Obrigado Brazil

After being underwhelmed following the first couple of listens, I decided to step back and take stock. What was right here, and what was wrong?

What's right is that this is a very listenable overview of Brazilian music, providing a staggeringly wide-ranging selection of this country's hugely diverse musical landscape--everything from Heitor Villa-Lobos to Pixinguinha to Camargo Mozart Guarnieri to Antonio Carlos Jobim to Egberto Gismonti. To even attempt to effectively present such a panorama requires a certain amount of chutzpah; to pull it off requires genius, which, I'm sorry to say, this disc lacks. Nevertheless, listeners unfamiliar with the richness of Brazilian music will find here a decent introduction.

Alas, that's also what's wrong with it--it's little more than an introduction, a buffet, albeit, a not untasty one. To retain any kind of sense of musical continuity and flow in the presentation of such an enormous variety of indiginous musics, an artist must engage in a trade-off, a kind of dumbing down of the inherent wild eccentricities of this remarkable music, a relegation of the delicacies to the musical equivalent of a steam table. Yes, this disc is unfailingly pretty, but it lacks the madcap, unruly beauty that is at the heart of so much of this music. For example, Egberto Gismonti, a man who spent several years in the Northern Brazilian jungle researching the ethnic music of that region resulting in such spectacular discs as Danca Das Cabecas, Sanfona, and Sol Do Meio Dia has never sounded so sedate (although there's some of the old fire and earthiness in Salvador, the concluding cut).

If this tempts listeners into exploring the glories and richness of Brazilian music, great. But it must be recognized that this is, at best, a sampler, and that it pales in comparison to the real thing. 3 and 3/4 stars would be about right, I'd say.