Baden Powell de Aquino, widely known as Baden Powell and born in the city of Varre-Sai in Rio de Janeiro, is immensely revered as a premier acoustic guitarist in Brazil. Baden created a guitar style that is unmatched – a classical guitar technique with popular music harmony and phrasing. Baden became known for his Bossa Nova tunes, samba, and Brazilian instrumental songs, a Brazilian style of Jazz, and MPB. His father liked scouting therefore naming his son Baden Powell after the founder of the Boys Scouts Robert Baden Powell.
Orfeu da Conceição (Orpheus of the Conception) is a stage play with music in three acts by Vinicius de Moraes and music by Antônio Carlos Jobim. It premiered in 1956 in Rio de Janeiro. The play became the basis for the films Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus, 1959) and Orfeu (1999), and for the musicals Orfeu (Brazil, 2010) and Black Orpheus (Broadway, 2014).The play sets the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a contemporary favela in Rio de Janeiro during the Brazilian Carnival. Started in 1954, the play was first performed on 25 September 1956 at the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro[4] with a stage setting by Oscar Niemeyer. Abdias do Nascimento was in the original cast.
Only 38-minutes long, Canta Vinicius De Moraes e Paolo Cesar Pinheiro is one of the truly great Baden Powell recordings. Long before alcoholism took its toll on the great guitarist and composer, he recorded this set in 1977 for the Festival label at the behest (read: strongarm tactics) of Jacques Lubin, his A&R man at Barclay, as a tribute to the two great lyricists and collaborations in his life. Powell is supported on this program buy a small group of truly sympathetic studio musicians who held him in awe. His small, tender, but deeply moving voice on such classics as "Labaréda," and "Samba de Bênção" - both of which are based on the chants, rhythms, and melodies of the Afro-Brazilian Candoble religion - that holds the magic…
Wonderful reissue from an old LP recorded with the sensitive Italian singer Ornala Vanoni together with Brazilian composer/poet/singer Vinícius de Moraes and his partner Toquinho. De Moraes is the composer of most of the lyrics covered in this Italian-sung album. There are fundamental songs here, such as "Sinal Fechado" ("Semaforo Rosso" in the Italian version), a classic by Paulinho Da Viola that was not found in bossa records very often - there was some animosity between the bossa party and the samba composers of the Carioca hills like Da Viola. It has an exquisite, unique melody, nevertheless. There are also de Moraes partnerships with names such as Jobim and Baden Powell, all splendid songs…