Gilberto Gil - Copacabana Mon Amour (Polydor)

Wise friends are essential to the proper maintenance of any personal musical library. My pal Ted hipped me to this album when he spotted a cheap used copy on one of our forays to Kim’s, that venerable East Village record emporium on St. Marks. I picked it up at his insistence and it instantly won me over. Gil’s long been my favorite exponent of the Tropicalia aesthetic. Not as eclectic as Caetano, not as funky as Jorge and not nearly as unhinged as Tom Zé, to my mind his early 70s work is still the most intuitive and organic of the loose-knit cadre of Brazilian troubadours. This one, the soundtrack to an eponymous film by Rogério Sganzerla, distills Gil’s folk roots and filters them further through a friendly hipster seive. Just a quartet in instrumentation with his unvarnished guitar and vocals augmented via overdubbing by Péricles Cavalcanti’s second guitar, David Linger’s sweet & salty flute and Claudio Karina’s battery of small percussion consisting of hand drums, claves, triangles and shakers. Seed time in the studio was likely minimal and the improvisational flavor of the pieces sparks some wonderful off-the-cuff interplay. Gil sings in both Portugese and English, but more often just scats along with the winding colloquial rhythms, most impressively on the fourteen-minute “Yeh Yeh Yah Yah.” I’ve found that this set works as an equally effective aural tonic winter or summer, melting away the film of frost and gloom in the former, or serving as supplement to deck chair, iced rum and perhaps a puff of stronger substance in the humid bliss of the latter. Obrigado, Ted.