Samba Recommendations

You can find a lot of classic samba artists like Cartola, Candeia, Beth Carvalho in Slsk. A great album I really like is "Samba... no duro" by Os cinco Crioulos.

I recomend Clara Nunes, too. Sometimes she didn't sing sambas, but she is great. I have a cd with her best knonw sambas and it is wonderful. Same with old Elza soares albuns.

One thing I really like is the "Sambas Enredo". It is Carnival music from Brazil and it is faster than traditional samba, but it is very good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpFx8ElBGto

omg, this is just so brutal and heavy and utterly unclassifiable, from the piercing, percussive prepared piano (or is it an organ?) intro, to the muffled drumrolls that sound like rock slides heard from across a canyon, to the dark P-Funk-esque piano-and-bass groove that forces all thoughts of prettiness and delicacy from your mind until two of the prettiest and most delicate voices you've ever heard slip into the mix in an echoey wooze, singing bitter, lovelorn lyrics that are all the more poignant for their banality, to the crude and dissonant keyboard solo at 1:50, to the perversely pleasant piano line in the outro. I don't know why this album isn't getting hipster kisses all over the world, but this song in particular is just begging to be sampled (in this year of our Lord 1995) by some dark motherfuckers like Tricky or the Gravediggaz.

the rest of the album is no slouch either:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af5_dMriSL0
what the Marine Girls might've sounded like if they had a budget higher than £10 and some tight session musicians at their disposal (come to think of it, I'm pretty much describing early EBTG).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpFx8ElBGto

oops, that last clip was supposed to be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxHlhntevGc

for reference, Daniela was a moderately well-known German popstar, and Ann was most famous for her role in a German production of the musical "Hair". this blog gives some more background on the album.

Noel Rosa.
― Anonymous Coward, Tuesday, October 19, 2004 3:34 PM (8 years ago)

Wow, never heard of him till now. Will need to check out his songbook

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-12-10/entertainment/ct-ott-1210-mkoj-20101210_1_paulinho-garcia-antonio-carlos-jobim-noel-rosa

The guy was incredibly talented, wrote something like 250 songs, most of which are still performed, apparently, before his death at the age of 27. He had a distinctive profile- his jaw had been crushed by forceps while he was being brought into the light of this world, and he usually had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth- which was easy to caricature, he looks like he was drawn by that guy who illustrated the Robert Benchley books, Gluyas Williams? I posted a few photos of him on this thread: Stroke It Noel.

Because of his problems with his jaw he had difficulty eating which led to health problems and may have set the stage for him catching tuberculosis. His dissolute lifestyle, which he sort of cleverly condemned but-not-quite in his lyrics, didn't help any. He is viewed as one of the great sambistas, but because of his urban, sophisticated themes and his poetically romantic lyrics, with a touch of philosophical distance and intellectual rigor, can be seen as a precursor to the later Bossa Nova movement. His famous "polemic" with Wilson Batista produced one if not more of the most beautiful songs you will ever hear, "Feitiço da Vila." You can read about their competition here, in Portuguese:
http://www.vermelho.org.br/noticia.php?id_noticia=143387&id_secao=11.

The film Noel: Poeta da Vila aka Samba Poet can be streamed on Netflix and gives a good outline of his story and that of some of the other sambistas of the time. It was based on a biography that was taken out of circulation shortly after it was written by the heirs to his estate, some nieces I believe.

Will post a few more links in a bit. To get a handle on the level of his achievement during his short complicated life you might think of him as a Hank Williams combined with an Antonio Carlos Jobim.

This link is in English:
http://www.brazzil.com/cvrfeb00.htm
These are in Portuguese, about his lady friends, the second one here having quite a bit of audio
http://feiticodonoel.blogspot.com/2009/11/as-mulheres-de-noel.html
http://blogln.ning.com/profiles/blogs/noel-rosa-e-suas-paixoes

There is also a reasonably detailed discussion of his career, especially the polemic with Wilson Batista, in Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil, by Bryan McCann. Reading about how these songs were written, performed on the radio, became hits that engendered other songs including variants and "answer songs" is quite exciting, like reading about the celebrated songwriting teams in Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building, by Ken Emerson.

http://zocalopoets.com/2013/02/08/orfeu-negro-and-the-origins-of-samba-wilson-batistas-kerchief-around-my-neck-and-noel-rosas-idle-youth/

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0a/24/f2/0a24f2369e8cf33cc684e448fba35df0.jpg
I love this recently.

Great cover. Def need to hear that one.

another good new album is Duduka da Fonseca Trio - Plays Dom Salvador - which is a tribute to Dom Salvador, the pianist in that trio. The Brazilian/Israeli pianist - David Feldman - who plays on this one is an incredible talent, he's truly amazing.

wande se sah - softly (with orchestrations by the dude who did the munsters) is really nice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvoNEwON96g