Bossa Nova | Brazil: Five Centuries of Change

An Interlude of Optimism

Not coincidentally, bossa nova appeared at a moment in which Cinema Novo, new movements of theatre in Brazil, the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer, Brasília were all germinating. It was an age in which there was a euphoria, a sense … there was a pretty strong national sense of pride. You were Brazilian and liked to be Brazilian, and you wanted to construct a nation (Leite 3).

So Chico Buarque, an internationally renowned Brazilian musician who came of age during bossa nova’s heyday, would describe the sense of euphoria surrounding the movement in a 1989 interview with Radio Eldorado.

João Gilberto, one of the most successful bossa nova musicians, impressed Antonio Carlos Jobim with his new style of guitar-playing. Together, they wrote some of the early songs that gained the movement attention. Gilberto’s recording of “The Girl from Ipanema” is one of the best-known bossa nova songs to this day. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Bossa nova, which literally means “new wave,” was a blending of samba and jazz that rose out of a guitar school formed in Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana neighborhood in 1956. The optimism of the era that Buarque described is evident in the songs’ lyrics, which casually describe the musicians’ environment: beaches, flowers, blue skies, and beautiful women. The presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek, which diverged from Getúlio Vargas’ nationalist model and diminished state control of the record industry, was a period in which the middle class had more buying power and the music industry had the opportunity to expand.

Cultural Exchange

The musicians and fans of bossa nova, unlike many samba singers, were part of the Carioca middle class that frequented jazz clubs and had been exposed to North American music and movies. Many Brazilian listeners were critical of the perceived influence of the United States on bossa nova, considering it simply an imitation of cool jazz. Antônio Carlos Jobim rejected this analysis:

Many people said that bossa nova was an Americanized phenomenon. I think this is entirely false. Much to the contrary, I think what influenced [North] American music was the bossa nova. I received letters and telegrams from various illustrious composers … saying that bossa nova had been the biggest influence on American music in the last thirty years.

[Antonio Carlos Jobim and Frank Sinatra, Arquivo em Imagens 3 p. 202]

Indeed, American musicians were fascinated by bossa nova, with its distinctive rhythm, lush instrumentation, and themes of youth, leisure, and natural beauty. Charlie Byrd, a well-known American guitarist, visited Brazil on a State Department-sponsored trip in the early 1960s and returned with a João Gilberto record. That record was an inspiration for a new collaboration between Byrd and saxophonist Stan Getz, and the beginning of a working relationship between these American performers and famous Brazilian bossa nova musicians like Jobim, Gilberto, and Luiz Bonfá, who made his biggest break with the soundtrack to the internationally renowned film Black Orpheus.

“A Garota de Ipanema (The Girl from Ipanema)” was a worldwide hit, winning a Grammy Award and recorded in English and Portuguese by numerous artists. It made audiences in the United States aware of the richness of Brazilian music, before overexposure made it the epitome of trite cocktail-lounge music.

Politics and Music after the Late-50s Bossa Nova Boom

In the fallout from an economy ruined by the large-scale building projects of the 1950s and 60s and a growing awareness of the extreme regional inequality, two debates emerged in popular music culture. The first regarded Brazilian nationalism, a rejection of the capitalist model associated with Kubitschek and later with the military dictatorship, and a critique of bossa nova’s alienation from cultural traditions and the experiences of the nation’s poor. Among increasingly critical university students and youth, bossa nova lacked any sort of class consciousness and aligned ideologically with a capitalist idea of modernization. The second debate questioned the purpose of an apolitical art form. A group of young, middle-class students and artists called for an explicitly leftist form of creative expression to serve as an alternative to the state’s modernization-minded message.

Out of this call for artistic products that encouraged class consciousness and critical engagement through political mass culture rose a wave of protest songs and musical styles that incorporated urban and rural musical traditions such as marcha, berimbau, and samba de roda. While songs about beautiful women and beautiful beaches did not die out, the increasingly dire situation of the country made the youth, key cultural consumers and producers, long for something more. While bossa nova enjoyed continuing popularity in the United States, within Brazil it was increasingly overshadowed by Música Popular Brasileira and Tropicália, forms that consciously used elements of Brazilian folk music and popular tradition, as well as North American rock ‘n roll, to create a new and stronger form.

Ze Keti (photographed here in 1956) was an enormously popular samba singer whose song “A voz do morro” was featured in the film “Rio: 40 graus” (Rio: 40 Degrees). Photograph from Correio da Manhã, courtesy of the National Archive.

Zé Keti, a popularizar of the samba de morro movement that came out of Rio’s favelas, came into popularity once again in the 1960s, as singers wanted to incorporate more diversity and more elements of Brazil’s musical traditions. Together with Nara Leão, a former member of the bossa nova movement, he performed a piece of musical theater, Opinão, that protested social injustice and racial inequality.