My new album "Everyday a Little Love” was released on Friday 4th November (https://bfan.link/everyday-a-little-love) and I have the "album blues" which is a kind of a "baby blues"!
Click on the photo to listen to the song!
Nothing better to fight the blues than to share what led me to select the songs for this album. Let's start with the opening song "Minha Saudade".
“João” is a very ordinary name in Portuguese, but the two composers of this song João Donato and João Gilberto, are anything but ordinary! They are both among the most important artists in Brazil and major figures in the history and development of bossa nova.
João Donato is a master in combining simplicity and beauty. He is the composer of standards of Brazilian popular music, namely “Minha saudade”, in partnership with João Gilberto. As a pianist, he is super creative; his playing is quite unique, with good taste and a lot of swing. He is simultaneously simple and sophisticated. Tom Jobim always said that Donato was a genius. He was one of Jobim’s favourite pianists and whenever Jobim could not make it to a recording, he always suggested Donato as his substitute.
João Gilberto, guitarist and singer, was one of the creators of Bossa Nova. His recording of “Chega de Saudade” in 1958 is considered as the official birth of the Bossa. It was João Gilberto who invented the bossa beat on guitar with guitar-picking figures in offbeat patterns, and his singing was unique, subtly percussive and without vibrato. He was not much of a song writer and has all in all about 10 compositions, among which “Minha Saudade” in a rare partnership with João Donato, whom he had met in the pre-Bossa times.
In a nutshell: I chose this song because it’s one of the rare compositions of João Gilberto and because the lyrics strongly reflected my state of mind in the last couple of years!
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