I Hadn’t Thought About Gal Costa In Hours

Ted Gioia mentions the release of some new Gal Costa tracks:

The late Gal Costa (1945-2022) is one of my favorite Brazilian vocalists. And I’m not alone in my admiration. How many popular singers get invited to share a piano bench with Herbie Hancock?

During her storied career, Costa performed and recorded with all the leading stars of Brazilian commercial music, and gained international renown as an exponent of the Tropicália style.

Now—out of the blue—Universal Music releases three tracks that have been sitting on the shelf since 1972. These capture Costa at absolutely peak expressive power.

I was thinking about Gal Costa yesterday.

As you might remember, gentle reader, the LP library at Nogglestead (now even fuller than shown in that post with the unboxing of my mother-in-law’s folk collection, given to us when she downsized a couple years ago, and another year’s worth of gleanings from antique malls and book sales) is not organized.

So, as it happens, records I don’t like that much end up on the left end of shelves. I pick things out of the library, play them, and then stack them on the desk. When it comes time to reshelve them, I shove all the records on the shelf to the left and then put the ones I’ve listened to on the right. So things I listen to frequently or like most end up sorted to the right, whereas the left extremes of each shelf ends up holding my wife’s folk records (and eventually the ones that had belonged to my mother-in-law), my own sainted mother’s sixties pop collections and Elvis records, the country or seventies folk records (including Olivia Newton-John, Lynda Carter, and Linda Ronstadt) that I bought because the covers had pretty women on them), and probably a copy of Firefall’s Elan somehow.

But this weekend, for a change of pace, I took from the most left of the top shelves, and discovered my only Tommy Reynolds 33⅓ LP (the rest of my collection are 78s or 45s). So I started working my way to the right from that left-most edge. I found and played Beth Carvalho’s Sentimento Braśileiro record, and I thought about Gal Costa since I bought a couple of her LPs at the same time as I bought a bunch of Brazilian LPs in 2016. Specifically, I thought of Fantasia which depicts a possibly nude Gal Costa on the cover which scandalized my boys some years later when they saw the cover.

So, to make a short story long, I knew the artist Gioia was talking about and had thought about her very recently indeed.

Unlike Gioia, Costa is not my Brazilian singer (Mizuho Lin, ultimately, has not surpassed Astrud Gilberto as my favorite).

(So how did some favorites end up on the left? I presume it’s because I had box sets there before I built the most recent set of record shelves, and when I moved all boxed sets to under the console stereo, I backfilled with some LPs that were actually favorites.)