1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 247. Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges – Clube Da Esquina (1972)

 

Nascimento and Borges are Brazilian artists, and this double album is a blend of mainly acoustic-based Latin/jazz fusion, with overtones of folk and a bit of pop. It’s mostly all very mellow and relaxing. Take the track O Trem Azul (The Blue Train), which is very reminiscent of the works of the Gilbertos, with its laid-back jazz guitar and catchy chorus. In some tracks the samba beats kick in, like the very short Cravo É Canela (Clove is Cinnamon, according to Google Translate). “Is” or “and”? Sometimes we get a very Spanish style like Dos Cruces (Two Crosses), sometimes they are power ballads, like the piano-driven Um Girassol Da Cro de Seu Cabelo (A Sunflower From The Crown Of Your Hair), most often they are jazzy blends of all of the above. Os Povos (The People) is an interesting wandering bossa-nova jazz odyssey where I’m positive that the “percussion” is vocal work.

I don’t speak Portuguese, so I’ve no idea what any of the lyrics mean. Since this was written at a time of a dictatorship in Brazil, I’d imagine that a lot of it was criticism of authoritarianism couched in disguise as love songs and metaphor – reading the Wikipedia notes suggests that perhaps the majority of the songs were more straightforward tales of friendship, love, and loss, but that I was right a least about some of them. Nascimento and Borges basically take turns with lead duties, and it’s hard on a first listen to spot the changes, both have great voices for this kind of thing, rich and smooth and full of emotion. I really liked this, it was different. 

Flipping through the tracks just now to remind myself which was which, they do feel a little samey when taken as small fragments, but if you listen to each track as a whole there is a lot of variation within the style, and they do just enough polyrhythmic work to keep it interesting and jazzy, rather than going full Trout Mask Replica.