Nights at the Roundtable with Jazz great-turned Pop hopeful Laurindo Almeida and his brief foray into the Les Paul market with Delicado, recorded in 1952 for Coral Records.
February 11, 2012

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Laurindo Almeida - widely respected Jazz guitarist somehow attempted a crossover to Pop by emulating Les Paul.


1950's Pop Music leaned a lot on gimmicks in order to stand out. Since Capitol Records had done so wonderfully well with Les Paul and his unique electronically-altered guitar playing, Coral Records attempted to follow suit by signing South American Jazz Guitar sensation Laurindo Almeida and recording a series of discs that sounded a lot like Les Paul clones but didn't make much impression on the charts in 1952.

Tonight's track is one of those gimmick-infested songs. From that series of sessions Almeida recorded for Coral in 1952 Delicado, like the other recordings from this series is an electronic tour-de-force and shows off Almeida's pyrotechnics, but it also shows his considerable talent which, in all honesty, was put to better use in other genres.

After his brief foray into the Pop Music World, Almeida upped his efforts and returned to Jazz and later Classical, leaving this handful of singles as something of a forgotten legacy. I'm not sure and I halfway doubt Delicado (or any of his other Pop efforts for Coral) were reissued on either lp or CD. As always, this is off the original 78's, so there's no way of knowing.

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