1. October (Outubro) (Milton Nascimento/Fernando Brant)
  2. Round ‘N’ Round (Gira Girou) (Milton Nascimento)
  3. Faithful Brother (Irmão de Fé) (Milton Nascimento)
  4. To Say Goodbye (Prá Dizer Adeus) (Edu Lobo/Lani Hall/Torquato Neto)
  5. From the Hot Afternoon (Das Tardes Mais Sós) (Milton Nascimento)
  6. Circles (Edu Lobo)
  7. Martha & Romao (Marta & Ramão) (Edu Lobo)
  8. Catavento (Milton Nascimento)
  9. Latin Chant (Canto Latino) (Milton Nascimento/Ray Guerra)
  10. Crystal Illusions (Memorias de Marte Sare) (Edu Lobo/Lani Hall/Gianfrancesco Guarnieri)
    Bonus
  11. Gira Girou (Round ‘N’ Round) – alt take
  12. Faithful Brother – alt take
  13. From the Hot Afternoon – alt take
  14. Catavento – alt take
  15. Canto Latino – alt take
  16. From the Hot Afternoon – alt take

Paul Desmond – alto sax
Dorio Ferreira – guitar (01-03, 05, 08, 09, 11-16)
Edu Lobo – guitar (04, 06, 07, 10), vocals (06, 10)
Ron Carter – bass
Airto Moreira – drums, percussion

Tracks 01-10, add:
Marky Markowitz, Marvin, Stamm – trumpet, flugelhorn  
Paul Faulise – bass trombone
Jimmy Buffington – French horn
Phil Bodner, George Marge – sax, clarinet, oboe
Don Hammond, Hubert Laws – flute, alto flute
Stan Webb, Jr. – flute, alto flute, percussion  
Pat Rebillot – keyboards
Jack Jennings – percussion
Lewis Eley, Paul Gershman, George Ockner, Eugene Orloff, Raoul Poliakin, Max Pollikoff, Matthew
              Raimondi, Sylvan Shulman, Avram Weiss – violin
Charles McCracken, George Ricci – cello
Margaret Ross – harp
Wanda De Sah [Wanda Sá] – vocals (04, 06, 10)

Produced by Creed Taylor

Arranged and conducted by Don Sebesky

Tracks 01-10: Originally issued as A&M SP 3024
              also issued as DE LA CALIDA TARDE (A&M HDAS 371-44 [Spain])

Tracks 11-16: Originally issued on Verve 314 543 487-2

Recorded on June 24 (01, 06, 07) and 25 (03, 04, 10, 12) and August 13 (05, 13, 16) and 14 (02, 08, 09, 11, 14, 15), 1969, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

01-03, 05, 08, 11-14 and 16 published by Almo Music Corporation (ASCAP)
04, 06, 07 and 10 published by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. (BMI)
09 and 15 published by Universal Music-MGB Songs (ASCAP)

(P) 1969, 2000

“I’ve become an arch conservative,” Paul Desmond said in Leonard Feather’s The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the 60s. “It is becoming fashionable to sound bad. I suspect that the only thing that will really save jazz…is the appearance of somebody who will make melodic jazz more fashionable than it seems to be now.”1

With From the Hot Afternoon, Paul Desmond made arch-conservatism sound more beautiful than liberal tastes could have ever imagined. This incredibly lovely album is a work of musical alchemy and performative wizardry. If Creed Taylor was responsible for the unaccountably symbiotic combination of the ever-lyrical alto saxophonist Paul Desmond with the empathic arranger Don Sebesky and the incisively poetic songwriters Milton Nascimento and Edu Lobo, then he truly is an alchemist extraordinaire. From the Hot Afternoon is an artistic achievement on every level: program, process, performance and production.

The program for Paul Desmond’s second A&M/CTI album is given over entirely to only two composers, Milton Nascimento, who doesn’t perform here as Desmond had hoped,2 and Edu Lobo (b. 1943), whose songs featured on such past releases as Herbie Mann’s Glory of Love (“Upa, Neguinho”), Tamba 4’s Samba Blim (“Reza”), J & K’s Betwixt & Between (“Casa Forte”) and Walter Wanderley’s When It Was Done (“Ponteio”). Certainly, both composers are Brazilian – but their music duly received significant coverage far outside of Brazil and far beyond the borders of Brazilian music. They are composers of the first-order, regardless of their ethnicity, and have both contributed rich and compelling songs to the canons of jazz and popular music. For Desmond’s record, Nascimento contributes six titles (three of which also appeared on Courage), including the title tune, while Lobo contributes four titles, as well as guitar on these four tunes and occasional vocals.

The process found Don Sebesky (and not Claus Ogerman, as the 1989 CD release indicates) working his magic on some particularly melodic tunes. This was Sebesky’s second outing with the saxophonist, but the compositions with their unusual changes provided a bit more of a challenge to the ever-adaptable arranger.3 Returning from the previous year’s Summertime were bassist Ron Carter, drummer/percussionist Airto Moreira and percussionist Jack Jennings. New to the proceedings were Tamba 4’s Dorio Ferreira (on the Nascimento pieces) and Edu Lobo (who had briefly relocated to the United States for the occasion) on guitar and Pat Rebillot, early in his recording career, on occasional keyboards.

The performance is breathtaking and certainly one of the finest and most pleasantly consistent in Paul Desmond’s mesmerizing body of work. If Desmond is, as he described himself, “like a dry martini,” this is his smoothest, most delectable drink on record. The saxophonist shines on “To Say Goodbye” (with vocals by Wanda Sá), “Circles” (with vocals by Sá and Lobo) and the always welcome “Catavento” (with the beautifully embedded “St. Thomas” quote near the song’s end).

Together, Desmond and Sebesky weave a most enchanting spell, significantly on “Latin Chant” and “Crystal Illusions,” but also on “October,” “Round n’ Round,” “Faithful Brother,” “From the Hot Afternoon” and “Martha & Romao.” Curiously, the album elicited no singles, though several selections might have caught on.

The bonus tracks included on the 2000 CD release of the album are barely “alternative”; they daringly display Paul Desmond, without Sebesky’s backdrops, in differing states of grace. The real pleasure of these tracks is hearing the more assertive interplay of Desmond’s band, namely guitarists Dorio Ferreira and Edu Lobo, bassist Ron Carter and drummer João Palma. Creed Taylor’s production is splendid and ranks among the best in the A&M/CTI series.

One suspects the helping hand here – not to mention elsewhere – of the uncredited impresario Eumir Deodato, as formidable a talent as a talent scout and an always inventive collaborator, whether out front or in the back. Outstanding as it is, the album somehow seemed to escape the notice of many at the time.

From the Hot Afternoon finally received scant attention in the CD generation: “A beauty,” wrote Richard S. Ginell in the All Music Guide to Jazz. “It sounds so effortless…until you try it yourself.” 4 The uptight writers at The Penguin Guide to Jazz seemed to think Desmond was “in some peril…of making a pop album” but conceded it is “a beautiful record…sensitively arranged and immaculately produced and engineered.”5

Yet, for all its artistry, it’s easy to hear how a craftsman such as Desmond might tire of this sort of thing, however successful, after a while. The saxophonist would continue down the same path for the following year’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, a remarkable tribute to Paul Simon’s music, arranged beautifully by Don Sebesky.

Later recordings would all find the alto saxophonist back in the quartet format he perfected during the sixties. Desmond would come back to CTI for two albums (and four sideman appearances) in the mid-seventies and wax his last records for former CTI-staffer John Snyder’s labels, including duos with Dave Brubeck and two records with Desmond’s own quartet. Paul Desmond died from lung cancer in May 1977. He was only 52 years old.

About the cover: “Paul Desmond” (1969, New York): Sam Antupit’s design for Paul Desmond’s second A&M/CTI album is his original, but as on Tell It Like It Is, the song titles are listed on the front cover – probably to suggest the programming shift from straight jazz to more Brazilian fare. Pete Turner’s photo of Desmond backlights the saxophonist to catch the reflection of light off his glasses. Desmond’s serious intellectual countenance here is a stark contrast to the typically breezy and playful elegance he brings to the music, particularly on this well-loved collection of Brazilian tunes. The cover image, however elegant, is a bit of a surprise given the pictorial quality of the album’s title.

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Endnotes:

  1. Feather, Leonard, The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the 60s (Da Capo, 1966), p. 107. Feather, it should be noted, is most likely paraphrasing a Desmond interview with Dan Morgenstern, “The Witty Paul Desmond,” in the September 9, 1965, issue of DownBeat. Nowhere in the interview does Desmond say “It is becoming fashionable to sound bad.” ↩︎
  2. Ramsey, Doug, Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (Parkside Publications, Seattle, 2005), p. 257. Also, Leonard Feather, Melody Maker, March 22, 1969, p, 12. ↩︎
  3. As Doug Ramsey points out in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, From the Hot Afternoon is Paul Desmond’s first outing with strings since Desmond Blue (1961). It is also the first overtly Brazilian program since the saxophonist’s Bossa Antigua (1964), despite the presence of bossa nova elements on all Desmond records as far back as Take Ten (1963). “In a number of conversations,” wrote Ramsey, “[Desmond] told me how he regretted not having boarded the bossa nova bandwagon years earlier. He thought he might have been able to help steer it away from the commercial exploitation that resulted in bossa nova knock-offs of every farfetched description, among them Edyie Gorme’s hit ‘Blame It on the Bossa Nova.’” (Ramsey, p. 237) ↩︎
  4. All Music Guide to Jazz, edited by Vladimir Bogdanov, Chris Woodstra and Stephen Thomas Erlewine (Backbeat Books, 2002), p. 328. ↩︎
  5. Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings – Ninth Edition (Penguin Books, 2008), p. 369. Given the editors’ take on crossover jazz in general and CTI in particular (when they address it all), it’s difficult to say if the adjectives here are sincerely intended. When the writers say this album “resembles the bouncy Latin style Charles Lloyd was making a commercial success around the same time,” one wonders if they listened to the record at all – or anything by Charles Lloyd, for that matter. ↩︎