Nicola Conte Presents Viagem 5

If you’re one of those people for whom vintage Brazilian music never grows old, Nicola Conte’s annual collections of rare bossa nova, samba and jazz are nearly as good as actually being in Brazil and tracking down the tracks yourself. The preponderance of familiar covers in this latest volume may indicate his nuggets are getting thinner on the ground, but when they’re as fun as ‘Take it Easy My Brother Charlie’, there isn’t much ground for complaint. In the hands of the Breno Sauer Quarteto, this Jorge Ben staple takes on a whole new sheen of kitschy, samba-jazz irresistibility, with the female lead spinning off into ad-hoc verbal riffing. Papudinho offers a raucous, all-too-brief take on the Afro-Brazilian standard ‘Yê Melê’ from Luís Carlos Vinhas, who is heard here in his own right with the rarefied ‘Tanganica’, which locks into a skin-tight Latin-jazz workout. Conte has called this collection a ‘declaration of love for the great musicians, composers and singers who created it’, a definition that could surely apply to the whole series.