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Quiet Stars
For The Economist online, I wrote about Elenco Records, the quintessential bossa nova label:
One morning in 1961, Aloysio de Oliveira, an A&R representative at Philips Records, arrived at his office in Rio de Janeiro. As one of the prime movers behind bossa nova, his career had seen better days. Oliveira knew the sound he helped foster was fast losing momentum on the charts. For the executive, the failure was more galling, still. The genre’s flagging fortunes were due in large part to the company he worked for. To reach the coveted American market, Philips snuffed out the Brazilian stars Oliveira brought with him to the label. Bossa nova artists were absorbed into American show business as back-room players, their roles reduced to adding novelty to the repertoires of celebrities like Perry Como and Sammy Davis, Jr. In short, the nova had been let out of the bossa.
Read the entire article here.
—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalism | Tumblr | Twitter
