Clave Maria

 

Tania Maria - The Lady from Brazil


OK, I have quite the Spring-clean for the May Queen planned, and it starts up the stairway here with birthday #76 for another one of those uncategorizable, yet absolutely legendary, figures.

Anytime I can interrupt the dangly sausagefest that is this page, I jump at the opportunity, and today illustrates why that is.

Today's birthday songstress has been defying conventional classifications since she burst upon the scene from Brazil at the end of the 1960s.

She can visit so many styles, often within the same song, but weave them into a unified whole that almost sounds like its own genre.

She can go from a bubbly pop tune, make it swing like Jazz, and then hit a percolating, funky bossa groove while whipping out a solo worthy of Bud Powell in the middle of it all.

And that's before Tania Maria even opens her mouth to sing.

Her vocalizations run the gamut from the most sensitive, lush balladry to the wildest scat sojourns, again sometimes within the same song.

She first started recording as a leader in 1966, but she really got going as an international superstar in the 1980s, when she got signed to Concord Records and unleashed a string of increasingly huge albums.

Overall she's made over 30 records and toured the planet many times over.

This incandescent burner of a show is from her Lady From Brazil period in the mid 1980s. Watch out for bass beast Eddie Gomez manning the upright on this one.

Tania Maria
The Catalyst
Santa Cruz, California USA
5.16.1986

01 introduction
02 Made In New York
03 É Carnaval
04 The Lady from Brazil
05 My Supernatural Orchestration Dream
06 Bronx
07 Tania teaches the audience the Tamborim rhythm
08 Funky Tamborim
09 Come with Me
10 Don’t Go

Total time: 1:26:35
disc break goes after Track 05

Tania Maria - piano, whistle & vocals
Tom Campbell - drums
Eddie Gomez - bass

grner1's master 4-track cassettes containing a matrix of the soundboard, onstage and crowd mics,
retransferred by him in 2020
edited, retracked and remastered by EN, May 2024 
538 MB FLAC/direct link

I'll be back in 48 with another supremely talented lady, who left us last year after a career reorienting everybody's molecules via sound.

Before those two days pass, I'd recommend letting Tania Maria -- born this day in 1948 and still incandescent -- whirl you around the Carnaval dancefloor for 90 minutes.--J.