🎵 AotW GREATEST HITS-Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 SP-4252

If you've ever heard or owned this album, how would you rate it?

  • * * * * * (Best)

    Votes: 4 22.2%
  • * * * *

    Votes: 8 44.4%
  • * * * (Average)

    Votes: 5 27.8%
  • * *

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • * (Worst)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • I've never heard this album.

    Votes: 1 5.6%

  • Total voters
    18
Yes, there was - and is! - a US CD out there. Mine, from about the 1990s has CD 3258 as the catalog number on the cover. The CD has the 75021 3258 2 designation on it. Both that and the W. German one are CSG'ed.
 
Kind of fun revisiting this over-16-year-old thread.

I don't think I ever got this album on CD, but I had it on LP. Reading Harry's long-ago post about his anticipation of finally hearing Brasil '66 in "digital" form reminded me of my early attempts at collecting the "Brasil 'xx" tunes on CD.... it was rough going there for a while, and I was so happy when that Very Best of Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 double-CD set came out, considering it had virtually all of the songs I'd been longing to hear on CD. Then not long after that, the Japanese issues of Primal Roots, Stillness and Pais Tropical came out and I still remember being in awe at receiving actual factory CD copies of those albums. Fun times.

I have collected quite a few of Sergio's "best-of's" over the years but I do think Greatest Hits is probably still about the best way to introduce a newbie to the band. If they take a liking to "Mais Que Nada," then you'd know they would enjoy the other B'66 albums.
 
The B66 greatest hits and the TJB Xmas album were the two first "classic" A&M albums I owned on CD, both purchased circa 1985 and found quite by surprise in the CD bin at an audio store I used to frequent. They carried a few imports, so this is how they came into copies of each of these. Can't say I play them at all anymore, but they were an interesting part of my early CD collection.
 
I don't know about the rest of you but to me the Mark of a superb Record is when you never tire of listening to it and you eventually wear it out that was the case for me more times than I can count and this Brasil 66 L.p. and many others fall into that category
 
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My mother bought this on CD back in the early 1990s, as one of her earliest CD purchases for the new Denon CD player that she had bought for the house. I recall hearing this CD as a little child. This was my first intro to Sergio's music.

By the way, this thread is appearing under "Small Circle of Friends", not the Brasil forum.
 
It was re-released in vinyl last year by "Craft Records".

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DKY35HP

71fkqL0pRzL._SX522_.jpg
 
No, Rudy---it's an imprint of Concord. Looks like they're aiming for a high-brow version of Rhino. Interesting stuff: https://concord.com/labels/craft-recordings/
That's good to know. There are so many bogus labels out there, it's hard to keep them all straight. For another site of mine, I've been meaning to compile lists of the good and bad labels. There's one that is still selling a bogus TJB Lonely Bull. I'm surprised Herb's people haven't shut it down yet, but seeing that it is sourced from another country, they would not have much legal clout over there, short of trying to get a behemoth like Amazon or eBay to comply in banning the product.

It's just so hard to buy good vinyl these days, with all the fakes out there. I'm still waiting for some of Bill Evans' recordings to be reissued again on vinyl, and all that are out there now are these fakes, all of them imports. Sad thing is, Analogue Productions has had this 45 RPM set of all of the Riverside recordings, and it is mucho expensive, with no way to buy the albums separately. (This is a licensing issue--they had the same deal with their two Stevie Ray Vaughan box sets, only able to sell the vinyl in complete sets.)

I would hope Craft did a better job on the Fantasy (Riverside, Milestone, etc.) recordings than OJC ever could--they typically grabbed any random master tape off the shelf vs. using an original. That is why the audiophile labels have such a fieid day with all of those. Labels' own reissue divisions rarely do a good job.
 
It seems the A&M label under Universal is now Totally Kaput in Every way as the Brasil 66 greatest hits vinyl reissue seems to show not even as a imprint only name
 
The A&M label seems to only exist for the few artists that are assigned to it, and the occasional Universal release of a classic-artist title like the recent Carpenters RPO release or classic re-releases from Japan. Things like this recent Mendes LP are licensed from Universal to other labels, so it makes sense for them to use their own labels and logos. That's been happening since the 1999 sale from PolyGram to Universal. When the Roger Nichols album was reissued in the UK, they used the Rev-Ola labels and logos.
 
I imagine they'll re-activate if/when it suits them (what does a label mean to the consumer in an era of non-physical media?). Reprise was dead for 11 years when Warners decided to re-activate it.
 
Universal seems to let labels die. Offhand I can't think of any they have revived. They just seem to send all the classic record label imprints to Interscope to die, and milk the cash cow acts as often as they can. They have so much forgotten music in their possession now (at least, when they're not being burned up in fires), most of it will never be reissued in our lifetimes. It costs so little to transfer this stuff to digital and at least get it online for downloading and streaming.
 
Universal sprayed all kinds of Apple, Capitol, and Parlophone labels on recent Beatles releases.

I think they use what they want to, when they want to.
 
Universal seems to let labels die. Offhand I can't think of any they have revived. They just seem to send all the classic record label imprints to Interscope to die, and milk the cash cow acts as often as they can. They have so much forgotten music in their possession now (at least, when they're not being burned up in fires), most of it will never be reissued in our lifetimes. It costs so little to transfer this stuff to digital and at least get it online for downloading and streaming.

They brought back UNI, briefly. And Decca, to an extent (largely for classical releases).
 
Universal sprayed all kinds of Apple, Capitol, and Parlophone labels on recent Beatles releases.

I think they use what they want to, when they want to.
I noticed that when one of the now defunct record stores were carrying The Beatles vinyl reissues the Parlophone and Apple logos along with Universal's logo were very prominent on the jackets the only Capitol logo I saw was on Magical mystery tour which was the only US LP included in the UK canon
 
My mother bought this on CD back in the early 1990s, as one of her earliest CD purchases for the new Denon CD player that she had bought for the house. I recall hearing this CD as a little child. This was my first intro to Sergio's music.

By the way, this thread is appearing under "Small Circle of Friends", not the Brasil forum.

Correction:
This thread does appear under the B'66 forum, as well. (But, somehow, when it appears under the "Small Circle" forum, it doesn't show the visit counts.)
 
This enduringly popular album has had a number of different releases over the years and remains in print on CD to this day.

Somehow, back in the early '70s, I must've rebelled against buying this album as SP-4252 in its gatefold format since I don't own one. And I've learned that the gatefold SP-4252 had two different color schemes: the familiar green as pictured above and a brownish color, a little darker than the Herb Alpert TJB orange color on the series, but brighter than the Baja Marimba Band's entry. I've not seen a real copy of that brownish cover, although our friend Paula had one and had it color-photocopied to prove it to me!

My first copy of the album was the SP-3258 reissue without the gatefold and with the silver label on the record. I seem to have managed to have acquired two of these over the years, both are in excellent shape.

When CDs were just starting to be issued in the mid '80s, I found a copy of the album on CD in the town of Davos, Switzerland. I can still recall my delight at seeing a familiar old friend of an album staring at me in this little, tiny CD store in the Swiss Alps. I bought it then and there, even though I wouldn't see my CD player at home for another two weeks. Still, on occasion, I'd open the case, read the label and the sparse liner credits and imagine how it would sound. It would be my first taste of Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 in a digital format. How happy I was that the track list featured long-time favorites "Like A Lover" and "Pretty World" as well as the rest of the tunes. I was not disappointed on my return home. It was heaven to have this album on CD. At this point in time, there were no Sergio Mendes albums available on CD in the US, so I managed to be among the first to get this one. It seems to me that it was a few years later, probably 1988, until the CD was released here in the States.

I still have that CD, and since then purchased a cheap domestic copy just for comparison. Sonically they are identical. The domestic copy has one less page in the liner fold-over. The European foldout features a larger version of the black & white photo from the cover on the inside.

As I mentoined, this disc has remained in print for all these years. In spite of that, an expanded and updated version came out soon after. In 1986, A&M Europe issued THE VERY BEST OF SERGIO MENDES & BRASIL '66 (A&M 396 907-2). The artwork on this one is the picture of a ladies hand holding a lit cigar. The twelve titles listed above all appeared, in almost the same order, with four additional tracks. Stuck in between "Fool On The Hill" and "Going Out Of My Head" in the sequencing, "Norwegian Wood" was added. Tacked onto the end were: "Wave", "Pais Tropical", and "Watch What Happens." Never mind that "Pais Tropical" was from Brasil '77. That didn't seem to matter.

The same expanded track listing as VERY BEST appeared again in 1999 on the British Spectrum label, now titled THE ESSENTIAL SERGIO MENDES (554 7032). It's not just the same disc though, as all of the tracks were re-mastered giving them a brighter sound than the duller VERY BEST OF.

Harry
...with green albums and CDs strewn all over the place, online...
The Green cover first appeared in the stores when I bought the album. I found the Brown cover years later at a thrift store but never saw it in any store's new album section and have not seen it on CD. I felt that a couple of the selections from "Look Around" could have been left off this in favor of "Wichita Lineman" and "Norwegian Wood" from the "Ye Me Le" album.
 
I assume you would mean in some cases where CD tracks with fade outs cut off sooner than on the LP's. But even in the vinyl arena, I've seen some discrepancies; one mastering studio may have anywhere from 1/4 sec. to :02 sec. pitch variables on songs where the sequence from beginning to end was exactly the same, as in comparison to another mastering studio. Or one studio would have either brighter or duller high end than the other on the same recording. On 45's as well as LP's.

But to tell exactly when something ends on long fadeouts, you really have to have the kind of hearing as like what canines hear.



I think back to The Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", which listed a time of 3:05 even though it was actually 3:46. There've been a few other instances similar thereto, with certain other tunes (presumably a few on A&M; the converse is Booker T. & Priscilla's "The Wedding Song," whose time on the 45 release – AM-1298 – was listed as 9:26, even though my timing came up with somewhere around eight minutes or thereabouts. It was still pretty long, though).
On a Judy Collins album that I have, one song is listed as being 6:29 but it is actually 7:29 so track timings are not always exact.
 
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