O Universe Musical de Baden Powell

Powell, Baden

album cover

The Best of a Bossa Nova Refugee

Soon after American interest in Brazilian bossa nova erupted in the early '60s, many of the music's budding stars traveled to the U.S. to spread the word. There, they made the music a phenomenon by collaborating with jazz musicians (Getz/Gilberto—see p. 308—is among the collaborative triumphs from this period).

The guitarist, singer, and composer Baden Powell went to Paris instead. It was a radical thing to do at the time: The French were indifferent to bossa nova, and Powell wasn't yet a known entity. But Powell immediately found work in nightclubs, and within months began recording for the Barclay label. A conservatory-trained guitarist and the most musically gifted of any of the bossa clan, Powell reworked Jobim's tunes into ethereal, dream-sequence caprices. His early works for Barclay (represented here on the early tracks) are brushed with a feeling of starry nights and Parisian romance.

Powell considered himself more a musician than a singer, and several of his instrumentals, including an exploration of Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight," exhibit a rare combination of intense lyricism and enormous technical facility. Powell was equally versed in classical music: His original "Samba em Prelúdio" craftily interweaves elements from Heitor Villa-Lobos's "Prelúdio das Bachianas brasileiras, No. 4." The beauty of his playing sometimes overshadows Powell's other great gift—his wondrous compositions, which are defiantly joyful and harmonically adventurous in ways even Jobim's music was not. This anthology gathers many of Powell's significant works, though as with Jobim, these graceful songs became better known when they were recorded by others—perhaps most transfixingly by Elis Regina.

Genre: World, Brazil
Released: 2002, Universal South America
Key Tracks: "Xango," "Samba do Avião," "Dora," "Asa branca."
Catalog Choice: Os Afrosambas de Baden e Vinicius.
Next Stop: Luiz Bonfá: Live in Rio 1959
After That: Elis Regina: Em pleno verão.
Book Page: 607