Sample Spotlight: Fortunate

The Needle-Drop Moment

Press play on "Fortunate" and a Portuguese line blooms: "Guarde nos olhos a água mais pura da fonte." The phrase comes from Ivan Lins's "Guarde Nos Olhos" on Nos Dias de Hoje, his seventh album, issued by EMI-Odeon in 1978 with Eduardo Souto Neto and Milton Miranda credited as producers. The English rendering: Keep in your eyes the purest water from the source. Pete chops the luminous refrain that Common floats his gratitude bars upon.

Who Is Ivan Lins?

A pillar of MPB (Música Popular Brasileira), Lins is Brazil's great electric-piano composer, the Rhodes-and-Wurlitzer melodist whose harmonies routinely send American jazz musicians into reverent fits. "Love Dance," written with arranger Gilson Peranzzetta and lyricist Paul Williams, became one of the most recorded songs in contemporary music after George Benson cut the first version in 1980, and the catalog widened from there through Sarah Vaughan, Quincy Jones, Carmen McRae, and Barbra Streisand.

Nos Dias de Hoje came out under Brazil's military dictatorship, and Mello Menezes's cover photograph (Lins shirtless with a dated placard around his neck) is a deliberate reference to how dissidents were photographed by the regime's DOI-CODI interrogators. The Fortunate lyric Pete loops sits inside that record.

Pete Rock's Sample Alchemy

Speaking at the Wexner Center for the Arts as part of Ohio State's Diggin in the Crates lecture series, Pete recalled the find in his own words:

"[Lins] looked real cool on the cover. That's what made me want to listen. My ears, I just turned them on, and went deep down. I was a little high, too."

"Fortunate" was released on The Auditorium Vol. 1, the 2024 Common collaboration cut at Electric Lady Studios with Pete on the boards. The Mt. Vernon producer who taught a generation what an SP-1200 could do (he told Wax Poetics he "read the manual, like, fifty times" before he made it his instrument) kept the source line close to the surface here.

Other Heads Who Flipped Lins

The cleanest catalog of who has dipped into the Lins well lives on WhoSampled. A few standouts:

• Nujabes & Shing02 — "Luv(sic) Pt. 2" flips Lins's duet with Elis Regina on "Qualquer Dia," and the same partnership returns to him years later on "Luv(sic) Pt. 6" via "Choro Das Águas."

• Madlib — "Rio De Janeiro" on Madlib Medicine Show No. 2: Flight to Brazil lifts "Abre Alas" from Lins's 1974 album Modo Livre.

• Tom Misch — "Sunshine" (2015) samples Lins's instrumental reading of Jobim's "Samba do Avião" from the 2001 album Jobiniando.
  
  
  

Cover Lineage

• George Benson's instrumental take on "Dinorah, Dinorah" picked up the 1981 Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Arrangement, which planted Lins firmly in the American jazz vocabulary by way of one of its most fluent voices. Quincy Jones's reading of "Velas" did the same the following year.

• Quincy Jones also cut "Setembro (Brazilian Wedding Song)" on Back on the Block (1989) with Sarah Vaughan, Take 6, Herbie Hancock and a guest list that doubled as a jazz hall of fame. The original "Setembro (1° Movimento)," a Lins and Peranzzetta composition, had opened his 1980 album Novo Tempo.
  
  
  

Watch & Listen

• Ivan Lins performing "Guarde Nos Olhos" live with Branford Marsalis.

• Common & Pete Rock: "Fortunate."

• Listen to the track as the finale to Strictly Butter | 01.