Track Listing

1. Desafinado
2. Samba Dees Days
3. O Pato
4. Samba Triste
5. Samba de uma Nota So
6. E Luxo So
7. Baia
8. Desafinado [45 RPM Issue] - Charlie Byrd, Stan Getz

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8823 in Music
• Released on: 1997-09-16
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .21 pounds

From Amazon.co.uk
This is the album that launched the samba craze in the United States in the early 1960s and thus was responsible for the bossa nova appearing in any movie scene that required an atmosphere of fun and cocktails. Not that one should blame either Stan Getz or Charlie Byrd for the appearance of lazy directors or indeed lazy musicians who took up the craze. For Jazz Samba rollocks along with Getz's tenor and Byrd's guitar and if it in truth isn't exactly Latin music then, frankly, who cares? It swings. It includes "Desafinado", which in a shortened form was a big hit at the time, but was improved upon a year later when Getz recruited an unknown singer called Astrud Gilberto to record "A Girl From Ipanema" (available on Getz/Gilberto). That was in the then future, in 1963 Jazz Samba shuffled along into a nation's hearts and their dancing shoes. --Phil Brett

Amazon.com essential recording
Guitarist Charlie Byrd was invited to travel and play in Brazil during a cultural goodwill tour sponsored by the Kennedy administration in 1961. He was completely enamoured by the music, and when he returned, he headed straight for the recording studio to make the now classic Jazz Samba. Collaborating with Stan Getz on tenor sax and backed by a band that included Gene Byrd (bass, guitar), Keter Betts (bass), and Buddy Deppenschmidt and Bill Reichenbach (drums), Byrd forged a new and brilliant sound. American record companies were to churn out hundreds of watered bossa-pop albums that have since given the style its lounge-addled image, but this album stands as a tribute to the vitality and adaptability of jazz. --Louis Gibson

Chronique amazon.fr
Stan Getz et le guitariste Charlie Byrd cosignent, en 1962, une ode à la samba et à la bossa-nova. Ils rencontrent alors un succès qui ne sera jamais démenti. Un rythme enlevé sur de belles ballades, teintées par la permanence du souffleur west-coastien et la présence agile du guitariste. Là se tissent les fils absolus de l'écheveau sud-américain. Précurseurs du jazz latino, les deux compères nous font découvrir ces rythmes redoublés à la chaleur du sud, avec la précision et le lyrisme de deux grands du jazz. --Jean-Michel Schlosser

Customer Reviews

one of the top-five best best records I own
This is an astonishingly beautiful, rhythmic, melodic, upbeat, and tender record. Truly, it is a perfect album. In my opinion, many bossa records are ruined with washy and often .... string arrangements that add needless clutter to the music. That isn't the case here. No sir. This music is made from an upright bass, percussion, Charlie on classical guitar, and Stan on sax. The arrangements are so solid and intricate - and both Byrd and Getz play masterfully. (Stan is always brilliant and smoothe and silk - and on this record he does what he does very well.) However, this was my first introduction to Charlie Byrd. The man has soul - and isn't afraid to bend some notes and play without a net. Charlie plays like a man posessed. If you like bossa at all - you need to buy this record. It is "the one".

BOSSA NOVA IS NOT A STAN GETZ THING!!
Many think that this was "the first bossa nova album"... of course that this was the 1st album to introduce bossa nova to north americans, but stan getz and charlie byrd had to learn that from someone else.. they DID NOT invented the genre... if you want to listen to some true bossa nova, from one of the greatest brazilian musicians, the father of bossa nova, try some albums from the maestro TOM JOBIM!

Tenor Saxophone and Acoustic Guitar Duets For All Seasons
Go to your nearest music store or get on the Net and buy this album right now. Skip dinner, skip the latest episode of "Survivor," skip tonight's poker game, do yourself a favor, go buy this album. Incredible as it seems to me now, this is the 3rd album I ever bought back in 1963, after Martin Denny's "Quiet Village" and Joan Baez's "In Concert," and it just blew me away. I just played this album about an hour ago and it still takes my breath away because it is so astonishingly beautiful, melodic, rhythmic and completely original. Jazz Samba is firmly ensconced in my own personal Pantheon of the greatest pop albums ever made. I mean right there with Sergeant Pepper, Fanfare for the Common Man, Graceland, September of My Years, Kind of Blue, Court and Spark, Highway 61 Revisited, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, Waylon Jenning's Dreamin' My Dreams, Gordon Lightfoot's Saturday Concert, and Eric Clapton's Unplugged. No matter what kind of music you like---classical, symphonic, swing, country, rock, cool jazz, Dixieland jazz, calypso, soul, hip-hop, bluegrass, folk---you are going to love this music and the bossa nova form this album put on the contemporary musical roadmap. It is interesting to keep in mind that Jazz Samba and the sweet guitar music of Charlie Byrd and rich breathy vibrato of Stan Getz's saxophone caught the public's attention so thoroughly when it was released that it was the number 1 album, across all genres, for several weeks in 1962.

So, get set for one of the most memorable musical experiences of your life. You'll be hearing a most unusual marriage of tenor saxophone with acoustic guitar, with the two congenial partners exchanging the most engaging musical conversations imaginable, weaving in and out of each other's solos with immaculate beauty and terrific melodies you'll be humming for the rest of your time on this alternately amusing and perplexing little planet. Let the rhythm of Brazil, the great songwriting of Antonio Carlos Jobim and other bossa nova tunesmiths, and American jazz virtuosity waft thru your home or car stereo and let Jazz Samba introduce you to messrs. Byrd, Getz, Gene Byrd (bass, guitar), Keter Betts (bass), Buddy Deppenschmidt (drums) and Bill Reichenbach (drums). In addition to all of its other attributes, this album has an extraordinary intimacy about it; you feel as though you're sitting right in the middle of this small 5-piece band as they trade off solos with each other. Their warm, breezy, haunting musicianship will make you a bossa nova fan for life, and I genuinely believe that you will know that you have experienced an archetype. There are other great, great bossa nova albums from this era, among them "Getz-Gilberto," "Black Orpheus," "Jazz Samba Encore," "Bossa Nova Pelos Passaros," but this is the one that shook the world. Forty+plus years later, let it shake yours. Among the great attributes of this album is that it possesses two of the loveliest, most unforgettable songs ever recorded: "Desafinado" and "The One Note Samba," both of which were written by Brazil's great composer, Jobim. This gifted songwriter (lovingly called "Tom" by the Brazilians) died in 1994 at the age of 66; Stan Getz died in 1991 at the age of 64; Charlie Byrd died in 1999 at 74 (one month shy of seeing the new millenium). But they live again through this timeless album, which by the way, was recorded in ONE DAY day on February 13, 1962, in Pierce Hall at the All Soul's Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C. Once hearing Jazz Samba, you will agree that this hall was clearly an acoustically-warm, perfect venue for making a ground-breaking album. An excellent sanctuary for Stan, Charlie and friends to get together to materialize a music form that was very new to American ears and something that still sounds like a unique type of gospel to me.