bossa nova

The Portuguese phrase 'bossa nova' combines bossa (a knack, a style, a natural flair — colloquially, a certain quality of ease or sophistication) with nova (new), from Latin novus (new), the source of 'novel,' 'novice,' 'renovate,' 'innovate,' and 'nova' (the stellar explosion named for its sudden newness in the sky). In Brazilian Portuguese slang of the 1950s, bossa meant a fashionable new approach, a cool new angle — something like 'the new thing' or 'the new vibe.' The phrase was applied to the musical style that emerged in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1950s as a label for what the musicians themselves were doing: not 'bossa nova music' but simply 'bossa nova' — the new way, the new knack. The modifier nova made explicit what was already implied: this was a break from the existing samba tradition, a new approach rather than a continuation.

Bossa nova emerged in the beachside apartments of Ipanema and Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro between approximately 1956 and 1960, in the musical conversations between the guitarist and composer João Gilberto, the pianist and composer Antônio Carlos Jobim (Tom Jobim), and the lyricist Vinícius de Moraes. The formal characteristics that defined bossa nova were specific and immediately recognizable: a simplified, cooled-down approach to samba rhythm (the batida — João Gilberto's characteristic guitar pattern, which distributed samba's rhythm between the thumb-plucked bass notes and the finger-strummed chord in a way that was both simpler and more complex than conventional samba accompaniment); sophisticated chromatic harmony influenced by American cool jazz (particularly Gil Evans, Miles Davis, and Stan Kenton) and by classical harmony; and a vocal style that sang conversationally, almost in speech rhythm, with minimal vibrato — the opposite of the operatic approach of existing Brazilian popular singing.

The canonical text of bossa nova is 'Garota de Ipanema' (The Girl from Ipanema), composed by Tom Jobim with lyrics by Vinícius de Moraes in 1962 and inspired by a seventeen-year-old named Helô Pinheiro who walked past the Bar Veloso in Ipanema on her way to the beach. The song's harmonic structure — particularly its sudden and apparently unmotivated modulation to a distant key at the bridge (in the original key of F major, the bridge shifts to G-flat major, a half-step away but harmonically remote) — is one of the most analyzed and admired moments in twentieth-century popular music. Recorded in English by Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto in 1964, 'The Girl from Ipanema' became the second most-played song in history after 'Yesterday' by The Beatles, by some measures — and it introduced bossa nova to the global English-speaking audience.

The 1962 concerts at Carnegie Hall — organized by impresario Sidney Frey and featuring João Gilberto, Tom Jobim, and Luís Bonfá — brought bossa nova to American ears and created an immediate cross-pollination with American jazz. Stan Getz's collaborations with João Gilberto, recorded in 1963–1964, produced albums (Getz/Gilberto, Jazz Samba) that reached mass American audiences and created a wave of bossa nova influence in American pop and jazz that lasted through the late 1960s. The phrase 'bossa nova' entered English from music journalism of this period and became a recognized genre term. In Brazil, bossa nova was not only a musical revolution but a political and cultural one: its sophistication and cosmopolitanism represented an urban middle-class Brazilian modernity at the moment of Juscelino Kubitschek's 'fifty years of progress in five,' the construction of Brasília, and the optimism of the late 1950s — which made the military coup of 1964 and its suppression of that optimism all the more bitter.