Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Elis Regina was born Elis Regina Carvalho Costa in Porto Alegre, Sao Paulo Brasil on March 17, 1945. She began her career as a singer at age 11 on a children’s radio show, O Clube Do Guri on Rádio Farroupilha. In 1959, Rádio Gaúcha contracted her and the next year she travelled to Rio de Janeiro where she recorded her first LP, Viva a Brotolândia (Long Live Teenage Land).
Following this debut she won her first festival song contest in 1965 singing Arrastão that launched her solo career. Recording her sophomore project Dois na Bossa, that became the first album to sell over a million copies, is considered the beginning of the new musical style MPB, Musica Popular Brasileira.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, along with Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, she helped to popularize the work of the tropicalismo movement. Her 1974 collaboration with Antonio Carlos Jobim, Elis & Tom, has been cited as one of the greatest bossa nova albums of all time. Her earlier records were mostly apolitical but from the mid-’70s on, her music became more engaged, and she began to choose compositions and structure her conceptually complex live shows in ways as to criticize the military government, capitalism, racial and sexual injustice and other forms of inequality.
Her death from a cocaine, alcohol and temazepan interaction on January 19, 1982 at the age of 36 shocked Brazil. Elis Regina, singer of MPB, samba, jazz, bossa nova, rock and pop, is widely regarded as the best Brazilian singer of all times by many critics, musicians, and commentators.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sérgio Santos Mendes was born in Niteroi, Rio de Janiero, Brazil on February 11, 1941. S a child he attended the local conservancy with hopes of becoming a classical pianist. As his interest in jazz grew, he started playing in nightclubs in the late-1950s just as the jazz-inflected derivative of samba known as bossa nova emerged.
Mendes formed the Sexteto Bossa Rio, recorded Dance Moderna in 1961, toured Europe and the U.S., recorded with Cannonball Adderley and Herbie Mann, played Carnegie Hall and then moved to the States in 1964, cutting two albums for Capitol and Atlantic Records.
Sergio would join the Musicians Union, Create Brasil 65, change the name later to Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66, opt not to record Tito Puente’s “Oye Como Va” which would become a hit for Carlos Santana, release “Mas Que Nada” that would take them platinum. He would record “Look Around” and their fourth album “Fool On A Hill”.
His breakout success was with the performance of Burt Bacharach’s “The Look of Love” at the 1968 Academy Awards telecast, ultimately becoming the biggest Brazilian star in the world at the time. He would go on to record for Elektra, Bell, A&M and Concord record labels, collaborate with Stevie Wonder, reunite with Lani Hall on the Bond “Never Say Never Again” soundtrack, record with will.i.am and The Black Eyed Peas, Jill Scott, India Arie and others on his Timeless project, win several Grammys over the course of his fifty-five releases and be twice nominated for an Academy Award for the Look of Love and his contributions to the 2011 film “Rio”.
