NEXT STOP WONDERLAND
1998 | Soundtrack

For the film Next Stop Wonderland, director Brad Anderson hit upon the idea of using Brazilian music to color the background of a searching-for-love tale. So this soundtrack album combines original music by Claudio Ragazzi with new recordings of the standards by Bebel Gilberto and Vinicius Cantuaria and various scraps, often obscure ones, from PolyGram's vast Brazilian holdings. If the primary objective is to capture the ambience of saudade, they've succeeded, delivering the goods with a wide variety of tracks ranging from brash to the most introverted. If the alternate objective is to introduce moviegoers and Generation X to the bossa nova, the needed documentation is scandalously skimpy on this almost arbitrary survey. To cite the most egregious example, on the famous recording of "Corcovado," the participation of Stan Getz, Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim is omitted; only Astrud Gilberto is listed! The original compositions by Claudio Ragazzi provide a brilliant score, I wish the record included more of the original music composed for this film. The historical recordings include the Tamba Trio'searly version of "Mas Que Nada," as well as tracks by Jobim, Elis Regina, Marcos Valle, Walter Wanderley, Toots Thielemans, and a delightful encore of Coleman Hawkins romping merrily through "O Pato."

Review by Richard S. Ginell