The Sounds of VTech / DJ Nuts – Arthur Verocai Mix

Arthur Verocai has composed and arranged for such giants as Jorge Ben, Gal Costa and Leny Andrade. But hiphop heads know him for his often sampled (see Ludacriss, MF Doom and Lil Brother) self titled solo album. Considered the holy grail of Brazilian crate digging, i.e. nigh on impossible to find in Brazil itself, “Arthur Verocai” (Continental, 1972) is a great mixture of Tropicalia, jazz funk and soul. You can find it on the sharity blogs with a quick poke around.
Rightly named THE expert on Verocai, DJ Nuts was comissioned to put together this mix of arrangements and compositions by the great man who was recently paid homage to in the Timeless series of concerts. Stretch out in your hammock, because this is classy stuff indeed.

Link to download MP3 here

Worth checking out this fan site of the covers of Elenco discos by in-house designer César Vilela. Some beautiful looking covers from what was an excellent label, putting out the best of Bossa Nova at that time. It’s interesting that in an interview talking about the covers he mentions the fact that he had to compete with the multinational releases of that time in the record stores and the simplification of the covers was a way of calling attention to them.

I have a special, world exclusive pre-announcement for y´all to make and it´s about an upcoming release of mine called BOSSA DO MORRO. “Morro” means “hill” in Portugese, in Rio particulary, the hills are the cite where many of the city´s favelas are located. Thus BOSSA DO MORRO is a Baile Funk remix compilation I comissioned to celebrate this year´s 50th anniversary of Bossa Nova, the great musical genre that was birthed in Rio in the late 50s. When I first heard about this anniversary I immediately thought that there should be a Baile Funk Bossa Nova remix release. But soon I skipped the thought as I knew that it was quite impossible to get any original Bossa tracks for official remix use. Then I met Cristina Ruiz-Kellersmann, the Brazilian wife of Universal Jazz Germany boss Christian Kellersmann, and I suggested to her the compilation idea. She was enthusiastic about it and presented the idea to her husband who greatly supported the idea, together with Universal Jazz A+R Matthias Kuennecke. Eventually I was able to get access to parts of the Bossa Nova catalogue of Universal. Unfortunately not all of their prime tracks could be used, but BOSSA DO MORRO now features remixes of classic songs by João Gilberto, Tom Jobim, Sergio Mendes and Klaus Doldinger amongst others. The remixes are by Rio´s finest DJs such as DJ Amazing Clay, DJ Edgar, DJ Nazz, DJ Marrentinho, DJ Fu, DJ Dinho and a few others. The results are simply amazing. Think of “Girl From Ipanema” with a Miami Bass Beat. Think of “Insensatez” with a Tamborzão. It´s crazy. And I can assure you that there was a never a similar project like this released in Brazil.

How come that todays hottest Rio Funk DJs and producers never touched the big music legacy from their very own city? Well, there´s various reasons. For Cariocas (=the people from Rio) Bossa is the music made by the 1950´s bobos – the bohemian bourgeoise which hung out in Copacabana, Ipanema and Leblon. These are area that are culturally and socially far away from the grim reality in the favelas. But it´s not only this barrier that hardly produced any Bossa-Baile Funk tracks so far (except for DJ Sandrinho´s famous “Funk Bossanova”). For the Rio funk DJ culture, Bossa´s just been far from being cool or dope , it´s music to which you can´t really grind your teenage booty to. Thus hardly any funk DJ samples MPB (=Musica Popular Do Brasil) or 1950s, 1960s Brazilian music. To Funk DJs, music from the USA or Europe is cool to sample, but certainly not the music that their grandma´s or parents were listening to. So BOSSA DO MORRO is truly a debut piece. The compilation not only cultivates the first Bossa/Baile Funk pairing, it´s a compilation that probably will be considered blasphemic in Brazil, where the music from the favelas is largely still considered trash. But maybe – hopefully – this image will get a slight correction when people will finally hear that even the most crude MPC based arrangement with a chunky Tamborzão beat can pefectly support a subtle song by Tom Jobim.

Watch out for the full compilation, scheduled for an October 17th release on both vinyl and CD through Universal Jazz Germany. A 12″ vinyl pre-release with four tracks will be released mid September. Watch this space for some more news (sorry I cant give you any free downloads of this project).