Getz/Gilberto

All of these things on their own would serve to make 'Gilberto/Getz' a masterpiece; together they make it a treasure. What makes it special and personal, I think, are the unassuming shards of milky piano that can occasionally be heard behind the surface delights. Played by the composer Jobim himself, they are the emotinal key through this faraway world into your own heart.


It got me a wife, that's how good the CD is.   July 2, 2003
Christopher Wanko (Nutley, NJ USA)
17 out of 21 found this review helpful

Short story #1:
I go with a friend to see a Henry Rollins
Spoken Word concert in NYC. This cool jazz is playing in the
background before Hank hits the stage, and I hear Portuguese
being sung. My then-girlfriend is Brazilian, so I recognize
the language and ask the soundman what this is.

He looks at me like I've either been recently dropped onto
Earth by aliens after a long visit, or I'm some ignorant hick
from New Jersey (the latter of which being true). "This is
'Getz/ Gilberto'. See," and he hands me the CD cover. I
take it in, we chat, and I resolve to buy it.

Short story #2:
After listening to "Getz/ Gilberto" for
months and discovering bossa nova in its purest form, I hit upon
the method of prosping to my still-then-girlfriend: I'll sing
"Girl from Ipanema" to her, in Portuguese, then propose in
Portuguese afterwards. Comedy of errors ensues, we're walking
in NYC on the coldest day of 2000, I have pneumonia, she's
mad at me... and yet, pianist Christopher Barrett plays the
music, I sing it at Churrascaria Plantation, and get down on
one knee to say, "Eu gostaria de pedir a sua mao em casamento."

To which she replies, "You've got to be kidding me."

We're still happily married to this day. So when I say this
CD will get you a wife, I'm not kidding. Everyone should own
a copy. You never know.


From the perspective of a Joao Gilberto fan...   October 12, 2003
Idiosyncrat (California)
16 out of 39 found this review helpful

First of all, I must say that this album is not all that bad. The songs are all good, though you need to understand Portuguese to really appreciate them. But having listened to a large chunk of Joao Gilberto's recorded output (and no Stan Getz beyond this album), this is a disappointing album.

It's got to be one of the most overrated albums in music history. Essentially, it boils down to Stan Getz using "exotic" music he does not understand as a background to long loud solos that don't fit it. If you listen to the Gilberto's original Bossa Nova recordings (sadly, currently out of print) and compare them to this album, you can't fail to be struck by how the former were very much about rhythm and songcraft, not about masturbatory improvisational soloing as this album is. The instrumentation and orchestration in those albums is all put in service of the song, and the songwriting is superb.

The songcraft, however, is sadly lost for the overwhelmingly English-speaking audience of this album because (a) they don't speak Portuguese (or, Spanish, for that matter), (b) the "translations" of "A Garota de Ipanema" and "Corcovado" are DREADFUL, (c) Stan Getz is too interested in the limelight to lay his musical ego aside and put the song first. In short, this album suffers from a terrible clash between the sensibilities of its two namesakes; and the Anglophone audience that endlessly lauds it does not even realize it.

When you add the fact that Getz made an order of magnitude more money off this album than everybody else on it (hell, Astrud Gilberto reportedly made a grand total of $120 for a night of work), the above comments take on a more disquieting significance: here we have yet another case of a powerful first-world musician exploiting "exotic" musicians to market himself to an Anglophone audience, while never really caring to understand the music involved. Thus the real underlying theme of this album: the power assymetries between the US and the rest of the world.

All that might be excused if Joao Gilberto sounded good in this album. But in fact, compared to most of his recorded output, here he sounds absolutely dreadful. The guitar sounds dead. There are rumours that Getz had the album reequalized to make the sax sound louder, at the expense of the rest of the instruments; at any rate, there is just no treble in Joao's guitar. And his interpretation is just too lethargic. Joao Gilberto is the only interpreter I'm aware of who combines "nearly silent" with "immensely funky". Yet this album lacks the second element.

If you have some reason for worshipping Stan Getz, I guess you don't need my opinion to judge this album. If, like me, you find yourself rooting for Gilberto in this recording, look elsewhere.


A Brazilian view   April 3, 2000
Oto A. Maia (Pretoria South Africa)
15 out of 16 found this review helpful

It's great to see this album remastered. When Joao Gilberto released his first single in Brazil, in the ides of 1956, some people were shocked. "Who is this guy singing like a ventriloquist?" But the strange sounding guy rapidly conquered the local audiences and soon was being listened with interest abroad. He was the essence of bossa nova, non emphatic, cool, lyrical, and with a different beat which he created practically alone. It was samba reduced to its bare essentials. The encounter between bossa players who loved jazz and jazz players who were discovering the new Brazilian rhythm did not take long to happen, and when it did it lasted for years and produced literally hundreds of records. This Getz/Gilberto date is in my opinion one of the best fruit of that crop, a classic of a golden age of popular music. Old timers like me who bought the first release of this album when it was really an album, a LP, can only hope that it will be equally enjoyed by the younger generation of CD music lovers: if they love music they will love it!