Rio de Janeiro

If too much sun leads to a prematurely furrowed brow, no-one's told Joyce: it's difficult to think of another sexagenarian singer who sounds as daisy-fresh. The rigours of age, it would seem, simply wash over this Brazilian grande dame as the Atlantic washes over her beloved Ipanema. If you've come to Joyce's music via the recently reissued Mauricio Maestro/Nana Vasconcelos collaboration, Visions of Dawn, however, the 15 featherweight puffs of trad samba that make up Rio de Janeiro may well wash over you just as easily. This album cherry-picks vintage songs, faces and places and moments-in-time that chart Joyce's personal relationship with Brazil's iconic city. Parlayed in the lowest of keys, with strictly acoustic accompaniment and a voice as wrinkle-free and relentlessly optimistic as the day it first graced a studio, the album runs through her first ever love-letter to the city, the precocious ‘Rio Meu’; ‘Manhã no Posto 6’, a sun-bleached miniature of a now-disappeared Copacabana; and, most heartfelt of all, a luscious extract (‘O Mar’) from Tom Jobim and Billy Blanco's suite, ‘Sinfonia do Rio de Janeiro’. The most delightful, musically dextrous moment on the whole album has Joyce rolling her ‘r's and fluttering her syllables on Adoniran Barbosa's ‘As Mariposa’, a piece she describes in her notes as ‘the most perfect musical translation of São Paulo!