Who is this and why are you listing to it, Fumo?

Oscar Castro-Neves is a cat from Rio, Brazil. He was born into a musical family and by the time he was a teenager, he was writing, arranging, and composing all of his own material when people in the mid-1950s started to notice. He, along with Antonio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto, was a vanguard of the Bossa Nova sound, which was a Latin beat coming out of South America and the Caribbean during some heavy times when the Cold War was in full swing. It was music that gave the American people the haze of a tropical paradise south of the equator. After becoming a member of Sergio Mendes' group in the early '70s, his fame spread, and since then has performed with such greats as Yo-Yo Ma, Joe Henderson, Stan Getz, Eliane Elias, Edu Lobo, and countless other Brazilian jazz, classical, and pop music stars. His big hit in the U.S. was "The Girl from Ipanema".

Oscar has an impressive resume and he can play beautifully. "Double Rainbow" is a cool instrumental that uses guitars and violins along with a basic Brazilian rhythm that is the thread that ties this whole CD together. For anyone looking for something light and airy, like a scone, this song is it. He revs it up a bit in the title track, "All One", which reminds me of a cheesy '70s movie I saw late one night after a New Jersey Devils victory. With a binger by my side, I came across an old Sonny and Cher movie, where they were young and Cher still had her original face. They ran through the flowers as the wind blew. The third track is called "Kurski Funk" and I'm still trying to figure out why. With a chorus chanting and clapping, this could be one of those World Music fusions, like a Brazilian and African mix, which it seemed Oscar was shooting for but came up short. It smooths out into something about to erupt but unfortunately, it never comes to pass.