Wish to hear the place the improvements of bossa nova and MPB met jazz fusion? Look no additional than João Donato’s 1970 album A Dangerous Donato. The document marked a break from Donato’s previous. Donato had been working professionally as a musician for the reason that early Nineteen Fifties, emigrating to the USA in 1959. His 1965 LP The New Sound of Brazil: Piano of João Donato was considered one of many albums that helped make bossa nova a family phrase in America. However after nearly a decade of residing overseas and enjoying with the likes of Chet Baker, Cal Tjader, and Astrud Gilberto, Donato was rising stressed and in determined want of recent musical stimulation. In 1970, he accepted an invitation to tour Japan with fellow Brazilian musician Sérgio Mendes, changing pianist Osmar Milito. It was throughout this journey that he captured the eye of Blue Thumb Information’ Bob Krasnow: “Man, when we go back to America I want to do an album with you,” Krasnow advised Donato, giving him carte blanche to document no matter he needed. The outcome was A Dangerous Donato.
What you hear on the album is Donatao bringing collectively all the things that he was listening to round him: Bossa nova, samba, Tropicália, lounge, rock ‘n’ roll, psychedelia, funk, and jazz. Recorded at Los Angeles’ A&M Studios, the album benefitted from a powerful group of musicians that included percussionist Dom Um Romão, double bassist Ron Carter, and saxophonist Bud Shank. For the preparations, Donato recruited samba-jazz musician and producer Eumir Deodato, with whom he would launch the collaborative LP Donato/Deodato in 1973.
Take heed to João Donato’s A Dangerous Donato now.
A Dangerous Donato contains ten tracks of lounge-funky landscapes with a tropical twist that showcase an ideal mix of technical experience and want to push the boundaries of jazz fusion additional. The countercultural life-style related to the period performed a component within the album’s periods too, which coincided with Donato’s temporary infatuation with psychedelics and producer Emil Richards’ flirtation with astrology, the latter requiring some tracks be laid down on particular days and occasions.
“A Bad Donato was already modern at the time of its release,” Som Imaginário’s bassist Luiz Alves as soon as defined, calling it “a bible for instrumentalists.” It’s laborious to not think about Brazilian and American musicians equivalent to Raul de Souza, Stanley Clarke, and George Duke learning these tracks.
The album represented a turning level for Donato. Quickly, he determined to start out collaborating with lyricists (a prelude to this new age occurred when Caetano Veloso wrote lyrics for opener “The Frog,” recording the music as “A Rã”). Donato’s lyric-laden work afforded him entry into the MPB world and expanded his viewers. Two years and a divorce later, Donato would use the cash earned with the album to return to Brazil – this time for good: “There was nothing more keeping me in the United States,” he defined throughout a 2015 interview.
Regardless of his in depth discography, A Dangerous Donato continues to be recurrently positioned amongst his best information, rating quantity 76 in Rolling Stone Brazil’s 100 Finest Brazilian Albums Of All Time. “João Donato saw music in everything,” president Lula da Silva wrote on the time of Donato’s demise, whereas Folha de São Paulo critic Lucas Brêda recalled he was one of many inventors of bossa nova with out ever letting himself be constrained by it: “[Donato] was a magician who had the ability to control time with the tip of his fingers.”
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