Poptones.co.uk's Soundtrack of the Week!

‘Like a street-tuff carnival going off in your flat...’

The soundtrack to the 50s movie, Black Orpheus is a wild ride through
the streets of Brazil.  Yeah, yeah .. before you say ‘but its jazz,
isn’t it?’ ... I would agree with you.  But the bossa nova beats that
stream throughout the album are street tuff and so rough’n’ready that
is easy to see why the movie and the soundtrack revitalised the
bossa-nova tradition and became wildly popular throughout America and
Europe, selling millions of records world-wide.

The film, an impressionistic version of the classic greek legend,
finds Orpheus, a minstrel haunting the streets of Rio looking for his
dead lover in the land of the dead.  Though rather morbid of a story
line, the music is inanely happy like a carnival going off on your
hi-fi and alternatively between gently picked lines with solid crooning.

Yet, with the majority of the tracks performed by Jobim, it might come
as a shock that instead of breathy girl vocals over lightly picked
guitars that you instead get tracks like Generique that scream with the
power of Brazil street rhythms with the sounds of dogs barking and
children playing before moving into A Felicidade, a traditional
Brazilian folk song with the sounds of the street before going back
into the propelled rhythms of ‘Frevo’ with drumbeats moving at a
frenetic pace as a woman shouts out.  It is the combinations of the
found noises of the streets and the random dialogue and whistles of the
passerbys that make the music natural and real as if it were beamed
from the film set and into your life.  The impressionistic score is
perfect for a day when you need a parade of life stream through your
life.

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