This Just In ...

Goodnight everyone, and have a quintessential weekend - Part Two

Posted by Kevin Fischer on Nov. 20, 2009 | 0 comments

It's Friday night. Time to unwind with our regular Friday night feature on This Just In.

The weekend has finally arrived.

The sun has set.

The evening sky has erupted. 

Let's put controversy and provocative blogs aside for the rest of this work week and smooth our way into Saturday and Sunday.

Tonight, a special two-part series with the best in smooth and mellow on a Friday night. In Part One earlier tonight, I listed the #6-#10 selections on my top ten list of tunes that seem to fit our regular Friday night feature.

Now it’s time for the top five.

We start at #5 with a true classic from a classic group.

In 1961, four musicians from Houston relocated in LA and added blues to their soul sound. They were trombonist Wayne Henderson, tenor saxophonist Wilton Felder, pianist Joe Sample, and drummer Nesbert “Stix” Hooper. They called themselves, The Jazz Crusaders. Somehow, during the decline of jazz in the 60’s, the group survived, and then some. Even so, by 1971, the group dropped “jazz” from their name.

The name change brought in a huge influx of new crossover fans. A big hit came in 1979, “Street Life.” But this composition with its familiar theme made my Top Ten....

Next up, it's #4.

In 1951, Dave Brubeck formed his famous quartet: Joe Dodge on drums, Bob Bates on bass, Paul Desmond on saxophone, and Brubeck on piano. In the mid-1950s Bates and Dodge were respectively replaced by Eugene Wright and Joe Morello.

The New Yorker once described the quartet as, "the world's best-paid, most widely travelled, most highly publicized, and most popular small group now playing improvised syncopated music."

The quartet revived popularity in jazz after the war, and in 1959 recorded the album, “Time Out,” the first million-selling jazz record in modern jazz history. It contained this famous single. 

We are up to #3.

Rolling Stone writes:

"The bossa is one of Latin America's most poignant and exquisite genres, light and sophisticated, but at the same time able to distill the full meaning of the word saudade -- Portuguese for nostalgia, or the inherent bittersweetness of life. And there would be no bossa without Antonio Carlos Jobim and his equally important but criminally ignored songwriting partner, poet Vinicius de Moraes.

What makes Jobim's compositions so deceptively simple is his classically trained harmonic sense, which draws inspiration from mood masters such as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Brazil's own Heitor Villa-Lobos, while remaining rooted in popular music. Together with Vinicius, singer/guitarist Joao Gilberto, and a few other collaborators, Jobim spearheaded the bossa wave in the late '50s."


Kenny G does a super rendition of the late Jobim's, "Desafinado."

 

From the album...




 

We are now at #2, and again, we highlight the genius of Jobim.

From an internet bio of Jobim:

“Jobim’s  place in the annals of popular music was secured by a single hit song, ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ (1964), which he co-wrote with lyricist Vinícius de Moraes. His creative contributions to jazz, however, went much deeper; many of his songs became jazz standards, and, in the words of Richard S. Ginell of the All Music Guide , ‘Every other set’ performed in jazz clubs ‘seems to contain at least one bossa nova.’  Jobim was sometimes called the George Gershwin of Brazil, not so much because of any musical or lyric similarity—Jobim's songs tended to have oblique, often poetic lyrics quite unlike the clever romantic rhymes of George Gershwin's brother Ira—but because his music became the bedrock for the work of jazz musicians for decades after its creation.

In 1962 Jobim composed a song that was soon to become a worldwide phenomenon, and in the process he added a phrase to the international lexicon. ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ (in Portuguese, ‘Garota de Ipanema’) was written as Jobim and Moraes were sitting at a table in a bar in Jobim's hometown of Ipanema and became infatuated with a passer-by, the ‘tall and tan and young and lovely’ woman described in the song. With a vocal by Gilberto's wife, Astrud, and a verse of English lyrics, the song became a number-two hit in the United States in 1964, eclipsed only by the Beatles' ‘A Hard Day's Night’."

From the very memorable 1964 film, "Get Yourself a College Girl"....

We have reached my #1 selection, in my view, the smoothest of the smooth, absolutely perfect for Friday night listening, unwinding, and why not, dancing.

Around 1963, Tony Bennett came upon Brazilian-born organist Walter Wanderley during a Brazilian tour and was so impressed that he urged Wanderley to move to America. Bennett even bragged about Wanderley to Verve Records producer Creed Taylor, and even gave Creed some of Wanderley’s  albums. Taylor needed some prodding but eventually sent contracts to Wanderley and his trio to make a record. The result in 1966 was an instant success, “Summer Samba,” with radio stations playing it four or five times an hour.  Wanderley never returned to his homeland.

This is a 2000 remake of his classic instrumental, sung by Bebel Gilberto.

That’s it for tonight.

Sleep well.

Have the best of weekends.

Next week, the sounds of the season.

I hope you have enjoyed.

Goodnight.