Quincy Jones: Big Band Bossa Nova Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		5.0
Video		0.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

Quincy Jones: Big Band Bossa Nova Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 21, 2013

Bossa Nova didn’t really start having a major impact in the United States until 1962, but the beginning strains of the seductive rhythm can be traced back to both samba and more directly to the 1959 classic Black Orpheus. A number of cultural interchanges sent American musicians like Paul Winter and Charlie Byrd to Brasil (as it’s spelled down there) and in 1962 Brasil returned the favor by sending a host of native musicians, including future stars like Sergio Mendes, to perform at Carnegie Hall. While many folks associate “The Girl from Ipanema” as the most iconic song of the Bossa Nova, it was actually another Antonio Carlos Jobim composition, “Desafinado”, which first stormed the United States charts in 1962 and started the sensation of Bossa Nova albums by a glut of American recording artists. Quincy Jones was one of the first into the fray, with his beautiful 1962 outing Big Band Bossa Nova, which in fact includes “Desafinado” among its cuts, along with “Soul Bossa Nova”, a song that has long been associated with “Q” and which has matriculated into all sorts of multimedia enterprises, from advertisements to Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.

Big Band Bossa Nova doesn’t traffic solely in what was then the still nascent development of the genre. Jones gives the evergreen “On the Street Where You Live” a Samba treatment, and other tunes tend to veer more into Mambo territory. The album is notable for its stellar array of sidemen, including Lalo Schifrin, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Phil Woods, Clark Terry and Jim Hall. The track listing for the album is:

1. Soul Bossa Nova
2. Boogie Stop Shuffle
3. Desafinado
4. Mahna de Carnaval
5. Se E Tarde Me Pardon
6. On the Street Where You Live
7. Samba de Una Nota
8. Lalo Bossa Nova
9. Serenata
10. Chega de Saudade
11. A Taste of Honey

Quincy Jones: Big Band Bossa Nova Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Aside from the static menu, there is no video content on this disc.

Quincy Jones: Big Band Bossa Nova Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

All of the new audio Blu-rays from Universal Music Group's many imprints include the following verbiage:

What is High Fidelity Pure Audio?

High Fidelity Pure Audio combines the vast storage space and bandwidth of a Blu-ray disc with the original high quality recorded material to create a uniquely luxurious listening experience. We take audio in its purest and uncompressed form and master it onto a Blu-ray disc, retaining all of its original sound range and character to deliver you audio as it was meant to be heard. Because none of the disc is used up by video content and we are able to offer audio at its purest form.

Once again the issue of "vast storage space" is ironic, since this Blu-ray uses a miniscule portion of its allotted space and, like the two Nirvana releases UMG recently released, includes three redundant audio options. (The LPCM 2.0 track plays at a steady 4.6mbps while the DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD versions play out in the mid-3 range.)

This issue aside, the audio here is simply phenomenal, though it tends to be a little on the "wet" side, as was the tradition with Mercury recordings of that era. Separation is fantastic, with Jones' massed brass often blasting out of the left channel, and the propulsive rhythm section relegated to the right channel. Clarity is exceptional, revealing an incredible warmth to elements like Hall's lustrous guitar. Fidelity is top notch and dynamic range is nicely wide and nuanced.

Quincy Jones: Big Band Bossa Nova Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are offered on this disc.

Quincy Jones: Big Band Bossa Nova Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As some of you may already be aware, UMG has evidently started to sonically watermark its audio downloads, something I personally think is an abhorrent practice. There's a lot of chatter about the death of physical media, and admittedly audio Blu-ray is a tiny, tiny part of the market, but releases like this deserve to be supported, especially when the alternative is highly compressed downloads that have been further bowdlerized by watermarking in order to prevent piracy. The Bossa Nova "reached out and touched" me when I was literally a toddler, and it has never let go. Big Band Bossa Nova is a wonderfully inventive and musically adventurous album, and it sounds spectacular in its new HFPA version. Highly recommended.