Bossa n’ Marley: The Electro-Bossa Songbook of Bob Marley (TMR 44)
Get up, sit down and chill away . . .
--
Bossa n’ Marley (Playlists Music Brokers, 2005) is an appetizing collection of musicians you’ve never heard of putting a bossa nova spin on Bob Marley classics. Amazonics come strolling in with a version of “Redemption Song” so laidback it’ll instill instant couch-lock, and this mood is permanent. Despite differing credits, every track sounds like it’s by the same band with the same steamy vocalist cooing in your ear. The drum programmers occasionally spice things up with enough Latin percussion that real musicians couldn’t have done better, and the trumpet on “Sun Is Shining” by Trippynova is so dirty that I have got to know how that’s done. It’d be easy to dislike this one for downtuning Marley’s apolitical politics of peace and love into mere elevator music, but only if it weren’t so impressively chill.
Note: I wrote this for Medium.com. If you are reading this on another platform, it has been pirated. I quit the Medium Partner Program, so I’m not doing this for money. It is nice, however, to know someone’s reading, so please clap or comment to let me know somebody’s out there. Gladius adhuc lucet.
