Tenório Jr. - Embalo (2017 Mr Bongo Reissue LP)

Tenório Jr. - Embalo | Vinyl LP - 2017 Mr Bongo Reissue (MRBLP144 / RGE XRLP-5.234)

• Francisco Tenório Júnior's only album as a leader, originally released on RGE in 1964: eleven tracks of samba-jazz and bossa nova with a cast of eleven musicians including Paulo Moura on alto saxophone and Milton Banana on drums, recorded in Rio de Janeiro when Tenório Jr. was in his early twenties
• "Nebulosa" has circulated widely through DJ culture and compilation albums for decades; regularly played by Gilles Peterson and Floating Points, remixed by Nu:Tone, and listed as one of the standout tracks of early 1960s Brazilian jazz
• Mastered from the original RGE tapes; replica original artwork; a proper reissue of a record that was genuinely hard to obtain before Mr Bongo brought it back in 2017
  

Francisco Tenório Júnior was born in Rio de Janeiro and grew up in the Laranjeiras neighbourhood, where he developed as a pianist while simultaneously studying medicine at the National School of Medicine. By the early 1960s he was a central figure in the bossa nova scene at Beco das Garrafas in Copacabana, the cramped alleyway of clubs where bossa nova crystallised as a genre, and was sought after as both a pianist and an arranger. Embalo was recorded in 1964, when he was in his early twenties, and features eleven musicians alongside him: Paulo Moura on alto saxophone, J.T. Meirelles and Hector Costita on tenor saxophone, Pedro Paulo and Maurilio on trumpets, Edson Maciel and Raulzinho on trombones, Celso Brando and Neco on guitars, Rubens Bassini on atabaque, and the rhythm section of Sergio Barroso Netto and José Antonio Alves on bass with Milton Banana on drums. It was the first and only album he recorded as a leader.

In March 1976 Tenório Jr. was in Buenos Aires as part of a tour accompanying the poet and lyricist Vinicius de Moraes and guitarist Toquinho. One night he left his hotel and did not return. Argentina was in the first weeks of a military dictatorship that would last until 1983, during which an estimated 30,000 people were killed or disappeared. A decade after Tenório Jr. vanished, a former Argentine Navy corporal testified that he had been arrested, taken to the ESMA (Navy Mechanics School), a detention and torture centre implicated in thousands of killings, and executed nine days after his arrest, with Brazilian military agents present. CONADEP, Argentina's National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, confirmed his death in March 1976 in its 1984 report Nunca Más. The Argentine state admitted responsibility in 1997. A Brazilian court ruled for compensation to his family in 2006. He left behind his wife Carmen, four children, and a fifth child born one month after he disappeared. Elis Regina dedicated her 1979 album Essa Mulher to his absence. The Brazilian filmmaker Rogerio Lima made a short film, Balada para Tenório, in the aftermath of his disappearance, with interviews from family and friends. Embalo remains the only document of what he was as a bandleader, and it is a remarkable one.

This Mr Bongo reissue, pressed in the UK in 2017 with replica original artwork and mastered from the original RGE tapes, is the definitive way to own it.