Samba '68 is a 1968 album by Brazilian singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Marcos Valle, released on the Verve label and produced by Creed Taylor. Recorded at Columbia Recording Studios in New York in October and November 1967, it was Valle's first album aimed at an international audience, commissioned by Verve to capitalize on the enormous North American appetite for Brazilian music that had been sparked by the Stan Getz/João Gilberto recordings and the success of artists like Sergio Mendes and Astrud Gilberto. To that end, the album features English-language versions of Valle's compositions, including his signature "So Nice (Summer Samba)" and "Crickets Sing for Anamaria," alongside other original material. Arrangements were handled by Eumir Deodato, who set Valle's guitar and voice within lush settings for strings, brass, and rhythm section characteristic of Verve's late-1960s pop-jazz productions.The album features vocal contributions from Valle's wife Anamaria Valle, whose cool, understated delivery provides an effective counterpart to Marcos's own vocals throughout the record's eleven tracks. As Slipcue's Brazilian Music Guide notes, the tracks are "uniformly bouncy and fairly irresistible," and Qobuz describes it as "a vibrant set of Brazilian pop, indebted to bossa nova and samba but undeniably Americanized for a domestic audience." The Verve Vault edition — released on 180-gram vinyl in May 2026 — was mastered from the original analog tapes by Ryan K. Smith at Sterling Sound and pressed at Optimal in Germany, making it the definitive modern reissue of a recording that stands as an important document of the intersection between Brazilian popular music and American pop-jazz studio practice at the close of the 1960s.
