Eliane Elias
Made in Brazil
(Concord Jazz)
June 6, 2015
Reviewed by Rob Lester for Cabaret Scenes
Well, of course, singer-pianist Eliane Elias is the genuine article when it comes to Brazilian music. She’s a native. That country’s sultry, mellow material crystallized by the swaying bossa nova has been holding sway over jazz-leaning American singers since it made its way Stateside back in its heyday of the 1960s.
Back then—and since then—it’s seduced Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Steve and Eydie, Sarah Vaughan, Chris Connor, John Pizzarelli, etc. into album-making. But there’s nothing like the feel of the lived-in real deal. Though Sao Paolo-born Elias has lived in the USA for over three decades, and this is her only CD actually made in Brazil with some original songs written and arranged there, she has hardly ignored her roots.
The world-wide jazz success and big album seller has dedicated two full CDs to the work of the man most synonymous with bossa nova, Antonio Carlos Jobim. In Made in Brazil, she dips again a couple of times into his songbag with fine results. Singing in both English and Portuguese here, she casts the spell with apparent ease.
Those listeners seeped in cabaret’s drama and personalized storytelling may find themselves less happily strangers in a strange land, left out in the cold-—or, rather, in the warm tropical breeze. Hushed-to-lite-to-muttering vocal approaches find the layered music massaged, decidedly laid in laidback strokes. It’s more about mood-setting than mood variations; things lock quickly into a lovely but low-flame groove, sometimes with track ends that fade out rather than build. The opener, the old-timer “Brasil” is not celebrational or as upbeat as we often hear it. On seven numbers, globbed-on orchestral tracks, arranged and recorded later in England, are mostly way in the background and feel like limp and soggy intruders. Only on one late, long instrumental introduction does it feel completely worthwhile.
Vocal harmonies by varying guest performers, however, add immensely as a rush of lush loveliness. The voices of group Take 6 enhance Jobim’s word whirl of “Águas de Março” (“Waters of March”), and its member Mark Kibble does backgrounds on two other tracks. Amanda Brecker, Elias’s daughter by ex-husband jazz star Randy Brecker, sounds great singing on “Some Enchanted Place,” one of the Elias originals (this one co-written with her musical and life partner/co-producer/bassist Marc Johnson on half the tracks here). If it’s jazzy settled-in atmosphere you want, with equal parts sugar and spice, here it is.
