Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66--TV Performance of "The Joker"

lj

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Here is new video of Brasil 66 featuring "The Joker". A great song from the mid 1960s Broadway show "The Roar of the Greasepaint The Smell of the Crowd" with lyrics and music by Bricusse and Newley. An amazing number of high quality songs came from this show and made it on Easy Listening/MOR radio stations back then. For example, Tony Bennett sang "Who Can I Turn To", Steve Lawrence sang "On a Wonderful Day Like Today", Vikki Carr sang "Look at That Face", Lanie Kazan sang "Feeling Good", and dancer/singer Elaine Dunn performed "Nothing Can Stop Me Now". Up through the 1960s and ending in that decade, MOR radio heavily featured these great Broadway tunes as recorded by the great MOR singers of the day, many of which became pop standards. I have many of these records. Fortunately, those people who don't own these records can hear this kind of music on YouTube. How I loved MOR music from the 1960s! I remember how the CBS TV game show from New York--Password--had many Broadway performers on the show during the day just before they would perform live at night. Password was a terrific word association game show hosted by Allen Ludden back in the 1960s. Episodes can be seen on YouTube. They are still fun to watch.

 
Broadway and Bossa Nova did the heavy lifting in keeping adult music alive for radio and records in the 60s.
 
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Michael--Your comment is well taken. For example, consider the huge Broadway hits of the 60s: Barbra Streisand "People" from "Funny Girl", Louis Armstrong "Hello Dolly" from "Hello Dolly", Ed Ames "My Cup Runneth Over" from "I Do I Do", Robert Goulet "If Ever I Would Leave You" from "Camelot", Sammy Davis Jr. "What Kind of Fool Am I" from "Stop the World I Want to Get Off", Eydie Gorme "If He Walked Into My Life" from "Mame" and the TJB had "Cabaret" from "Cabaret" and "If I Were I Were a RIch Man" from "Fiddler on the Roof" and the list goes on and on for lesser-known Broadway songs that helped fill the 12 tracks needed for MOR long play albums. Yes indeed, thank goodness for Broadway and Bossa Nova songs that kept adult music alive in the 1960s. And to think that the source of this great music came from basically two cities--Rio de Janeiro and New York City.
 
What struck me about this clip was how Lani absolutely dominates it. Though she doesn't get a close-up (nobody does) The camera zeros in on her and she sings directly into it with her big dark eyes. Bopping and swinging her hair, it's the liveliest I've seen her in her Brasil '66 TV appearances. Poor Janis - minus her attention-grabbing "Christmas-Tree-ball earrings"- is off to the side, and barely makes an impression.
 
What struck me about this clip was how Lani absolutely dominates it. Though she doesn't get a close-up (nobody does) The camera zeros in on her and she sings directly into it with her big dark eyes. Bopping and swinging her hair, it's the liveliest I've seen her in her Brasil '66 TV appearances. Poor Janis - minus her attention-grabbing "Christmas-Tree-ball earrings"- is off to the side, and barely makes an impression.
Oh she made an impression on me. She must have been very new to the group at this point with some still unfamiliarity with the material. Watch her start to mouth the vocals before they even start (at about 0:15). Later on, she's miming with Lani when there's only one single voice singing. I noticed this before on another video, maybe one on the Sergio Doc.

But yes, Lani is into it and has the performance nailed - well, I guess she should, she sang all the vocals on the record!
 
There are lots of unsynchronized moments in this one. I like when the big cymbal crash happens at 1:42 but the drummer doesn't hit the cymbal nearly hard enough to make such a sound. There is more percussion than there are percussion instruments, too. Sergio, on the other hand, really has his piano part down.
 
This is one song that got a lot of airplay on AM radio in 1967-1969 despite being a B side.
As it was the flip side of the first A&M single for Brasil '66, I'm not at all surprised that the radio stations would flip the big, new "Mas Que Nada" record over to see what other goodies might be there.

And we can't ignore the language thing either, as "Mas Que Nada" had zero English, while "The Joker" was all-English.
 
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