1. Wave
  2. The Red Blouse
  3. Look to The Sky
  4. Batidinha
  5. Triste
  6. Mojave
  7. Dialogo
  8. Lamento (Lamento No Morro) (Antonio Carlos Jobim/Vinicius de Moraes)
  9. Antigua
  10. Captain Bacardi

All songs written by Antonio Carlos Jobim, except as indicated.

Antonio Carlos Jobim – piano, guitar, harpsichord and vocal (08)
Ron Carter – bass
Claudio Slon – drums
Dom Um Romão, Bobby Rosengarden – percussion
Urbie Green, Jimmy Cleveland – trombone
Joseph Singer – French horn
Ray Beckenstein, Romeo Penque, Jerome Richardson – flute, piccolo
Bernard Eichen, Lewis Eley, Paul Gershman, Emanuel Green, Louis Haber, Julius Held, Leo Kruczek, Harry
              Lookofsky, Joseph Malignaggi, Gene Orloff, Raoul Poliakin, Irving Spice, Louis Stone – violin
Abe Kessler, Charles McCracken, George Ricci, Harvey Shapiro – cello

Produced by Creed Taylor

Arranged and conducted by Claus Ogerman 

Originally issued as A&M LP 2002 (mono) and A&M SP 3002 (stereo)
              also issued as WAVES (A&M SA & M 2010 [Brazil]), OLA (A&M/Hispavox HAD 371-12 [Spain])
              and A&M AMS-1020 [Mexico]) and OLA DE MAR (A&M 5076/6076 [Argentina])

Recorded on May 22, 23, 24 and June 15, 1967, at Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

All titles published by Corcovado Music Corp. (BMI), except 08published by Corcovado Music Corp./V. M. Enterprises, Inc. (BMI)

(P) 1967

Although Wave is the second in the series of A&M/CTI releases, the album’s sessions represent the earliest of the label’s recordings. Arguably among the finest recordings of all time, Wave reunited Antonio Carlos Jobim (1927-94) with Creed Taylor for the first time in three years. During that time, Jobim, known as “Tom” in his native Brazil, became a household name and a worldwide sensation. Today, Jobim is not only one of the founders of the internationally successful bossa-nova movement but one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century. Jobim first captured worldwide attention with the score to Black Orpheus (Orfeo Negro) (1959), on which he shares credit with composer/guitarist/singer Luiz Bonfá. In 1962, Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd kicked off bossa nova-mania with the Jobim-authored and Grammy Award-winning hit “Desafinado” (a.k.a. “Off Key”). Then came Jobim’s “The Girl from Ipanema,” originally heard on the 1964 Stan Getz/João Gilberto album Getz/Gilberto, featuring Gilberto’s then-wife, Astrud, on vocals. The song topped the charts, challenging the Beatles’ chart hegemony, and became one of the most popular songs of all time. Bossa nova became all the rage and many of its finest recordings were helmed by Creed Taylor at Verve in the early sixties.

Wave finds Jobim working again with arranger Claus Ogerman (1930-2016), who’d also arranged Jobim’s solo debut, the Taylor-produced The Composer of Desafinado Plays in 1963. Back then, nobody thought the German-born Ogerman, who worked mostly on pop records at the time, possessed the right temperament for Jobim. The always intuitive Creed Taylor, however, knew the match was right from the start. Writer Gene Lees recalls Taylor telling him, “from all the sessions [Creed] had done with Claus, he simply knew he could do it and do it superbly.” Taylor told Lees that “[Ogerman] knew space and he had the taste. Just because he was doing commercial stuff, and doing it very effectively, didn’t mean he couldn’t turn around and do a completely different kind of material. I knew he was right for the Jobim album.”1 Indeed, the result revealed an unexpected artistic chemistry and a mutually beneficial musical marriage. No one ever worked as intuitively with Jobim or with such sublime subtlety as Ogerman. For his part, Jobim never responded elsewhere with the artistry and musicianship Ogerman brought out in him. Their collaborations rank with those of Miles Davis and Gil Evans or Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle (the latter two also collaborated with Jobim). In the intervening years, Jobim and Ogerman came together again for the legendary Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim (1967) and A Certain Mr. Jobim (1967), released shortly before Wave.

Opening with the track that gives the album its name, the familiar “Wave” is both a bossa-nova and jazz standard – easily the last of its kind. “Wave” is one of Jobim’s most harmonically complex and, surprisingly, most widely covered songs, with over 500 recordings listed in Tom Lord’s jazz discography. Interestingly, Creed Taylor first recorded the song for Walter Wanderley’s Verve album Batucada – one week before recording the composer’s version heard here. Jobim later added his own lyrics to the song and covered it with Frank Sinatra for the singer’s 1969 Sinatra & Company album. Ogerman, himself a great admirer of the song, encouraged Oscar Peterson to record “Wave” the following year for their lovely collaboration Motions & Emotions2 – a performance even Jobim approved of. Ogerman also provided new charts of the tune for João Gilberto’s Amoroso (1977) and for Jobim again on Terra Brasilis (1980).

Another standard heard here, “Triste” (Sad) was written by Jobim in 1966 while in Los Angeles waiting for Frank Sinatra to return from Barbados for their recording together. Jobim and Sinatra would ultimately record “Triste” together on Sinatra & Company (1969) while Ogerman, as he did with “Wave,” arranged the piece again for the 1977 Gilberto album and the aforementioned 1980 Jobim album (where Jobim sings his own lyrics to the song). “Lamento” (a.k.a. “Lamento do Morro”) joins “Wave” and “Triste” as one of the album’s most memorable tracks. It also stands out as the album’s only vocal, with Jobim tenderly singing Vinícius de Moraes’ haunting Portuguese-language lyric. Originally written for the 1956 stage play “Orfeu da Conceição,” “Lamento do Morro” was left out of Marcel Camus’ 1959 film adaptation, Black Orpheus. The song was repurposed for the 1967 film Garôta de Ipanema, in a performance by singer Nara Leão with future A&M/CTI recording artists Tamba 4. This “Lamento” is an absolutely lovely performance and the cornerstone of the album’s timelessness.

It’s hard to fault any of the music here; so much of it is simply wonderful. Just because some of these tunes can only be heard here (“Mojave,” “Antigua”), it is worth hearing…over and over again. Perfectly sublime accompaniment comes courtesy of the flutes (particularly on “Wave,” “Mojave” and “Antigua”), trombonist Urbie Green (“Look to the Sky,” “Triste,” “Lamento” and “Captain Bacardi”) and, most especially, bassist Ron Carter (particularly on “The Red Blouse,” “Lamento” and “Captain Bacardi”), the most sensitive of collaborators and one who would go on to contribute to many of Jobim’s subsequent recordings through his final album Antonio Brasileiro (1995).

Wave was a Top 5 jazz album, reaching 114 on the Billboard 200 chart; however, the album set the bar so high that none of Jobim’s later albums could match it in artistry or popularity – though Jobim’s 1970 CTI album Stone Flower came mighty close. Even engineer Rudy Van Gelder cited it as one of his most memorable recordings, calling it, in a word, “perfection.”3 Jobim would go on to record only two more albums with Creed Taylor while Jobim and Ogerman would further collaborate on the Ogerman-produced Jobim (1973) and Urubu (1976) and, finally, on Terra Brasilis. Curiously, though, Wave is the last of the many sessions Taylor did with Ogerman; however, the arranger would score beautiful post-CTI dates for Stanley Turrentine, Freddie Hubbard and, most significantly, George Benson.

About the cover: : “Giraffe” (1964 – Amboseli National Park, Kenya). Probably Pete Turner’s best-known and most-beloved photograph, “Giraffe” was selected for the Photography in the Fine Arts exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the same year of this album’s release in 1967. For unknown reasons, A&M reissued the album four years later with a green backdrop instead of the photographer’s intended red. The 80s-era CD release of the album maintained the green cover, while Japanese CD reissues typically use the red cover. Both have their admirers. Note the reverence Jobim’s photo gets on the back cover.

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Endnotes:

  1. Gene Lees, “Claus Ogerman,” liner notes to Claus Ogerman – The Man Behind the Music (Boutique 524 867-2, 2002). ↩︎
  2. My liner notes for the 2005 CD release of Oscar Peterson’s Motions & Emotions can be read here. ↩︎
  3. Rudy Van Gelder, “Interview: Rudy Van Gelder (Part 5),” interview by Marc Myers, Jazzwax.com, February 17, 2012. ↩︎