Brazil is so disproportionately blessed with great musicians, and has had such an outsized influence on both pop and jazz music around the world, that compiling a collection of great Brazilian music would seem to be an impossibly frustrating task. Even if you were to decide up front that for some insane reason you were going to leave out the gimme artists (
Caetano Veloso,
Antonio Carlos Jobim,
Gal Costa), how do you pick from all of the myriad geniuses who remain? The answer is not to think about it too hard -- just pick 15 slices of musical ambrosia and call it good, recognizing that for every brilliant track you include you're missing out on a hundred more, and count on the listener to follow the trail you've left and get deliriously lost in the musical jungle on his or her own.
A Night in Brazil accomplishes that task handsomely, with classic material from, yes,
Gal Costa (an early-'90s recording of "Caminhos Cruzados") and
Caetano Veloso (the brilliant "Samba em Paz," from 1965) as well as lots of
Jobim tunes by a variety of artists -- tunes that, inevitably, include both "One Note Samba" and "Girl from Ipanema." A number of the other featured artists are legends in Brazil but less well-known in North America: the great Tropicálismo singer
Nana Caymmi; samba legends Alcione Nazaré and
Beth Carvalho; MPB innovator
João Bosco. Every track on this collection packs a slightly different kind of wallop, and every one is a winner.