Fool on the Hill

Mendes rode the Brazilian craze of the mid-1960s and became one of Herb Albert's signature artists, even as the hits dried up and the records started going psychedelic. Before he became a slick popster, he was a pretty fair bossa pianist, but his real talent lay in contemporizing (ethnicizing) Up with People-type vocalists and laying commercial Brazilian tracks behind the Beatles' title track and "Scarborough Fair", as well as some of Brazil's own. In the early 70s he started to get into his roots, recording in the lounge/art-rock mixture that Hermeto Pascoal and Cateno Veloso were exploring. He lost his audience until the '80s, when he went uselessly synth. But Brazil 66 is so evocative of a time long passed that by the nineties, its music has become ubiquitous in every "lounge" in the country. --D. Strauss