Bebel Gilberto

Father and daughter Joao and Bebel Gilberto would be roughly to Brazilian music what Frank and Nancy Sinatra were to American pop. Joao Gilberto's latest, produced by the ubiquitous, one-man Brazilian cultural industry Caetano Veloso, is very much the exercise in languor you'd expect from the man who, along with composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, is largely responsible for creating bossa nova. Accompanied only by his own acoustic guitar strums, Gilberto revisits "Desafinado," one of the Jobim songs he made famous with his collaborations with Stan Getz, and for that matter, most of the album seems a revisiting of sorts. His days as an innovator are long past, and for that he can be forgiven, considering a paternity of such bossa nova standards as "The Girl From Ipanema" and developing and popularising one of the most enduring of all pop sounds. So Joao Voz e Violao is little more than the title suggests: Joao Gilberto's elegantly hushed vocals and the signature guitar strums that brought samba rhythms into a melodic pop context. It's a kiss of a light, summer breeze, which for his fans will be enough. Tanto Tempo, though, has Joao's daughter, Bebel, inheriting from him the impulse to fuse new rhythms and pop possibilities. Where her father created the worldly music of bossa nova by blending jazz, pop, Portuguese folk and samba, Bebel Gilberto has her ears attuned to DJ culture and a world of breakbeats, soft funk and trip-hop mutations to open up a third-generation kind of bossa nova rooted in the past and sounding utterly contemporary. The best example is probably "Samba de Bencao," where Gilberto sings a Baden Powell/Vinicius de Moraes song from the mid-'60s over "Nova," a track from Amon Tobin's Permutations album, and if you'd never heard either before, you'd swear the two parts always belonged together. Other accomplices on the album include Thievery Corporation, who've long worked in the realm of bossa breaks, but aside from Gilberto, the real star is its producer, Suba, a Yugoslavian enamoured of Brazilian music who relocated to Sao Paulo several years ago and died in a fire last November, just as this album was wrapping up. He weaves a breezy, lilting spell on the old bossa nova/easy listening crossover hit of 35 years ago, "Summer Samba," while other collaborations with Gilberto across Tanto Tempo give a glimpse of future global pop