Adi <- webring -> Trinity
Back to my homepage
Song of the Week: 17 April 2026
This is my first ever time writing a song of the week, inspired by friends and fellow webringmates Anna, Sof and Peter, whose websites are way more awesome than mine and whose SoTWs you should also check out.
Anyway, on to my first song of the week, which is the song Olha Maria by Ben Wendel:
I’ve been in love with his album BaRcoDe since it was released in March. Wendel has been one of my favourite jazz musicians since I discovered his music when I was 15, mainly down to how much he’s willing to push the boat out within his music. The first standard I heard written by him is called Still Play, which is esentially an encyclopaedia of what can be done without a rhythm section. So what does he do once he’s done all that, and then released an absolute banger of a live album?
Naturally, you go the exact opposite way and compose an album for saxophone and 4 mallet percussionists (and some electronics, but this could certainly be done live with just the four percussion instruments). Some tracks, such as Clouds, are completely original, and some tracks, like Olha Maria, are not. I would recommend listening to the entire album of course, but I’ve chosen this one in particular for just how well it uses the percussion - their natural reverberance combined with the use of silence and space (also listen out for someone using a bow on the vibraphone!) makes this such a dark piece and it’s so cool to listen to.
One of my conducting teachers likes programming concerts where he would play a piece, then tell the audience what it is about, and then play it again. I would recommend doing that for this piece - at least the first few minutes, to get the vibe, and then read on, then listen to it again, because researching this song has forever changed the way I listen to it. I promise I won’t do this every week, but it’s really worth doing (unless you know the background of this, in which case read on).
You might be wondering why I might make a song of the week and then only talk about how harrowing the piece is to listen to, and also why I haven’t disclosed the original writer of this song. The answer to both of these questions is that this is originally by Brasilian songwriter and poet Chico Buarque, who was highly targeted by the Brasilian military dictatorship in the 1960s (I would highly highly recommend Sof’s SoTW from last year where they go into more depth on this.). This song was part of an album called Construção (Portugese for “construction”), and was written partly during his self-exile to Italy and partly during his return to Brasil. While a great number of the songs on that album are more explicitly political (part of the title track discusses how a worker’s death is seen as an inconvenience to society rather than as, you know, a death of a real live human being), this song is far more romantic (though I do think Buarque is referencing the fear he went through during this time) - a rough English translation of the first verse is given:
See, Maria
I had so wished
To make you a present
Of my poetry
But today, Maria
To my surprise
To my sadness
You must part.
I was originally going to write a blog about Ben Wendel and how much I love his music, and I still do. It wasn’t until researching to write about this song that I discovered who originally wrote it, and it has undoubtedly changed how I will always listen to this song.
Anyway, thank you for reading my first SoTW - I hope I’ve introduced you to a wonderful sound world, and please do check out both BaRcoDe and Construção. They are both well worth a listen.