Bossa Nova
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Posted by Liz Heart in Culture section |
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Perhaps ironically, bossa nova, the music style associated with complacence, is also considered responsible for the birth of the protest music of the 1960s that denounced the political uproar Brazil found itself in that led to the military coup of 1964.
Critical of the insipid character of bossa nova lyrics and influenced by the precarious political and economic situation of Brazil, artists started using music to voice their opinions and as a vehicle to teach the largely uneducated Brazilian population about their country's current social, political and economic status.
In the late 1950s, some urban musicians developed a “New Style” (in Portuguese, “Bossa Nova") of music. Starting with the basic and by-then popular Samba rhythm, they infused a heavy dose of “cool jazz” influence from the US jazz scene of the time. The role of the familiar battery of dozens of percussion instruments fell to a single drummer.
The simple Samba chords grew much more complex, incorporating 7th, 9th, 11th and 13th formations. And the structure provided for a new twist: solo improvisation. Though it was a popular revolution, it was a musical challenge for the musicians, and for some of the critics at first too.
Bossa Nova, advanced especially by singer/guitarist Joao Gilberto and pianist/composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, was a revolution on the established Samba tradition. Where Brazilian singers had always used loud, expressive, operatic voices, the shy and reclusive Gilberto sang in a soft, sensuous near-whisper, syncopated against his guitar, which he fingerpicked in a new way, a percussive rhythm based on the bateria (percussion ensemble) of a full Samba band, particularly the tamborim.
Gilberto’s 78-RPM single “Chega de Saudade” turned Brazilian music on its collective ear in 1958 and within a few years drew the attention of some of the artists of US jazz that had provided some of its building blocks, such as guitarist Charlie Byrd, saxophonist Stan Getz, and flautist Herbie Mann. Getz brought Jobim and Gilberto into a US studio in 1963 to record an album that spawned a US hit, “Garota de Ipanema” (The Girl From Ipanema) sung by Gilberto’s wife Astrud, and the Bossa Nova craze was re-energized.
Though its popularity has somewhat waxed and waned over the years, neither the music nor the artists dedicated to it show any signs of wear.
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