The bossa nova bangs are back.

It's 2021.07.01 on the lunar calendar today.

Hello! Welcome to what appears to be a Brazilian music edition of the newsletter.

Before we get into the bangs, let me share a whispered epiphany I had in the past month on the second four-something AM composing session for client work: How come I can't will myself to get up at 4AM for my own projects? After all, I'm my most important client—the one I have to live with for the rest of my life.   ❕

This week, I'm returning to Music Academy of the West, as a judge for digital content/music videos from Fellows this time. They're a creative classical bunch so I look forward to reviewing the submissions.

Finally, I'd like to announce to you, to myself, that the bossa nova bangs are back. I took great care to ensure my hair would look just right but it was so windy at the outdoor venue that it mattered not.

Live Performance Videos

I had so much fun playing with Marcel (guitar), Léo (drums), and Dre (bass) last month. After an exceptionally long stretch of not performing in real time with others, I had reached the point where I began wondering how my brain even processes chords and knows which note to have my vocal folds produce ... but it did and appeared to function more or less normally. There was excessive internal dialogue as I was performing though so hopefully I'll get to singing out more to iron that out. But even the hiccups of live performance, which I had forgotten about, were amusing to me.

I'll add videos from the performance weekly to my bossa nova playlist over the next couple months. To start are "How Insensitive" (check out the stunning setting from the lighting team at the Segerstrom) and "K.K. Bossa."

"K.K. Bossa" is well-loved in Animal Crossing and I thought this song that has brought joy to so many deserved a proper cover backed by Sergio Mendes' rhythm section. I also tried my hand at writing lyrics in Portuguese for it 🤓

Rítmica Workshop 

Rítmica is a fascinating rhythmic system by José Eduardo Gramani and while I composed a Rítmica Etude for marimba long ago, I don't remember much so it'll be be great to re-learn and from dear friend and incredible percussionist and human Rogerio Boccato on Zoom this week. If you're a musician, try to catch his workshop sometime!

Jobim.org

I only learned yesterday that this web resource offers free PDFs of Jobim's sheet music and was like whaat. So if you wanted to learn "How Insensitive," for example, without having to transcribe it yourself, you could just get it here. How did I not know about this earlier? I'll definitely be using it.

Currently listening to the Morelenbaum²/Sakamoto album Casa 🎧 I have "Bonita" and "Esperança Perdida" on loop. They make the Panda Express arrangement of "Samba do Avião" almost forgivable and I'm having the time of my life at my kitchen table singing along with Paula Morelenbaum.