Brasil: A Century of Song

Blue Jackel CD 5001/4-2, £44.49

The spirit lives on.

Whether or not Brazil can hold out against the steady march of MTV and the multinational McDonaldisation of pop music, the legacy surveyed in this four-volume potpourri is reassuringly luxuriant and multifaceted. First impressions are not entirely encouraging, since several important figures are missing from the play list: although Milton Nascimento contributes two numbers to the final disc, devoted to contemporary strands of that amorphous entity, MPB – Musica Popular Brasileira – you will look in vain for Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso or Elis Regina. But Joao Gilberto, Gal Costa and the guitarist Baden Powell, among many others, do make an appearance elsewhere. Carnival, understandably, gets a whole disc to itself. The section on folk and traditional forms even throws in a field recording of a candomble religious rite, preceded by an overdue reminder that Carmen Miranda amounted to more than a model for gaudy headwear.

Clive Davis

[The Sunday Times, 27 July 1997]

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