As a singer and songwriter, Dolores Duran worked mostly in the samba-canção style, writing songs that portrayed emotional torment and romantic suffering, but her repertoire extended to North American popular songs (Ella Fitzgerald attended a show in Rio and declared that Dolores’ interpretation of ‘My Funny Valentine’ was the finest she had ever heard).Certainly her performances (presented here) of pre-bossa and early bossa selections from the Tom Jobim songbook are extraordinary in their drama and intensity. It is said that Marlon Brando owned copies of all her records. She is regarded as the greatest romantic singer in the history of MPB. Maysa, to quote Caetano Veloso, was ‘a beautiful eighteen-year-old from São Paulo’s high society who, with her wild green eyes and her smoky voice, was the overnight sensation of the bohemian set she also wrote a few simple and exemplary songs of her own, all samba-cançãoes, none of them ever forgotten’.Still, her sensitive interpretations of ‘Chora ta tristeza’ (‘Cry Your Sadness’) by Oscar Castro-Neves and Luvercy Fiorini and ‘Sem Você’ (‘Without You’) by Jobim and Vinicius with the peerless Baden Powell on guitar, are indispensable examples of Brazilian music at its most temperate. Arguably bossa nova’s best kept secret, Alaide’s early albums are remarkable, displaying a rich, complex potential that would, inexplicably, go largely unfulfilled. At once, He heard in her voice the subtle, modernist qualities he felt were required for the new style he was in the process of perfecting, the style that would be bossa nova. João Gilberto first encountered Alaide Costa while she was recording an early 78 for RCA Victor.Such imperious Jobim compositions as ‘Corcovado’ and ‘One Note Samba’ (which Caterina had championed), ‘Chega de saudade’, ‘How Insensitive’, ‘Girl from Ipanema’ and ‘Wave’, were now the eternal masterpieces of the genre.
When in the 1970s she visited Brazil with a German documentary film crew, bossa nova, having reinvigorated both jazz and international pop music, had become a worldwide phenomenon. A suitably light touch in performance and a personal interest in Brazilian and Portuguese culture doubtless assisted her in meeting the demands of this gorgeously understated, elegant music.
FOUR GIFTED WOMEN: PIONEERS OF BOSSA NOVA…