco “Samba de Latada”, lançado este
ano. O que poderia parecer falta de estilo, ou ecletismo barato, em
Paulo Moura é definição de versatilidade e genialidade.
Na contracapa do LP “Fibra”, em 1971, Moura escrevia: “Aqui são raras
as oportunidades que tem o solista de mostrar suas possibilidades. (…)
O artista consciente que, dia a dia, vem procurando aperfeiçoar seus
conhecimentos, fatalmente se distancia de um gosto médio. Nem
mesmo saberia como fazer as tais concessões que lhe são solicitadas.”
A carreira de Paulo Moura é um exemplo eloqüente de que não é
necessário fazer concessões para alcançar os mais altos patamares.
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Flabber-blurb:
Before I say anything else, I should warn the prospective listener that if you are planning to hear Paulo’s (snake)charming clarinet, you won’t find any of it on this album. He sticks to the alto saxophone and flute on this one. Also, no choro. This is early-70’s post-bossa jazz fusion before it became the Devil’s plaything. His band includes Wagner Tiso on piano, who would remain a frequent collaborator throughout the years, as well as Milton Nascimento (playing on one song, but contributing with some writing credits). The lineup also includes the ubiquitous Robertinho on the drum kit and Oberdon Magalhães, who would later come to notoriety as part of Banda Black Rio, on tenor saxophone.
In fact in terms of production and execution this record sits quite nicely with the early Clube de Esquina work. Moura would appear on their landmark album released the following year, and also Milton’s most adventurous record ‘Milagre dos Peixes’, and the repertoire includes several compositions from that collective (“Tema dos Deuses” from Som Imaginario, “Vera Cruz” from Milton’s ‘Courage’, and “Cravo e Canela”, the one painfully weak song here, which – as far as I know – had yet to be released in any form yet). “Cravo e Canela” would be interpreted by a whole slew of people, often very badly, although oddly enough one of the more interesting versions would appear on Banda Black Rio’s ‘Gafieira Universal’. The rest of the tracks include one composition from Moura (“Fibra”), a few from Tiso, and some Brazilian standards (“Samba de Orfeu,” “Aquelera do Brasil”, “General da banda”). The album is recorded and mixed wonderfully, with that slightly trippy and psychedelic tinge familiar to those Mineiros mentioned above. Robertinho’s drums are mixed with a rather strong plate reverb panned to the left channel that sounds pretty cool but eventually becomes a little cloying, making me wish they would have used the technique a little more sparingly and only on a few cuts. Is this a typical, characteristic Paulo Moura album? Probably not, but then what IS a typical album from a guy who recorded so much and in so many contexts. To say he will be missed is to put it rather mildly – over the last week there has been a mournful but warm response to the news in Brazil for an artistic life well-lived.
