Mendes won a Grammy for best world music album for his 1992 album Brasileiro and two Latin Grammys for best Brazilian contemporary pop album for Bom Tempo and Timeless. He received a lifetime achievement award from the Latin Recording Academy in 2005.
In 1966, Mendes came to the attention of Herb Alpert, co-founder of A&M Records, and one of the top-selling album artists of the 1960s. Alpert produced the group’s first three albums, all of which went gold. Alpert also took Brasil ’66 on tour with him and even wrote an enthusiastic recommendation that appeared on the back cover of their debut album: “One afternoon recently, a friend of mine called to ask if I wanted to hear a new group. From the first note I was grinning like a kid who’d just found a new toy.” That album remained on the Billboard 200 for more than two years (a rarity in those days) and was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2012.
Alpert was a close friend of Mendes’ for nearly 60 years. “Sergio Mendes, my brother from another country, passed away quietly and peacefully,” Alpert said in a statement on Friday. “He was a true friend and extremely gifted musician who brought Brazilian music in all its iterations to the entire world with elegance and joy.” (Another bond between the two musicians: Lani Hall, to whom Alpert has been married since 1973, was one of two female singers in Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66.)
The group’s sound was cool, yet hot, and brimming with confidence. Still, it was a new sound in 1966, so new that A&M took no chances and supplied parenthetical phonetic spellings for five song titles on the album, including “Mais Qu Nada (Ma-sh Kay Nada).” That pronunciation gambit may seem quaint in an era when Bad Bunny gives acceptance speeches on general-audience award shows in Spanish, but, hey, baby steps. One generation paves the way for the next.
The group’s music was often featured in “lounge music” compilations of pop songs from the 1960s, which were a forerunner to today’s “yacht rock” collections of pop songs from the 1970s and 1980s. Some people, it seems, can only enjoy pop music if they’re being ironic about it. (But they’re listening, so I’ll take it.)
Here are 10 Mendes tracks which will remind you of his greatness or give you a good place to start in exploring this talented and innovative musician.
I wrote the liner notes for a CD compilation, Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66-86, which was released in 1987 amid A&M’s 25th anniversary celebration. This piece draws some material from those notes.