In the Key of Joy

Parental guidance: multitude of guest artists. The rapper Common, for example, (dis)graces the opening track on the venerable Mr Mendes' umpteenth album with rhymes like ‘I can be focused because we be the dopest.’ Of course, collaborations may well be the secret of the pianist-composer's long-lasting success, but they demand discernment. It's no accident that the few successful numbers are those that feature his wife and lifelong collaborator, singer Gracinha Leporace. She appears with Hermeto Pascoal on ‘This is It (É Isso)’ and with João Donato on ‘Muganga’, so there's no shortage of heavyweight talent here. The music throughout is well performed and well produced, the songs are melodic, but it all seems so plastic. No coincidence perhaps that Sérgio Mendes lives in California.

The album is ‘all about joy and celebration,’ he says, but it's redolent of the enforced joy of sun-kissed party-people whoopin' and a-hollerin' in some beachside nightclub. Only the few incontestable classics on the retrospective Official Soundtrack (disc two on the double-CD deluxe edition) help to lift the new album out of a skip bound for the nearest landfill. For diehard Sérgio completists only and people who believe in track nine, ‘Romance in Copacabana’.