Brazil Naughts

On a whim, Sheryl and I went to see Caetano Veloso -- the "Paul Simon of Brazil" -- at the historic Beacon Theater Wednesday night. Even though we bought tickets 45 minutes prior, with the cashier telling us, "There'll still be some left" when we said we needed to go to an ATM for cash -- there were still at least four scalpers outside. After a full half-hour delay for seating people, and some proactive audience applause to urge the show on, Veloso came out and introduced each of his touring group by name, and then "these New York musicians," at which point a black-clad mini-orchestra stood up, with no further identification than that. Veloso did an accentually idiosyncratic, mellow-guitar-inflected version of an American standard. Then another. Then another. Turns out he was doing many of the cuts off his new album of American standards, "Foreign Sound." Among his interpretations was a compelling "I'll Take Manhattan" -- complete with a jokey ad-lib of "perfect for a Jew and goy" which was no doubt hilarious to the largely Brazilio-American crowd -- a much happier-than-the-original cover of Nirvana's "Come As You Are, and a rap, during which this silver-haired, black sweatered gentleman in his 60s sat down on his stool, put on his reading glasses, and read the rap off a lyrics sheet, occasionally stopping to make "pistol" signs with his hands. Basically, Veloso could do whatever crazy physical business occurred to him, and be guaranteed a huge crowd reaction, as witnessed when he did a 20-second, lethargic, non-travelling "Moonwalk" at the edge of the stage. And this dynamism even worked against him, as when he seemed to be trying to signal us to sing along during the "Memor-y-a" chorus of "CAYA", but might have just been making big hand scoops in the air -- wasn't clear. The sequence after "ITM" was nice, because he then read from his book a passage about Manhattan, then played one of his own, Brazilian songs about it. But for the most part, he played sadistically none of the songs that had made him legendary enough to bring all these compatriates (and at least 2 distinctly gringo Jews) out to hear him. At the end, he came out for his encore and mentioned the names of these songs -- so he couldn't well plead that he'd simply forgotten them -- but then launched into just one of the lesser ones.