Brazil is a country of idiosyncrasies. On the one hand, you have the most beautiful beaches, the exuberant Carnival, the rain forest and an extremely rich, high-class minority. On the other hand, Brazil has the sad reputation of being one of the most violent countries in the world, where the favelas – shantytowns filled with dangerous drug dealers and gang lords – lay side by side to closed luxury condominiums and private security.

Nevertheless, the Brazilian culture - and especially its traditional music – is as much a patrimony of the world as the Amazonian forest. It was somewhere between 1958 and 1963 that a group of Brazilian musicians created a genre that would cross borders and survive the passing of time.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Brazil was under a succession of dictatorships, the final of them emerging from a military coup in 1964. This wave of political instability in Brazil is known as the Era of Populism. The philosophy behind these politics was to bring more power to the middle and upper classes in the country through nationalism and policies of import. Therefore, that period in Brazil was a fertile one for artists and musicians, but miserable for the lower classes, which comprised mostly the people who worked in agriculture and had fled to the cities looking for a better life – finding instead a life of poverty in the favelas. It was during this period that, by the beaches of Copacabana, the first chords of Bossa Nova were thought of, and played.

Although many musicians can be named as being part of the Bossa Nova genre, two men stand out immediately as the fathers of the New Brazilian Cool: Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Joao Gilberto was an eccentric and suave young man from Bahia, who moved to Rio de Janeiro sometime around the 1950s, aiming for a life of bohemia. Antonio Carlos Jobim was the opposite: he had a day job, and managed to live – albeit barely – doing something he liked very much: play the piano in bars by the beach. Jobim and Gilberto met casually among the music crowd of Rio de Janeiro and soon found that, more than complementing each other with their character differences, they had something else in common: the love for jazz music, and the desire to do something new with the traditional samba rhythms. With Joao Gilberto’s guitar, Jobim’s piano and musical contacts, Bossa Nova emerged as a mix of a more downtempo samba and Jazz.

The six years that followed marked the establishment of this new music genre. For this to happen, two main factors contributed first, the Brazilian movie “Black Orpheus”; second, the interest American jazz musicians, such as Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, took in Bossa Nova.

In 1959, “Black Orpheus” is released. The movie is based upon a play written by Vinicus de Moraes, a Brazilian diplomat, writer and poet, who would become the most important lyricist of Bossa Nova. The premise of the film is the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, this time relived in the middle of the Rio de Janeiro Carnival by black actors. Although the main score is samba music, the love songs Orpheus sings to Eurydice are all Bossa Nova; these songs were composed by Tom Jobim for the movie. “Black Orpheus” would become a great success, winning the 1959’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and launching Bossa Nova as the new hit music style of the time. In 1962, influenced by the new sounds coming from Brazil, Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd record “Samba Jazz”. Tom Jobim, in its majority, also composed this album, featuring Getz playing saxophone and Byrd playing a very Django Reinhardt-style guitar.

A year later, Getz teams with Jobim and Joao Gilberto to record the two “Getz/Gilberto” albums, the seminal Bossa Nova works which would lead to the widespread of the genre across the world and into times to come. This was also when Astrud Gilberto went from being Joao Gilberto’s wife to become a worldwide renowned singer. Joao Gilberto had thought about having Astrud singing the English lyrics of “The Girl of Ipanema”, albeit he hadn’t discussed it with his music partners. As they agreed to try, they realized that she was an excellent singer, even if she had never sang professionally in her life. Suddenly, Astrud Gilbert went from being Joao Gilberto’s wife to become a highly requested Bossa Nova singer, going even as far as releasing solo albums.

With the degradation of the Brazilian’s quality of life, especially that of the most impoverished low-class, and the military coup of 1964, the Bossa Nova hype began to wane. The soft, downtempo songs about love, sadness, beauty and pleasure began to be seen as frivolous and inconsequent: it was the birth of the Popular Brazilian Music, also known as MPB (Musica Popular Brasileira, in Portuguese). This new musical movement would drink influences from Bossa Nova in terms of the guitar, but resembled much more the sounds of samba, especially due to the use of traditional Brazilian instruments that Bossa Nova had replaced with a jazz ambience. In particular, MPB musicians would sing about the everyday struggle of the poor people to survive in a country where there was an extremely huge crack between the rich and the poor. Bossa Nova was to become, in years to come, a reflection of the luxury of the Brazilian elite and, throughout the world, something as trivial as “elevator music”.

Albeit relegated to the “easy listening” shelves during nearly 30 years, Bossa Nova has had an enormous resurgence by the end of the 1990s and early 2000s. With the emergence of the wide variety of subgenres inside electronic music, artists around the world began paying a tribute to the wonders of the Brazilian Cool. Perhaps the first take of contemporary musicians to Bossa Nova happened with the Red Hot compilation inspired by Brazilian tunes, Red Hot + Rio. This charity album features electronic covers of Bossa Nova songs, such as “Corcovado”, sung with a drum n’ bass beat by Everything But the Girl. It even has a duet of Sting singing with Astrud Gilberto one of the genre’s anthems, “How Insensitive”.

Some years later, the former Yugoslavian musician and producer Suba began to reinterpret the classics, and lent a hand to singers such as Bebel Gilberto – Joao Gilberto’s daughter with his second wife, Miucha – whose albums mix with perfection the allure of Bossa Nova with the freshness of electronica. Other heavy-industry names such as Thievery Corporation, Jazzanova, Soulstance, Nicola Conte and the whole of Schema label in Italy also brought back Bossa Nova into the new century, where it deservedly belongs, to our listening pleasure.

>Written by d/visible contributor Mariana Passos E Sousa.

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