With its dreamy lyrics and gentle sound, Brazilian bossa nova took over the world in the 1960s. After a spell in the wilderness of supermarkets and lifts, it's time to rediscover its beauty, writes CORMAC LARKIN
Tall and tanned and young and lovely, the Girl from Ipanema goes walking, and as she passes, each one she’s passes goes ‘aaah’.
WITH THESE words, sung by doe-eyed Brazilian housewife Astrud Gilberto, bossa nova entered the global consciousness in 1964 and coolly swept away all before it. Only the Beatles sold more records that year.
At the Grammy awards, The Girl from Ipanemawas record of the year, and soon this soft-spoken cousin of the Brazilian samba was everywhere.
Frank Sinatra stopped swinging for a moment and recorded an entire album of bossa nova tunes with Ipanema'scomposer, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and even Elvis Presley was hip to its gentle beat.
Everything Brazilian was cool, in particular the idea that life was best lived on a tropical beach, with a guitar in one hand and a cocktail, or better still, a girl holding a cocktail, in the other.
Bossa nova – a Brazilian-Portuguese expression meaning “new thing” – was the first “world music” to break through to a global audience. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, its languid groove and dreamy lyrics captured the spirit of the times – the sense that we had arrived as a species and could now relax.
Soon, it seemed to say, we would all be tanned and lovely, living in beige apartments, with washing machines and hostess trolleys, sipping lurid cocktails and smoking cigarettes that wouldn't give us lung cancer. These were the sunny days before the turmoil of the late 1960s, when men were still men and women still weren't, a world carefully evoked in Playboypictorials of the day, and now recreated by the US drama series Mad Men. Life was an episode of I Dream of Jeanie,and bossa nova was the theme tune.
Ironically, the music’s beauty was its downfall. Cool, restrained and urbane, bossa nova was balm to the ears in an increasingly noisy world, and that made it ripe for plunder. Played in the new self-service supermarkets, an ersatz version – the first “muzak” – was expected to make people stay longer and buy more washing powder. Tinkled in the background of the lounge bar, it made patrons think they were sophisticated and order expensive drinks that came with their own umbrellas. And, in the final ignominy, piped into elevators, bossa nova could provide a transient moistening of the soul that made the fact that you were ascending to your lawyer’s office to discuss your divorce seem momentarily unimportant.
THE ORIGINS OF the "new thing" in Ipanema and the neighbouring suburbs of Rio de Janeiro is meticulously documented in Bossa Nova and the Rise of Brazilian Music in the 1960s,a recent book and accompanying CD compilation by producer Stuart Baker and musical taste-maker Gilles Peterson.
Over two, near-definitive discs, and a lavishly illustrated book, Baker and Peterson reclaim bossa nova from the cheese merchants and refocus on the music itself.
Evocation is always a problem when trying just to “hear” music, particularly music that has such strong associations with an earlier era, but heard with fresh ears, bossa nova really is beautiful.
It was João Gilberto (whose wife Astrud was to become the face of bossa nova to the world) who first crystallised the from. With his gently strummed guitar and soft, almost whispered singing, Gilberto’s sound was a less frenetic version of the samba, the music of the working-class favelas. It was an urbane, sophisticated sound born not in the streets but on the beach, and in the cafes and apartments where he and his well-heeled friends hung out.
Accompanied by lucid, carefully researched notes, which place the emergence of bossa nova in the context of Brazil’s burgeoning modernity, the book and CD booklet admirably capture the atmosphere of the early 1960s, and relate the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Gilberto to architect Oscar Niemeyer’s audacious plans for Brazil’s new capital, Brasilia, and to the bold designs of Cesar Villela, whose striking album covers form the core of the illustrations in the book.
Those early pioneers were not to know that within a few short years, the tanks of a military dictatorship would be rolling through the streets of Ipanema, smothering Brazil’s nascent modernism almost as soon as it emerged. By then, bossa nova’s founders had relocated to America and their music belonged to the world.
Rescuing bossa nova from the elevator is important because it reminds us that, not long ago, we humans seemed to like to chill out and think life wasn’t all that bad. But it also lets us hear afresh the authentic voices of some of the true geniuses of modern music, whose influence has permeated all of subsequent popular culture.
Bossa nova for beginners
João Gilberto
The soft-voiced progenitor of the style that would become known as bossa nova,was the original singer of La Garota de Ipanema, only to be usurped by his wife's English version. His album Chega de Suadade(1958) has been described as ground zero for modern Brazilian music.
Antonio Carlos Jobim
As well as composing Ipanema, Tom Jobim, as he was known to his friends, wrote some of bossa nova's most enduring songs, and many have become jazz standards. Francis Albert Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim(1967) is the high water mark of bossa nova's global popularity.
Vinicius de Moraes
Diplomat, playwright, and the poet of bossa nova, he wrote the original lyrics for Ipanema and co-wrote hundreds of classics of the genre, including Os Afro-Sambas (1966) with guitarist Baden Powell. The film of his play, Black Orpheus, won an Oscar in 1959.
