Year: 2018

Do you keep checking your inbox to see if Bloomsbury has emailed you back about your 33 1/3 proposal? Worry not! We’re chipping away at the massive pile of submissions we received, and we promise that yours is getting the due diligence it deserves. Thank you again to everyone who submitted and entrusted us with their brilliant ideas. From Janelle Monáe to Frank Sinatra, we have so many ways we could take this series. We are still hard at work looking through all of them, though, so please be patient…

87 years old, alone, fragile and in debt: in his final post, Bryan McCann reflects on how the musical genius that is João Gilberto came to meet his tragic destiny João Gilberto is the King Lear of bossa nova. As this once-majestic hero nears the end of his life, he is bereft and alone. His children bring battle against one another in the courts of law and in the press. Former allies (ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, ex-partners, and ex-lawyers arguing ex-parte) claim to represent his interests by pursuing their own. Old friends…

It’s publication day for Getz/Gilberto! Today Bryan McCann introduces us to a “masterpiece” album that remains little known even in Brazil, yet deserves our attention… Sometimes great things come from inauspicious beginnings. The Adventurers, a 1970 film directed by Lewis Gilbert, based on a Harold Robbins potboiler, is an agglomeration of every imaginable stereotype of brutal, exotic Latin America. Although the film is loosely based on events in the Dominican Republic, it is set in Cortoguay, a fictional country where the ragged campesino rebellion of the Mexican Revolution, the tropical splendor of…

Today, 33 1/3 Brazil author Bryan McCann explores how bossa nova links to two other important cultural developments in mid-’50s Brazil: air travel and the construction of the “airplane city”, Brasília. Bossa nova came from Rio de Janeiro—directly from its beaches, nightclubs and middle-class apartment buildings and indirectly from its downtown streets and hillside favelas. But because it emerged when it did—in the late 1950s—it is inextricably linked to two phenomena that pull it away from the specificity of Rio de Janeiro in different directions: the construction of Brasília and…

Bryan McCann, author of João Gilberto and Stan Getz’s Getz/Gilberto, is guest-blogging for us all week. Today he delves into the relationship between bossa nova and politics, asking: what hope does the music hold for Brazilians in the current political climate? Getz/Gilberto was recorded in March of 1963 but not released until late February of 1964. By the time it came out, Brazil was in the midst of political crisis: tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets of Brazil’s major cities, demanding the ouster of President João Goulart. In…