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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Ann Cefola: Free Ferry & The Getz-Gilberto Connection

July 28, 2018 by Doug Ramsey

About a year ago, I received a request from The Upper Hand Press for permission to use parts of what I wrote in the liner notes for the reissue of Getz/Gilberto Featuring Antonio Carlos Jobim. The 1963 album included Joao Gilberto’s wife Astrud singing Jobim’s “The Girl From Ipanema.” In the post-Elvis Presley era also dominated by the Beatles and chart-toppers like “Tha Crossroads” by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, the track by Getz and the Gilbertos achieved something nearly unimaginable for a sensitive jazz performance in that era; it became a hit.

I granted permission to use quotes. Free Ferry, a book of poetry by Ann Cefola, was published in the spring of 2017. Ms. Cefola is a poet who in this collection uses mastery of classical themes melded into observations of modern life complicated by nuclear-age developments. In the book-length poem (54 pages) Free Ferry, she manages to entwine evocations of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with 20th and 21st century realities of weapons-grade plutonium, Cold War anxieties, episodes from everyday life and, sometimes, humor. A sample:

                         [Cleaner]

Eurydice sucked deep in detergent aisle;
Names, celebrating pines and joy, end in ex or ol.
So many sprays—yellow, orange and sky blue.
Searching the shelf, every wife lost until one
on TV screams into a plate
I can see myself!

 

To learn more about Ms. Cefola and her work, go here.

A quote:

I sang The Girl from Ipanema for Stan
and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s fine with me.’
After the final take, Stan looked at me
and said very emphatically,
‘That song is gonna make you famous.’—Astrud Gilberto

It made her famous.

The Rifftides staff intended to embed “The Girl From Ipanema” here, but YouTube said we couldn’t.

Sorry. I guess you’ll just have to dig out your CD or LP copy.

Later: Or, better yet, you can go here (thanks to reader Dave Lull)

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Comments

  1. Ann Starr says

    July 29, 2018 at 10:18 am

    Wow! Thanks so much for bringing this very cool book to your readers’ attention. It reminds us how Getz and Gilberto were enchanting a world under cloud of nuclear disaster. Thanks for the permission, and for your kind recognition!

    Ann Starr, Publisher
    Upper Hand Press

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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