Ye-Me-Le - Sergio Mendes

 

Easy To Be Hard

Ye-Me-Le

Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66

Produced by Sergio Mendes

Arranged by Sergio Mendes

Engineer: Larry Levine

Studio: A&M Recording Studio

Orchestra Arranged & Conducted by Dave Grusin

Guitar: Oscar Castro Neves

Cover Painting: Ivan De Morales

Art Direction: Tom Wilkes

Photography: Jim McCrary

A&M Records SP 4236

1969

Wichita Lineman

Norwegian Wood

Some Time Ago

Moanin'

Look Who's Mine

Ye-Me-Le

Easy To Be Heard

Where Are You Coming From

Masquerade

What The World Needs Now

Collaboration - The Modern Jazz Quartet with Laurindo Almeida

 

Concierto De Aranjuez

Collaboration

The Modern Jazz Quartet

With Laurindo Almeida

Recording Engineer: Ray Hall

Cover Design: Marvin Israel

Supervision: Nesuhi Ertegun

The painting by Juan Gris appears on the cover by courtesy of the publishing house of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

Atlantic STEREO 1429

1966

The Modern Jazz Quartet is composed of: John Lewis, piano; Milt Jackson, vibraharp; Percy Heath, bass; Connie Kay, drums. The Quartet is augmented on this LP by guest artist Laurindo Almeida, guitar. Laurindo Almedia appears through the courtesy of Capitol Records, Inc.

From the back cover: Collaboration, as the term is used in music, generally means a sharing in some intellectual creation. Very often, especially in recent years, it has denoted a bringing together of elements not customarily seen or heard together. The joint labors of love in which John Lewis has been involved have included collaborations with symphony orchestras at home and abroad; with an American saxophonist, a Belgian guitarist, a Danish violinist, a German trombonist; with traditionalists, boppers and avant-gardists; with anyone, in short, whose talents have made a strong impression on his singularly perceptive ear.

The teaming of The Modern Jazz Quartet with Laurindo Almeida began as a project for the 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival. Until that time the MJQ and Almeida had never worked together; they had been based on opposite coasts and their paths had never crossed.

Almeida at that time was basking in a reputation that had reached him in a curiously indirect manner. Born in Sao Paolo, Brazil, he had come to the U.S. while still in his twen- ties and gained recognition as featured guitarist with the Stan Kenton orchestra. Living near Hollywood, he was accepted among musicians as a master of the classical Spanish concert guitar and among jazzmen as an artist eager to experiment in the blending of jazz and Latin idioms. His first recordings of Brazilian themes with a jazz combo were made in the early 1950s, but it was not until a decade later, when the bossa nova movement upset seismographs throughout the United States, that his name became nationally known through a series of performances of popular songs reshaped to fit the new fad.

John Lewis knew and respected Almeida not simply as a purveyor of Brazilian music, but as a performer with a far broader range of interests. "After we played together in Monterey," Almeida says, "John invited me to tour with the Quartet as guest soloist. We left the United States in February 1964 and stayed together until early June."

"We started in Milan and spent almost a month in Italy and Sicily. We worked in some of the smaller towns where hardly any other American groups had been heard. Later we played in Switzerland, Belgium, France, England, Germany, Scandinavia, Yugoslavia; and also three cities in Spain. I hadn't been in Spain since just before the Civil War, in 1936."

"It was different from so many of these European tours; no rushing. We took four months to play 50 concerts. We enjoyed working together, and had time to really see the countries we visited and get to know their people. The greatest night of the whole tour, for me personally and for the Quartet too I believe, was Paris. The audience there was just magnificent."

"The reaction seemed to indicate that the audiences were pretty well divided between classical and jazz fans. We were able to play whatever we liked. And of course by the time we came home and made this album we knew one another well enough to give the best possible performance of all this material."

With the exception of Foi A Saudade, all the numbers heard here were played by Almeida and the MJQ during their tour. Their repertoire, by composers ranging from 18th Century Germany to 20th Century North and South America, hints at the breadth of their mutual interests.

Silver is a composition characteristic of the jazz-oriented side of John Lewis. There is more than a suggestion of the blues; there are tempo changes, and at one point, going into the slower last movement, there is a tricky retard that called for particularly close listening on the part of all five participants.

Trieste revisits territory that should be familiar to most Lewis students. It was recorded by the regular MJQ per- sonnel in the Lonely Woman album (Atlantic 1381). Though the new version starts almost exactly like the original, many differences develop along the way. There are several curious and fascinating historical overtones. The tango rhythm harks back to Rudolph Valentino and the 1920s, though this is a tango that sometimes swings in a totally contemporary sense. At one point John Lewis' solo evokes the 1930s with touches of Earl Hines and Fats Waller; and Laurindo's interplay with Milt Jackson toward the end may remind students of early jazz guitar that the timbre (and time) of Eddie Lang will never be out of date. Note also the ponticello effects (playing on the bridge of the guitar) added by Laurindo for color.

Valeria is part of the original music Lewis wrote for the motion picture A Milanese Story. It was heard in the original soundtrack album (Atlantic 1388), played by an international group that included a string quartet. The introduction and coda wrap the new performance in a dark, brooding flamenco mood, with Connie Kay's clave effects adding a contrastingly light percussive note. Almeida plays a mainly rhythmic role while Lewis and Bags contribute some of the most propulsive straight-four jazz of the session.

The Bach Fugue In A Minor remains faithful to the composition from the first note almost to the last, but the special requirements of this instrumentation are put to total use as Almeida, Jackson, Lewis and Heath are all involved at one point or another in the weaving of the counterpoint. The qualification in the above phrase "from the first note almost to the last" is an allowance for the little cadenza that comes unexpectedly at the end. Here, for just a moment, we find Bach dipping into Bags' bag. "This is one number," says Laurindo, "that used to bring down the house wherever we played it. Performing it was a great delight for us all."

One Note Samba was first played by Almeida with the Quartet at Monterey. Partly ad lib, partly routined by Lau- rindo, it is the only track in the album not arranged by John Lewis. The dual authenticity of this performance, with Jackson's and Lewis' solos backed by Almeida's comping and Connie Kay's steady bossa nova pulse, demonstrates ideally the marriage of the two musics.

Foi A Saudade (the title means "There was a longing") is a fast bossa nova by Djalma Ferreira, best known as composer of Recado, one of the first bossa novas brought to this country after the tremor hit us. "Europe loves the bossa nova," Almeida reports, "and I am very fond of the writing of Ferreira. He came here from Brazil early in 1964 and now lives not far from me in the San Fernando Valley." Almeida's solo, mainly in single note style, is a highlight. The melody has a flavor that is as much Spanish as Brazilian, perhaps because of the importance of a flat ninth in the second bar (D Flat against a C7), which is not a common element in the typical bossa nova.

Of the Concierto de Aranjuez Almeida says: "This is one part, the adagio movement, of a three-part work by Joaquin Rodrigo, the blind Spanish composer of contemporary music. I met Rodrigo in Los Angeles when Segovia played one of his works. He is a sort of modern Albeniz. By now many jazz lovers know him, of course, because Miles Davis and Gil Evans included this Concierto in their Sketches of Spain."

A sense of stately beauty is evoked both by Rodrigo's thematic structure and by the performance of Almeida and the Quartet. Here the synthesis of talents reaches its zenith of sensitivity, and for Almeida at several points it becomes a technical as well as an emotional triumph. Lewis adapted the orchestration for the Quartet while leaving the guitar part untouched.

"I am very proud of this performance," says Almeida. "It is one of the best things I ever did." His quiet pride is shared by the four men who played this brilliantly conceived and superbly executed work for warmly receptive audiences all over Europe. The Concierto reminds us that this album represents an amalgamation not only of personalities, but of cultures, of nations, of musical emotions.

The meeting of the MJQ and Almeida has been a collaboration in a sense more comprehensive than any that would have been feasible a decade or two ago, when the idioms represented here would have been two or three disparate worlds, total strangers to each other. – LEONARD FEATHER

The Modern Jazz Quartet can also be heard on the following Atlantic LPs: A Quartet Is A Quartet Is A Quartet / The Modern Jazz Quartet, Quartetto di Milano, The Hun- garian Gypsy Quartet (1420); The Sheriff (1414), The Comedy/Guest Artist: Diahann Carroll (1390); European Concert, Volume Two (1386); European Concert, Volume One (1385); Lonely Woman (1381); The Modern Jazz Quartet & Orchestra (1359); Third Stream Music / The Modern Jazz Quartet & Guests: The Jimmy Giuffre Three & The Beaux Arts String Quartet (1345); Pyramid (1325); The Modern Jazz Quartet At Music Inn / Guest Artist: Sonny Rollins (1299); One Never Knows (1284); The Modern Jazz Quartet (1265); The Modern Jazz Quartet At Music Inn / Guest Artist: Jimmy Giuffre (1247); Fontessa (1231).

The European Concert is also available in a two-LP set (2-603).

Silver

Trieste

Valeria

Fugue In A Minor

One Note Samba

For A Saudade

Concierto De Aranjuez

Good Vibrations - Hugo Montenegro

 

Tony's Theme

Good Vibrations

Hugo Montenegro

Produced by Joe Reisman

Whistler: Muzzy Marcellino

Recorded in RCA's Music Center Of The World, Hollywood, California 

Recording Engineer: Mickey Crofford

RCA STEREO LSP-4104

1969

From the back cover: The thing for a composer-arranger-conductor-recording artist to do is find a sound, style or lick that is uniquely his own and separate himself and his orchestra from all the others. OK, Hugo Montenegro has done this. He did it with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. His usage of the ocarina, the electric violin and a whistler was really tricky. That sound fooled most of us – we didn't know what it was, but we liked it.

Mr. Montenegro told me that the "sound" he used for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was one he researched a long time. He said he recorded over 200 different kinds of woodwind instruments, flutes, recorders, whistles, pipes, etc., before he finally decided that the ocarina was the sound he wanted. Therefore, it stands to reason that he must have done similarly involved research and experimentation to come up with the combination of electric violin and Muzzy Marcellino (the whistler, or rather, a whistler). Let's face it. You don't just jump up and say out of the blue: "I'll do that tune with an electric fiddle and a whistler!"

Anyway, the unique problem that Hugo Montenegro has is that he likes to research and experiment with all his music. He doesn't want to take what is a valid idea for one tune and, because it was successful, blow it up out of proportion and force it to fit every tune he does. This "freedom" to experiment is always a problem to any successful recording artist because the recording industry and the public tend to embrace the result of experimentation – the sound, the style, the lick, or whatever-instead of the motivation that caused it to be created. We always believe in the miracle instead of why or where from which it comes.

In this album Hugo Montenegro has come up with some new licks as a result of research and experimentation. The big concept, I think, is his utilization of voices. In popular music of late the "group" vocal backing behind the lead singer has become as important and involved artistically as the lead or melody. Hugo has taken the vocal backing of rock, folk rock, bossa nova, etc., and brought it up front, producing an interesting and exciting vocal effect. Because of the spirit in which it was created, GOOD VIBRATIONS can definitely be felt from this album.

Good Vibrations

Classical Gas

Another Place, Another Time (theme from the television production, "The Outcasts")

Tony's Theme (from the Twentieth Century-Fox release, "Lady In Cement")

A Future Left Behind (theme from "The Big Valley")

Lady In Cement (from the Twentieth Century-Fox release, "Lady In Cement")

Happy Together

Lullaby From "Rosemary's Baby" (from the Paramount picture, "Rosemary's Baby)

Knowing When To Leave (from the Broadway production, "Promises, Promises")

Night Rider

Love Is Blue

Thomas Morley - Elizabethan Madrigals - The New York Pro Musica Antiqua

 

Miraculous Love's Wounding

Thomas Morley (1557 - 1603)

Elizabethan Madrigals - Canzonets - Balletts

The New York Pro Musica Antiqua

Conducted by Noah Greenberg

With Incidental Virginal Interludes played by Blanche Winogron

Counterpoint/Esoteric CPT 520 (S-2397 - 5520)

1966

THE PRIMAVERA SINGERS

RUTH DAIGON - Soprano

LOIS ROMAN - Soprano

RUSSELL OBERLIN - Counter-Tenor

ARTHUR SQUIRES - Tenor

CHARLES BRESSLER - Tenor

BRAYTON LEWIS - Bass

THE PRIMAVERA SINGERS of the NEW YORK PRO MUSICA ANTIQUA, formed with the purpose of faithfully presenting the neglected works of Medieval. Renaissance and Baroque music, have performed in concerts of vocal and instrumental music of this period. Noah Greenberg, the conductor of The Primavera Singers, was instrumental in the founding of the New York Pro Musica Antiqua, and leads an active musical life as a choral director, composer, and teacher in that city. He has been a student of the Renaissance period for many years and has done much to heighten interest in this music among musicians and music-lovers.

Blanche Winogron has appeared as a Virginalist in concert and on radio. She has devoted many years to the study and performance of early keyboard music and has begun to record the literature for this beautiful instrument. Her set of Virginals were made especially for her in 1936 by John Challis of Detroit, and is a faithful reproduction of the seventeenth century English Virginals.

From the back cover: Thomas Morley was one of the leading musical figures in Elizabethan England. A pupil of the great William Byrd. "founder" of the English Madrigal School. Morley distinguished himself as a composer, theoritician, organist and publisher.

From the sparce facts that remain concerning Morley's life, we know that he was born circa 1557 married in 1587 and took his degree of B. Mus. at Oxford in the next year. He became organist at St. Paul's. London. a short time after this and left that post when sworn in as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1592. The records at St. Helen's (where Morley's children were baptized) indi- cate that Morley lived in the parish of Little St. Helen's. Bishopsgate. between 1596 and 1601. as did William Shakespeare. Morley's health was poor during these years and it is believed he died in the year 1603.

Morley and his contemporaries were strongly influenced by the Italian School but their works were unmistakably English in flavor. The music this master has left us images all we know and love about Elizabethan England: its great exuberance, its elegant tragedy and its "kindly lust."

SIDE ONE

From – the First Booke of Balletts to Five Voyces. 1595.

SING WE AND CHANT IT
While love doth grant it.
Not long youth lasteth.

And old age hasteth. 

Now is best leisure 

To take our pleasure. 

All things invite us 

Now to delight us. 

Hence, care, be packing! 

No mirth be lacking! 

Let spare no treasure 

To live in pleasure.

From – Canzonets or Little Short Songs to Three Voyces. 1593.

CEASE. MINE EYES. cease your lamenting.
In vain you hope of her hard heart's relenting.
Drop not so fast. O cease your flowing!
O drop not where no grace is growing!
She laughs, she smiles, she plays with joy and gladness 

To see your grief and sadness.

O love, thou art abused!
Was ne'er true love so scornfully thus used!

From –  the First Booke of Balletts to Five Voyces. 1595.

NOW IS THE MONTH OF MAYING,
When merry lads are playing
Each with his bonny lass
Upon the greeny grass.
The Spring, clad all in gladness. 

Doth laugh at Winter's sadness. 

And to the bagpipe's sound
The nymphs tread out their ground. 

Fie then! why sit we musing. 

Youth's sweet delight refusing? 

Say, dainty nymphs, and speak.

 Shall we play barley-break?

Virginal Interlude – BARAFOSTUS DREAME (ANON.)

From – the First Booke of Canzonets to Two Voyces. 1595.

MIRACULOUS LOVE'S WOUNDING!
Even those darts, my sweet Phyllis,
So fiercely shot against my heart rebounding. 

Are turned to roses, violets and lilies,
With odour sweet abounding.

From – Madrigalls to Foure Voyces.... the First Booke. 1594.

NOW IS THE GENTLE SEASON FRESHLY FLOWERING, 

To sing and play and dance. while May endureth. 

And woo and wed, that sweet delight procureth.

THE FIELDS ABROAD with spangled flowers are gilded. 

The meads are mantled, and closes.
In May each bush arrayed and sweet wild roses. 

The nightingale her bower hath gaily builded. 

And full of kindly lust and love's inspiring. 

'I love, I love,' she sings, her mate desiring.

Virginal Interlude – GALIARDA (MORLEY.)

From – the First Booke of Canzonets to Two Voyces. 1595.

I GO BEFORE. MY DARLING.
Follow thou to the bower in the close alley.
There we will together
Sweetly kiss each other.
And like two wantons dally.

From – the First Booke of Balletts to Five Voyces. 1595.

LADY. THOSE CHERRIES PLENTY.
Which grow on your lips dainty.
Ere long will fade and languish.
Then now, while yet they last them.
O let me pull and taste them.

A Dialogue to Seven Voyces

PHYLLIS. I FAIN WOULD DIE NOW. 

O to die what should move thee? 

For that you do not love me. 

I love thee! but plain to make it. 

Ask what thou wilt and take it. 

O sweet, then this I crave thee, 

Since you to love will have me, 

Give me in my tormenting, 

One kiss for my contenting. 

This unawares doth daunt me. 

Else what thou wilt I grant thee. 

Ah Phyllis! well I see then 

My death thy joy will be then. 

O no, no, no, I request thee
To tarry but some fitter time and leisure..
Alas. death will arrest me
You know before I shall possess this treasure.
Temper this sadness.
No, no, dear, do not languish.
For time and love with gladness
Once ere long will provide for this our anguish.
(CLAIRE HOLMES. Assisting Artist... Alto)

SIDE TWO

From – the First Booke of Balletts to Five Voyces. 1595.

MY BONNY LASS SHE SMILETH
When she my heart beguileth.
Smile less, dear love, therefore, 

And you shall love me more. 

When she her sweet eye turneth, 

O how my heart it burneth! 

Dear love. call in their light. 

O else you'll burn me quite!

LO. SHE FLIES WHEN I WOO HER.
Nor can I get unto her.
But why do I complain me?
Say. if I die. she hath unkindly slain me.

Virginal Interlude – IRISHE DUMPE (ANON.)

LEAVE THIS TORMENTING AND STRANGE ANGUISH, 

Or kill my heart oppressed. Alas, it skill not!
For thus I will not.
Now contented,
Then tormented.
Live in love and languish.
Virginal Interlude

GOE FROM MY WINDOW (MORLEY.)

From – Madrigalls to Foure Voyces... the First Booke. 1594.

CLORINDA FALSE, ADIEU, THY LOVE TORMENTS ME. 

Let Thyrsis have thy heart since he contents thee.
O grief and bitter anguish!
For thee, unkind, I languish!
Fain I. alas, would hide it.
O but who can? I cannot, I, abide it.
Adieu, adieu, leave me, death now desiring. Thou hast, lo, thy requiring.
Thus spake Philistus on his hook relying,
And sweetly fell a-dying.

Virginal Interlude – CAN SHEE (ANON.)

From – the First Booke of Balletts to Five Voyces. 1595.
FIRE! FIRE! MY HEART!
O help! Ay me! I sit and cry me.
And call for help. but none comes nigh me!
O. I burn me! alas!
I burn! Ay me! will none come quench me? Cast water on. alas. and drench me.