Luiz Bonfá – Introspection

A new entry in the category: records that lodge themselves between temple and shoulder blade and then simply stay there. Luiz Bonfá’s Introspection is one of those. Recorded in 1972, far from the Copacabana home the Brazilian had left after the start of the military dictatorship. In New York, where he would live from then on, Bonfá wrote for Elvis Presley and Quincy Jones. He had something to show for himself, after all, as a quasi-co-inventor of what people had recently started calling Bossa Nova.

Bonfá had already played through its brightly coloured plastic-umbrella variant in the storm-and-stress years. Introspection is therefore rather homelessness and the gaze out to sea and the most necessary sentence: it really does make you feel very small as a human being. That is to say, Introspection is exactly that: looking inwards, into oneself, outwards. Twelve nylon strings help, along with an old man who is alone with his instrument and knows exactly what he has to say, but possesses the wisdom never to explain it any further. Half a century later, someone else does that anyway: Jazzybelle Records.