Jorge: The Definitive Collection

No Brazilian singer has chronicled the unpretentious, good life of simple, working-class Rio more faithfully than Jorge Ben. For almost half a century, through oppression and dictatorship, prosperity and police violence, he has been joyfully singing about girls and football, barbecues, macumba and samba dancing. Life may be tough when you’re poor in Rio. But life, as Ben has long reminded blue-collar Brazil, is also good. As he sings on one of his numerous joyful anthems, ‘Pais Tropical’: ‘In February there's carnival, I've got a VW Beetle and a guitar… and I'm happy with life’.

This excellent two-CD collection follows Jorge Ben’s 50-album journey from the 1960s through to 1976, and showcases some of the best recordings of his very best material. It kicks off with ‘Mas Que Nada’ (made famous internationally by Sergio Mendes), before slipping sunnily through a string of Ben classics which include ‘Chove Chuva’, ‘Take It Easy My Brother Charles’, ‘Que Pena’, ‘Taj Mahal’ (which was plagiarised by Rod Stewart on ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’) and the wonderful ‘Jorge da Capadocia’, an absolute classic in Brazil that has been covered by Caetano Veloso and Fernando Abreu amongst others. With much of Ben’s back catalogue unreleased or deleted, many of these tracks have been very difficult to come by over the years. It’s wonderful to have them available again on what is close to being a definitive collection.