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LIVRO

Caetano Veloso
1 disc

Additional Info

Manufacturer Part Number (MPN): 536584
Credits

Producer
Engineer
Personnel includes: Caetano Veloso (vocals, guitar); Maria Bethania (vocals); Luiz Brasil, Davi Morais, Pedro Sa (guitar); Jacques Morelenbaum (cello); Marcelo Martins (flute, alto & tenor saxophones); Ze Canuto (flute, alto saxophone); Andrea Dias (piccolo); Sueli Farias, Carlos Malta, Ulbaldo Versolato (baritone saxophone); Eduardo Morelenbaum, Lucia Morelenbaum, Christiana Alves (clarinet); Eduardo Mandlebaum (bass clarinet); Walmir Gil, Flavio Melo (flugelhorn); Philip Doyle, Ismael de Oliveira, Antonio Augusto (French horn); Victor Santos, Ulisses de Abreu, Leonardo San Leandro (trombone); William Magalhaes (keyboards); Jota Moraes (vibraphone, xylophone); Jorge Helder, Dadi, Fernando Nunes (bass); Carlinhos Brown (percussion).
Producers: Jaques Morelenbaum, Caetano Veloso.
Recorded at Estudio AR, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Includes liner notes by Caetano Veloso.
LIVRO won the 2000 Grammy Award for Best World Music Album.
LIVRO won the 2000 Latin Grammy Award for Best Musica Popular Brasileira Album and was nominated for Album Of The Year.
Sometimes called the Bob Dylan of Brazil, Caetano Veloso, along with Gilberto Gil and Os Mutantes, was one of the key figures of the late-'60s tropicalismo movement. He has been astonishingly prolific ever since. To compare him to another famous North American, only Neil Young can match Veloso's combination of output and high quality over the years.
His latest stateside release, LIVRO, is no exception to this happy trend. Less aggressively avant-garde than the Arto Lindsay-produced OS ESTRANGEIRO of a decade prior, the mainly acoustic LIVRO represents a return to Veloso's neo-bossa nova roots. Actually, the facile comparison with Dylan breaks down given the fact that, unlike his bossa nova mentors Tom Jobim and poet/lyricist Vinicius de Moraes, the mellifluous-voiced Velsoso was never much of a croaker. Throughout LIVRO, especially on songs like "Voce E Minha" and "Manhata," Veloso simply aims for the sheer beauty of sound and melody. He is too sophisticated and creative to ever sound saccharine in this quest, a danger that his more rock-oriented compatriot Gil never risked. Along with recent albums by Tom Ze and Veloso's sideman Vinicius Cantuaria, the gentle, complex LIVRO is a perfect introduction to modern Brazilian music.
Critic Reviews

Rolling Stone (7/8-7/22/99, p.148) - 4 stars (out of 5) - "...LIVRO is a fresh, fearless collection that balances ideas and sonics, art-song and pop sport, street hummability and academic achievment, Tropicalia guts and Antonio Jobim grace..."
Spin (5/99, pp.148-150) - 7 (out of 8) - "...LIVRO is a kitchen-sink recapitulation of Veloso's career to date....the self-congratulatory, genre-bending love songs of an intellectually agile city-slicker with deep country roots."
Entertainment Weekly (6/4/99, p.87) - "...Veloso is artfully all over the map here, with...coiling energy..." - Rating: A
Alternative Press (10/99, p.113) - 4 out of 5 - "...a textbook illustration of how [Tropicalia] is done, with its fluid and deft mixture of Latin and techno rhythms, soulful crooning, Portuguese rap, big-band horn charts, contemporary classical dissonance, and electrical acoustic guitars..."
Magnet (8-9/99, pp.94-5) - "...LIVRO is a collection of songs that capture's a lifetime's worth of experience in an hour's worth of blissful listening."