Handsome Italian chanteur Mauro Gioia released an album in 2008 which takes soundtrack work by the legendary movie composer Nino Rota and turns it into a selection of classy easy listening pop songs, with guest appearances by all kinds of like-minded singers from the great (Ute Lemper) to the dreadful (Sharleen Spiteri). It's all great fun, loaded with swining music-hall stuff to torch song ballads and most genre appropriate stuff in between. Gioia has a decent, relatively forgettable mid-range voice, which is actually perfect for this sort of thing and he obviously went into the whole project with a ton of brio because he makes sure the whole affair is a lively, cheerful business, camp enough to be great fun without overdoing it. With a solid background in Neapolitan theatricality it's no surprise that he managed to make the record so entertaining without being too kitschy and although a lot of the material doesn't really translate that well, cross-culturally speaking, it doesn't matter remotely because it's all such rollicking silliness.
Giant Sand's first two albums, Valley of Rain (1985) and Ballad of a Thin Line Man (1986) don't resemble the sound of the band that people are more familiar with at all. Instead of the idiosyncratic dust-blown atmospheric desert rock that they're known for, these two albums are instead a kind of ramshackle jangle-rock, with chiming guitars and pounding drums hidden in the mix. If anything these records sound like an American version of the early Go-Betweens records (listen to the title track of Valley of Rain and you'll see what I mean pretty clearly). It's nice stuff, raucous and lively, brittle and anxious, but what's difficult about it is that a lot of other bands were still making these sort of records a lot better (the Rain Parade for instance were doing a much better job). There's some decent stuff on these two albums, certainly, and there are indications of the direction that the band would eventually take, but they sit quite well next to the first American Music Club album, in that they're all claustrophobically produced records which suggest much more promise to come than they actually deliver themselves.
By 2000 the elliptical Giant Sand sound was pretty much consolidated, with acoustic guitars, sun-scorched atmospherics and Howe Gelb's resigned vocals, together with Calexico's superb rhythm backing, and that sound has rarely been better used than on 2000's Chore of Enchantment LP. In keeping with other Giant Sand releases around the same time, Chore of Enchantment is unpredictable, all over the map and hard to keep a handle on, but it's punctuated by so many lovely tunes that its wilful eclecticism never grates. 'Shiver' is a real charm for instance, with Juliana Hatfield's backing vocals complementing Gelb's take it or leave it delivery nicely. 'Raw' and 'Well Dusted' are similarly graceful, and although there are moments when the album seems to be wandering into cul-de-sacs, it always pulls around in time with another fine tune. If anything, despite it's stylistic freewheeling, Chore of Enchantment is actually one of Gelb's most focussed pieces of work, in that it never loses sight of its essential character and stays true to a spirit of down-home experimentalism with enough melody to always be utterly engaging. As such it's also a record that truly rewards attention but can also provide perfect background, with its gentle, elegaic, end of a baking hot day mood.
After her songs and shows with Stan Getz, Astrud Gilberto was given the opportunity to make her own records, starting with 1965's The Astrud Gilberto Album. Any fears that her wobbly, uneven voice wouldn't be able to sustain the charm or carry an album's worth of material are put to rest by The Astrud Gilberto Album. It's a gorgeous summer day of a record, bossa and samba at its easiest and most artfully tasteful, while avoiding kitsch entirely and staying at the very finest end of what was to become the easy listening market. Apart from the unintentional stalker's manifesto lyrics of 'Once I Loved' it's all hearts and flowers, with only the occasional melancholy moment for colour, and every song is a breezy delight. Loads of the material became bossa standards. including the wonderfully slinky 'Agua de Beber', the two step jazz of 'How Insenstive', the lighter than air 'Dindi', and it's all great stuff and although in some ways its smoothness has made it prime fodder for brain-dead marketers to use in their shit adverts, that shouldn't detract from its inherent loveliness.
The follow-up, The Shadow of Your Smile (1965) tries to expand the scope of Gilberto's musical palette, by adding in some bossa readings of more straight pop to try and secure her place in the American market, but for the most part when she strays from the strict bossa template things go a bit awry. The version of the title track is a bit insipid and there's a pretty hopeless version of 'Fly Me to the Moon', along with a couple of other failures. It's a shame because when the album works, it works really well. The boulevard stroll of 'Aruanda (Take Me To)' is wonderful, the string drenched 'The Gentle Rain' is delicately precious, and 'Tristeza' is a heartbreaker. Overall the album is too uneven to really qualify as a success and the limitations of Gilberto's untrained voice are made all too plain too often throughout it, but when it flies, it really soars.
Even more of a game of two halves is 1966's Beach Samba, which has awful trite nonsense like 'A Banda' nestled up to truly wonderful songs like the absolutely perfect cover of Tim Hardin's 'Misty Roses', and for every beautiful 'My Foolish Heart' is a clumsy 'I Had the Craziest Dream'. Unlike The Shadow of Your Smile though, even when Beach Samba slips up Gilberto never sounds anything other than utterly charming and any problems with her voice are easily smoothed over by the lovely arrangements and the innate personality that she delivers all the material with. The album does go to show that a lot of the time Gilberto was only as strong as the musicians and arrangers that she worked with, but when those musicians and arrangers were sympathetic even the duds sound like triumphs. Even so, you do need a strong stomach to cope with the insanely saccharine cover of the Lovin' Spoonful's 'You Didn't Have to Be So Nice' that she sings with her six year old son...
It's all a matter of taste I suppose but when comparing the luminous work of Gilberto and the Hammond organ bossa frenzy of the other superstar of the genre in the US, Walter Wanderley, I can't help but feel that there's something so intrinsically naff about Wanderley's penny cinema organ stylings that the idea of putting the two together, although perfectly understandable at the time, now seems like asking Ingmar Bergman to make a movie starring Norman Wisdom. The album that Gilberto and Wanderley made together, 1967's A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness, is in no way an unmitigated disaster, and there are some great arrangements of some samba greats ('Here's That Rainy Day' and 'So Nice' are really good) but you can't get away from the fact that for once a Gilberto album really would sit happily next to James Last in a suburban grandmother's record collection, and that's a disaster because Gilberto was worth so much more than that.
And so finally we have a bit more bossa but much more modern with the daughter of Astrud's first husband Joao, Bebel Gilberto and her debut solo album Tanto Tempo (2000). It's a very contemporary, slick and technically precise version of bossa, very different from the organic studio fun of the 1960's take, but that's not to say that it isn't successful. It's super-relaxed and a lot of it sounds almost tailor-made for Grey's Anatomy-type TV show soundtracks, but while that should be an insult, for once it's simply because it's unobtrusive. There's a lot of stuff going on here and occasionally there are some surprisingly odd things going on, the phased vocal tracks on the subtle 'August Day Song' aren't a million miles away from Juana Molina's challenging experimentalism and although could never accuse anything on Tanto Tempo of being challenging it is prepared to try things out. Gilberto's gently earthy voice is quietly impressive and the fusion of understatedly bossa acoustic guitar figures and electronics works surprisingly well throughout the album. Of course, this being a Gilberto's debut album she couldn't possibly get away with not covering one of the big, big samba numbers and so 'So Nice' gets a working over and it's a lovely and unshowy attempt at updating a worn out standard, and demonstrates the degree to which Bebel Gilberto really does get the fine line between the requirements of the genre and the need to keep up to date. It may not be the kind of album to get excited about but it's certainly the kind of album to be sure to have to hand.
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