Seville — Luiz Bonfá

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAny1bIApcA

Sampling is an essential part of music, but it's often frustrating. There's a little twinge of rage in discovering, years later, that a song which you loved for a particular riff and whose artist you gave credit for its genius was sampling the riff from another, older artist — as if we gave credit to someone for imitating Shakespeare, but forgot about Shakespeare entirely.

Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know is a great example. Luiz Bonfá's Seville (above) is the original, a brilliant 1960s instrumental from the Brazilian jazz/folk scene. Am I mad? Yeah, a little. But I also firmly believe that sampling is an integral part of music — modern and not. So I have some cognitive dissonance on the matter.

Luiz Bonfá's The Shade Of The Mango Tree was also sampled for Nujabes' Lady Brown — but I'm less mad, as Nujabes made a career off of sampling wonderful jazz and adding beats and guest rappers. Still, I wish more of the music I knew came with citations.