One of the songs I’ve been listening non-stop is The Boy from Ipanema, interpreted by Diana Krall. Her performance is absolutely outstanding.
The first time I discovered this song, I thought it was a spoof. The original song is called Garota de Ipanema (“The Girl from Ipanema“), which was written in Portuguese in 1962 by Vinícius de Moraes and composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim. And, as pointed in the title, it talks about a girl that swings so cool and sways so gentle.
I found funny that someone would replace the word “girl” with “boy” and change a few more words here and there to match the “boy” theme. Now that I think about it, this is actually an interesting approach for a cover song. There has been 100 versions of it, and each is so unique in its own way; however, rewording it and turning into a different version refreshes the cover.
This is a great example that shows that, in the creative process, everything is a remix.
Everything we create is copied, transformed, and combined from our culture.
Kirby ferguson
Or from Ben Murray’s perspective, as written in Remixing Culture and Why the Art of the Mash-Up Matters, “all cultural artifacts are open to re-appropriation.” The results can be truly fruitful. As I did a bit more research on this song, I found that Diana Krall isn’t the only singer that has interpreted The Boy from Ipanema. Shirley Bassey, Petula Clark, Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, Peggy Lee, The Supremes, Crystal Waters, and Sarah Vaughan also did it. Even if it’s the same song, each performance provides a different vibe to it.
How about Nancy Wilson’s version? It’s completely different than Diana’s.
How are you remixing things around you?