Paul Winter & Carlos Lyra
The Sound Of Ipanema

The evening is cool, the brown light in the sky is soft, warm. The skin still burns after the scorching sun, in the night a thousand stars in the sky are unreachable islands.

There is a sweet taste in the heart, a happy nostalgia, like something already irretrievably lost, but that you know will repeat ten, a thousand times more. A memory, a skirt fluttering, golden legs walking, intertwined hands. A quiet belonging. There is only silence, the moonlight, eyes half-closed lingering in a sweet and sensual drowsiness, waves of the heart that leave behind on immense deserted beaches shells that speak of the depths of the soul, crystal clear, and filled with a deeply green-blue light. The calm thrill of bossa nova.

The soft voice of Carlos Lyra, and the calmly, sensually languid rhythm of Brazil. The sound of Paul Winter's sax that, folded onto itself, always finds that right softness of sound. That molds it as in a barley light. Calm, aware.
"Voce e Eu", just "You and I", and nothing more. The words of Vinicius de Moraes, soft as petals, as the curves of a breast seen mischievously through a light dress, as soft hips to encircle with one's arm. Eleven songs like pearls in this album.
Eleven tracks like wild pearls, which all seem the same and yet are not. Because like every pearl, also each of these songs has its light, its gray-rosy hue, like a sky shaded by a blanket of clouds, before a long night of shivers, of sensations that slide over, of caresses on the neck. Brazil.

Brazil that is not just carnival, not just dances, not just beaches, that is not just butts moving frantically in the carioca cheering or breasts waving in the wind like trophies. There's the real and authentic Brazil in this historic album of 1964. The poetically boundless and sweet soul of this great country. The soul of "Ordem e Progresso". Poetry, saudade, a guitar whose strings are touched like a hand caresses a woman's back.
A voice that whispers as if to sing a lullaby in "De Quem Ama", the comic rhythm of "Aruanda", the skin-chilling sweetness in "Coisa Mais Linda". The sax of Winter that acts as a counterbalance, almost an alter-ego, to the always calm, sweetly measured vocal line of Carlos Lyra. Close your eyes and start dreaming.

This album is gorgeous, smooth, and sensual like an orchid. And like the soft curves and the loving gaze of a woman.