Junior Mendes
Copacabana Sadia

Despite the absolutely anonymous appearance and a name like a thrusting fullback from the 1983-84 Avellino season, Junior Mendes boasts an album that can be defined as perfect in its genre. The (non)genre of Junior Mendes is the same genre anthologized by Ed Motta in a compilation from last year, which too (like Junior Mendes's face) will appear anonymous at first glance, but over time will reveal all its relevance. Needless to say, Junior Mendes IS - in that compilation.

Whether you acquire it in a luxurious limited edition-double vinyl, recover it in the more prosaic CD version, or enjoy it through the even more prosaic YouTube and Spotify, you will understand that Too Slow To Disco - besides collecting, indeed, all the music too slow to dance to in a disco - is the best collection yet dedicated to Brazilian adult-easy listening in the transition between the '70s and '80s. That is, the much reviled AOR of which too much is said but little is known, starting from what it actually is.

Ed Motta, I told you, has the right credentials to explain it. But we won't focus on him here.

We won't even focus on Junior Mendes, paradoxically. Being sidelined seems to be his fate.

Instead, we will focus on Lincoln Olivetti, pioneer of the '80s sound between Copacabana and Ipanema. Although his name says even less than Junior Mendes.

To me, it said nothing until I enjoyed that sumptuous roundup of duets titled Erasmo Carlos Convida, an album from 1980 in which the Legend of Jovem Guarda invited to his home (more than to his court, because the atmosphere is all about friendly confidences) other heavyweights of Brazilian music. And I enjoyed it not only for the stature of those guests, which surely did not need Erasmo to be discovered. But also for how fantastically that album - taken blind from a bunch of Brazilian records taken equally blind - sounded.

And thanks to that old habit of reading and rereading the back cover notes and various credits from top to bottom and then bottom to top, I realized that in half of the pieces appeared (as arranger and keyboardist) Lincoln Olivetti.

I deduced that this Olivetti had to be someone quite important - if Erasmo chose him as the arranger for an album that included, among others, contributions from Gil, Caetano Veloso, Jorge Ben, Gal Costa, Tim Maia, Roberto Carlos... who did not seem like emerging artists to me, and certainly weren't even in 1980.

Além Do Horizonte (with Tim Maia: the uncle of someone I mentioned up there at the beginning, and who is not Junior Mendes) proudly showcases this Olivetti sound, and bears his signature composed of horns + elegant synth lines + funky guitar and bass prominently with frequent slap. Even a classic like this, which a fairly famous singer among us has made equally famous, looks great with the custom-fitted suit Olivetti sews for it.

(Of course, to get an idea, this other is perfectly fine, with his main studio collaborator: there aren't any great voices but everything else is there).

If you like all this, you will also like Copacabana Sadia by Junior Mendes (that's him) because it is one of the cornerstone albums of Olivetti's aesthetics. Technically, it is the tropical counterpart of the California West Coast Sound, sometimes renamed Yacht Rock due to the refined details that characterize it (said like this, it sounds like nonsense, but everything will be understood after), in reality, it is that Brazilian pop that is neither pop-rock nor disco music. It’s in a middle ground that cannot be filled with labels, or it requires a really big and therefore imprecise label.

Never heard of Junior Mendes before? I hadn't.

But neither have names like Marc Jordan, Stephen Bishop, Ned Doheny often been heard. Still more than Junior Mendes, that's obvious.

The fact is, he had a more productive career as a writer and studio man than as a singer, also because after '84 he is only talked about again in 2014. When he dies of cardiac arrest. Apparently.

Lincoln Olivetti left a year later. Few know him outside Brazil, yet you might have heard him many times because, besides in solo productions for almost all those names on Erasmo's album, his hand is in various soundtracks for films set in exotic locations in the early '80s. Like this one.

(In fact, no one captured those atmospheres better than Olivetti. The same as the famous album where Marcos Valle is sipping cocktails on the cover. Who do you think produced it?)

Therefore, Junior Mendes's Copacabana might be one of those slightly stereotypical things from a movie - or from telenovelas like Agua Viva, which I actually don't remember much about besides the colorful shirts of the guys, but that was the fundamental aspect. However, it's surely more Copacabana than the Copacabana of any Barry Manilow and not only because the cardboard palms convey a vague sense of ridicule (if only it were just those...)

And Junior Mendes is there, with his sole album, proving that cariocas are much better at being Californians (in their own way) than the other way around.