Garoto's Music In Words

In a comment regarding the previous entry on the Trio Surdina Story article by Jorge Mello Zé Carlos of Sovaco de Cobra , a great web-resource according Brazilian Music (in Portuguese only, unfortunately), has good news to all interested in the musical legacy of Garoto (Anibal Augusto Sardinha, 1915-1955).

Zé Carlos wrote: "I've started recently a series about "lyricized" music of Garoto. It's intended to review more than 50 tunes (some of them totally new and unreleased) in weekly articles, offering plenty of rich content: histories, rare images and audios. Unfortunalety it's avaliable only in Portuguese by now (an English version is due to be published as soon as possible." It's great to learn that Garoto's legacy in Brazilian music is kept alive and researched in articles as the mentioned, this is a proper way to reach a larger public interested in the subject but perhaps unaware of details regarding the works of Garoto.

Click on headline to read the introductory article by Zé Carlos and follow the links in the article to reach the first three contributions on musical compositions/"lyricized" music of Garoto. As mentioned, the text is in Portuguese only by now, however, readers of this blog will be notified when a version in English is available later.

The latest article by Zé Carlos deals with the tune "Amoroso", a composition originally recorded as an instrumental by Garoto and Carolina Cardoso de Menezes in 1944. On the original recording Garoto played the electric Hawaiian guitar accompanied by the piano of Carolina Cardoso de Menezes. I found a video performance of "Amoroso", here played on cavaquinho accompanied by guitars and recorded at a roda de choro in Rio's famous 'Bandolim de Oro' store

Many of Garoto's compositions from his later years have since become standard repertoire with guitarplayers, one of them is "Lametos do Morro", here performed by an accomplished young guitarist

One of Garoto's compositions has become the piece-de-resistance among choro solo guitarists, the valse-choro "Desvairada", originally played on bandolim by Garoto. Here is a rendition by the guitar wizard, Raphael Rabello that leaves me speechless and running out of words

Jo