The Heart of The Film

The beloved Brazilian guitar legend's resumé is so chock-full of varied musical experiences – jazz, pop, film scoring, ten years with Sergio Mendes – that his brilliant solo efforts can't help but include informal homages to different eras of his life. He starts out here getting straight to the heart of the matter, paying tribute to his fellow countryman Antonio Carlos Jobim with a self-contained plucky guitar/vocal duet of "Waters of March," which includes spirited scat passages. He moves into samba mode for a lively medley of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker tunes, "Groovin' High/Whispering," deferring to Toots Thielemans' always engaging harmonica for melody as he harmonizes gently; then they switch roles.

In 1942 The Musical Times reported a ‘grave loss’ referring to Walter Leigh’s tragically early death, killed in action whilst serving in a tank regiment near Tobruk, just before his thirty-seventh birthday. Though during his lifetime he was more than once compared to Sir Arthur Sullivan, from a contemporary standpoint an equally pertinent analogy could be drawn with a composer from a later generation, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett. Both men approached film music and ‘light music’ with the same seriousness of purpose and invested it with the same impeccable craftsmanship they brought to their concert pieces.