Our son said he has an 18-hour day helping to set up the sound for Sergio Mendes' entourage at Carnegie Hall tonight.

He's so stoked about being part of them and continues to share his adventures w/us.



The original lineup of Brasil '66 was Mendes (piano), vocalists Lani Hall and Janis Hansen, Bob Matthews (bass), Jose Soares (percussion) and Joao Palma (drums). John Pisano was the guest guitarist.

This line-up recorded three albums between 1966-1968 (including the best-selling Look Around LP), before there was a major personnel change for their fourth album Fool on the Hill. Karen Philipp replaced Hansen as the second female vocalist, while veteran drummer Dom Um Romao teamed with Rubens Bassini to assume percussionist duties. Sebastiao Neto was the new bassist and Oscar Castro-Neves the guitarist.

This line up had a more orchestrated and big band sound than their predecessors. Most significantly, in the early 1970s, lead singer Hall pursued a solo career and became Alpert's second wife. Some accounts claim that Mendes was upset with Alpert for years for "stealing" Hall away from his group.

Though his early singles with Brasil '66 (most notably Mas Que Nada) met with some success, Mendes really burst into mainstream prominence when he performed the Oscar nominated Burt Bacharach/Hal David song "The Look of Love" on the Academy Awards telecast in March 1968.

Brasil '66's version of the song quickly shot into the top 10, eclipsing Dusty Springfield's version from the soundtrack of the movie, Casino Royale, and Mendes spent the rest of 1968 enjoying consecutive top 10 and top 20 hits with his follow-up singles, "The Fool on the Hill" and "Scarborough Fair."

Though he continued to enjoy adult contemporary chart successes with Brasil '66 through 1971 (a group name change to the more forward-looking "Brasil '77" didn't reignite sales), he would not experience the mainstream chart hits he enjoyed in 1968 until his comeback album in 1983 generated the biggest single of his career, "Never Gonna Let You Go," sung by Joe Pizzulo and Leza Miller, which peaked at #4 on the Billboard charts.

However, from 1968 on, Mendes was arguably the biggest Brazilian star in the world, enjoying immense popularity worldwide and performing in venues as varied as stadium arenas and the White House, where he gave concerts for both Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Mendes' career in the U.S. stalled in the mid-1970s, but he remained very popular in South America and Japan. His two albums with Bell Records in 1973 and 1974, followed by several for Elektra from 1975 on, found Mendes continuing to mine the best in American pop music and post-Bossa writers of his native Brazil, while forging new directions in soul with collaborators like Stevie Wonder, who wrote Mendes' R&B-inflected minor hit, "The Real Thing."

In 1983, he rejoined Alpert's A&M records and enjoyed huge success with a self-titled album and several follow-up albums, all of which received considerable adult contemporary airplay with charting singles.

By the time Mendes released his Grammy-winning Elektra album Brasileiro in 1992, he was the undisputed master of pop-inflected Brazilian jazz.

The late-1990s lounge music revival brought retrospection and respect to Mendes' oeuvre, particularly the classic Brasil '66 albums.

His stature in his native Brazil is reflected by "Cantor de Mambo," a song by fellow Brazilians Os Mutantes, which they regularly dedicate to Mendes in concert. He has released over thirty-five albums, and still plays his bossa nova heavily crossed with jazz and funk.