Product Description:
Personnel: Bud Shank (alto saxophone, flute); Laurindo Almeida (guitar); Gary Peacock (bass); Chuck Flores (drums).
Reissue producer: Michael Cuscuna.
Recorded in Los Angeles, California from April 15-22, 1953. Originally released on Pacific Jazz (1204) except #7 which was released on Pacific Jazz (JWC-500). Includes liner notes by Pete Welding.
All tracks have been digitally remastered.
In 1953, the West Coast studio reedman Bud Shank created a first by going into the studio with the Brazilian master guitarist Laurindo Almeida. A good eight years before Stan Getz conducted a similar experiment called JAZZ SAMBA (with non-Brazilian guitarist Charlie Byrd), Shank and Almeida produced a natural-born musical hybrid that still sounds startlingly contemporary today. There aren't too many 1953 jazz albums about which one could make the same claim.
The two musicians stick with mainly Brazilian material, featuring such highly regarded pre-bossa nova composers as Ary Barroso, Luis Gonzaga, and Pixinguinha. The only stateside detour is in the company of the romantic standards "Stairway to the Stars" and Kurt Weill's "Speak Low," both of which sound perfectly at home in this context, thanks to Almeida's incredible fluency and Shank's unmannered, freshly conceived improvisations.
