2024-09-06 16:34:43
His adaptation of ‘Mas que nada’, a song by Jorge Ben, was projected to the world, in 1966, a revision of the world and Brazilian music ‘cool’, in harmony with pop, jazz and funk, and even more. shows that a song in Portugal can be an international hit. Notable achievements, those of Sergio Mendesa musician who is not a musician, He created his own style based on samba and bossa novaand whose journey stopped this Friday, at the age of 83, after suffering health problems related to respiratory failure and related to the consequences of covid.
Mendes has been living in Los Angeles for decades, and his work has developed mostly in the United States, since, at the beginning, in 1962, he found himself among the musicians (with António Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto at the helm) who performed bossa nova to New Yorkers on the stage of Carnegie Hall. Born in Niteroi, a city on the coast where Rio de Janeiro is (and where he was born on January 11, 1941), His direction took shape when he created the group Brasil 66, with a novel arrangement, with two female voices, Janis Hansen and Lani Hall.This wife of trumpet and record player, creator (with Jerry Moss) of the A & M label, Herp Alpert. From the album ‘Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66’ comes ‘Mas que nada’, and delightful approaches to bossa novas and Beatles songs. His later ‘Crazy on the Hill’ and his on Burt Bacharach’s ‘The Look of Love’, both in 1968, added to his early succession of hits.
Music for Leaders
Mendes established himself as a celebrity, performed before Presidents Johnson and Nixon, and at the Osaka Expo (1970). His trail continued to live in the following decades, he revived his support group with changing names (The New Brasil 77, Brasil 88) and took a new milestone with the ballad, originally by Cynthia Weill and Barry Mann, ‘Don’t be and go (1982). The album ‘Brasileiro’ (1992), with material by Carlinhos Brown, won him a Grammy, and ‘Timeless’ (2006) spread his ‘Mas que nada’ among a new generation of audience through his encounter with The Black Eyed Pea.
This is the music that never tires of him, as he told this newspaper in November 2023, when he came to perform at the Palau de la Música, hosted by the media Barcelona Jazz Festivalin what turned out to be his last concert, as part of a small tour of Europe that day before taking him to Paris and London. That night in which, smiling and cheerful, sitting at the keyboard, he gave a perfect performance through his performances with a group that included his wife and showgirl Gracinha Leporace. The documentary ‘Sérgio Mendes in the key of happiness’ (2020) tells his story with the participation of colleagues like Harrison Ford (who, when he was in his 20s, was a carpenter in his California home studio), Quincy Jones y John Legend.
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