João Almeida, Rodrigo Pinheiro & Vasco Furtado Linae

A wonderful live set from Joao Gilberto - very intimate, with a spare, stripped down quality that shows him at his best! The album features Joao on acoustic guitar and vocals - with no other backing, holding up a wealth of emotion and fragile beauty with a few simple moves of his hand and voice, in that incredible way that few other bossa players ever managed to match!

A wonderful live set from Joao Gilberto - very intimate, with a spare, stripped down quality that shows him at his best! The album features Joao on acoustic guitar and vocals - with no other backing, holding up a wealth of emotion and fragile beauty with a few simple moves of his hand and voice, in that incredible way that few other bossa players ever managed to match!

Laurindo Almeida, a brilliant Brazilian guitarist who was equally skilled at both classical music and bossa novas, gained famed originally for his work with Bud Shank in the mid-1950s. However, in the 1960s, his string of LPs for Capitol were generally quite commercial and overly brief. This album is fairly typical in that the material contains a few songs used widely in jazz (such as "Secret Love" and "Here's that Rainy Day"), current pop tunes ("Call Me" and "Goin' Out of My Head") and a few lesser-known numbers. All 11 performances clock in between two and four minutes, as Almeida is joined by an anonymous string section, background horns and rhythm players, all arranged unimaginatively by Lex de Azevedo. The playing is pleasing but very predictable, and at best these soothing sounds work well as background music.