" data-original-title="" title="">Elis Regina, an iconic Brazilian singer lesser known in the U.S. who a few years later died of a drug overdose at the age of 36. I'm writing about it now because recently I was listening to some of Jobim's records and took this one off the shelf and played it. I marveled as I always had at the remarkable musical rapport of the two and the spontaneity and pure Brazilian feel of their singing. I then looked around the web, and found that there is a wonderful story to be told about the making of this album.

The recording date was more intensive and took more time than most. Elis and Tom were together day and night in and out of the studio, rehearsing, talking, cutting tracks, dining with the musicians and others, and just hanging out. This went on for at least seven days and nights (estimates vary up to two weeks). They lived together, dug deeply into the tunes, and established a rapport that made for an entrancing and timeless recording. Compare this with the way recordings are typically made: in a day or two, with one or two takes, sometimes intermittently, and often in a rush between travel commitments and gigs. The album shows beyond a doubt the inestimable value of doing a recording with sufficient time for an extensive collaborative process, with the musicians bonding deeply and engaging in a prolonged creative process. Such conditions can elevate the recording to a new level of human intimacy and musical interaction.

It was the mid-1970s, and Jobim was chilling out in Los Angeles after his incredible successes in the U.S and as the bossa nova craze began to wind down. A younger Elis Regina had become a leading popular singer in Brazil with many performances and recordings already to her name, and with outspoken political convictions that at one point later on put her family in danger. In other words, like Jobim, she was a celebrity in Brazil, and a woman with passion and conviction as well. I don't know if she ever met Jobim personally or performed with him, but she asked her record label (Phillips) executives if they could get her a recording date with him. They got a deal, and Elis, her husband, and son flew to L.A. Jobim met them at the airport and they stayed at the same hotel together. (All this is documented in various news articles and on-the-scene videos. There is a video of them walking along a beach together. It was probably staged, but there is plenty of other evidence showing how close they became to one another.)

At their points of origin, jazz and Brazilian music both were forged in such intimate contexts. In the U.S., you had the musicians in L.A., New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit, for example, living amongst one another, spending long hours woodshedding, writing tunes, re-working arrangements, dropping in on one another's gigs, playing extended stays at clubs with sets that ran well beyond midnight. In Brazil, it was just like that too. Music was a communal enterprise, and in both countries, it came mainly out of the lower-income and/or minority districts, reflecting the struggles of the people. That is perhaps why Brazilian and U.S. music and musicians have always had a natural rapport with one another. In that respect, the Elis and Tom recording went back to their communal roots. It's still a mystery how all that came together. No one else was doing it that way at the time.

The family feeling and intimacy of the experience is apparent in videos made at the time. It is also evident in the testimony of the great Brazilian guitarist