I've watched that video on The Girl from Ipanema a couple times. As I'd always thought bossa nova was too smooth for my taste, it was fascinating to see how harmonically unusual the tune is. Looking forward to listening to your playlist. I know Frith's work quite well, and I even remember Picky Picnic. They were on a cassette compilation called Local International, which was either released or distributed by Recommended (now ReR) run by Frith's old sparring partner, Chris Cutler. Somewhere I got mp3s of a Picky Picnic album entitled Ha Ha Tarachine but can't recall what it sounds like. Will have to hunt it up and give it a listen.
On your compilation (going by discogs listing) along with Frith, Kaiser, Zorn, I recognize Tipographica, Der Plan and Pyrolator. The over all tenor of the compilation reminds me of some of the releases by the French eccentrics who run InPolySons.
The Japanese underground has long fascinated me, beginning around the time Frith curated the Welcome to Dreamland compilation, and Cutler issued a compilation drawn from three releases by Wha Ha Ha. Dreamland included a track by the great female post punk band, Mizutama Shobodan (Polkadot Fire Brigade), as well as After Dinner, Saboten and others whose work I began to follow.
On second thought, since so many musicians have treated this song as a musical exercise in their own personal style without being too concerned by what the song was originally meant to be, it might have been interesting to hear what Sid Vicious could have done with it after what he did with "My Way", a French original by Claude François before Paul Anka wrote his English lyrics that were not necessarily in line with the meaning of the original song, but that became a worldwide hit by Frank Sinatra who also recorded his own version of the Girl from Ipanema.
Thank you Rick for including the fascinating and remarkable video of explanation of the song. If you understand Portuguese, the female singer - who turns out to be really Brazilian - sings the bridge as it was originally written: masculine form to be sung by a man. I happened to have lived in several areas of Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro from October 1972 to March 1977, and one of my real pleasures in life was to go for a leisurely drink at the Veloso bar-cafe in Ipanema where the inspiration for the song actually came from. The lyricist Vinicius de Morais and the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim used to hang out there, and they were mesmerized by a young lady who walked up from the beach almost every day and would stop to buy cigarettes in the cafe. Her beauty and nonchalance, the warmth of the afternoon sun, and the atmosphere of the neighborhood inspired them to write the song ... and when I would go there for a drink at the terrace of this cafe, looking at the many beauties passing by, it was really easy to feel the greatness of this song which totally reflected the exact mood of the moment - as long as it was played by the original version of Pery Ribeiro. What made it an instant hit locally was that you could feel instantly the contrast of the beauty passing by and the loneliness of the man watching her there and then. Later on, it exploded worldwide with the Stan Getz / Joao Gilberto version sang by Astrud but, for as much as I can appreciate the musical genius of this adaptation, it had lost the meaning of what this song was supposed to be. Then, little by little, many talented artists gave it their own spin - some excellent, some overly sweetened - but none of them managed to express the simple contrast of the girl's physical beauty and the genuine sadness of that man in a simple scene at that particular Brazilian bar. And that's why the original by Pery Ribeiro remains my favorite, specially since it always evokes such a personal nostalgic and real moment for me.
I've watched that video on The Girl from Ipanema a couple times. As I'd always thought bossa nova was too smooth for my taste, it was fascinating to see how harmonically unusual the tune is. Looking forward to listening to your playlist. I know Frith's work quite well, and I even remember Picky Picnic. They were on a cassette compilation called Local International, which was either released or distributed by Recommended (now ReR) run by Frith's old sparring partner, Chris Cutler. Somewhere I got mp3s of a Picky Picnic album entitled Ha Ha Tarachine but can't recall what it sounds like. Will have to hunt it up and give it a listen.
On your compilation (going by discogs listing) along with Frith, Kaiser, Zorn, I recognize Tipographica, Der Plan and Pyrolator. The over all tenor of the compilation reminds me of some of the releases by the French eccentrics who run InPolySons.
The Japanese underground has long fascinated me, beginning around the time Frith curated the Welcome to Dreamland compilation, and Cutler issued a compilation drawn from three releases by Wha Ha Ha. Dreamland included a track by the great female post punk band, Mizutama Shobodan (Polkadot Fire Brigade), as well as After Dinner, Saboten and others whose work I began to follow.
On second thought, since so many musicians have treated this song as a musical exercise in their own personal style without being too concerned by what the song was originally meant to be, it might have been interesting to hear what Sid Vicious could have done with it after what he did with "My Way", a French original by Claude François before Paul Anka wrote his English lyrics that were not necessarily in line with the meaning of the original song, but that became a worldwide hit by Frank Sinatra who also recorded his own version of the Girl from Ipanema.
Thank you Rick for including the fascinating and remarkable video of explanation of the song. If you understand Portuguese, the female singer - who turns out to be really Brazilian - sings the bridge as it was originally written: masculine form to be sung by a man. I happened to have lived in several areas of Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro from October 1972 to March 1977, and one of my real pleasures in life was to go for a leisurely drink at the Veloso bar-cafe in Ipanema where the inspiration for the song actually came from. The lyricist Vinicius de Morais and the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim used to hang out there, and they were mesmerized by a young lady who walked up from the beach almost every day and would stop to buy cigarettes in the cafe. Her beauty and nonchalance, the warmth of the afternoon sun, and the atmosphere of the neighborhood inspired them to write the song ... and when I would go there for a drink at the terrace of this cafe, looking at the many beauties passing by, it was really easy to feel the greatness of this song which totally reflected the exact mood of the moment - as long as it was played by the original version of Pery Ribeiro. What made it an instant hit locally was that you could feel instantly the contrast of the beauty passing by and the loneliness of the man watching her there and then. Later on, it exploded worldwide with the Stan Getz / Joao Gilberto version sang by Astrud but, for as much as I can appreciate the musical genius of this adaptation, it had lost the meaning of what this song was supposed to be. Then, little by little, many talented artists gave it their own spin - some excellent, some overly sweetened - but none of them managed to express the simple contrast of the girl's physical beauty and the genuine sadness of that man in a simple scene at that particular Brazilian bar. And that's why the original by Pery Ribeiro remains my favorite, specially since it always evokes such a personal nostalgic and real moment for me.