Luiz Bonfá
photo: harry pot · cc by 4.0 ↗Luiz Bonfá was a Rio de Janeiro guitarist and composer who trained classically as a boy before falling in with Rio's radio-era choro and samba-canção scene, developing a brassier, more percussive solo-guitar style than his bossa nova contemporaries. His 1959 composition 'Manhã de Carnaval,' written for the film Black Orpheus, became one of the most recorded songs in the world; his 1967 instrumental 'Seville' spent decades as a footnote until it resurfaced, sampled almost note-for-note, as the foundation of Gotye's 'Somebody That I Used to Know.'
Bonfá began formal guitar study at 11 with Isaías Sávio, the Uruguayan-born classical guitarist who anchored the classical-guitar chair at São Paulo's conservatory; Sávio was reportedly so struck by the boy's talent that he waived the family's inability to pay for lessons. That classical grounding is the source of the 'brassier, more penetrating,' polyphonic solo-guitar style writers use to distinguish Bonfá from his bossa nova peers — he plays melody, harmony, and bassline at once, a classical guitarist's habit transplanted into popular song.
listen forSet a classical piece like Sávio's 'Serões' against Bonfá's 'Menina Flor.' Listen for the same three-voice texture — a singing top line, moving inner harmony, and a walking bass all under one set of fingers — that a samba-canção guitarist wouldn't typically attempt alone.
Bonfá met the choro guitarist Garoto (Aníbal Augusto Sardinha) around 1946 and the two played together for hours in Rio; Bonfá later called him 'a musical genius far ahead of his time.' Garoto had already been fusing choro, samba, and American jazz harmony into a uniquely chromatic, jazz-inflected guitar vocabulary years before bossa nova existed, and that harmonic sophistication — chords reaching well past simple samba changes — is what Bonfá carried into his own radio- and film-era writing.
listen forPlay Garoto's 'Jorge do Fusa,' with its restless, jazz-club chord movement under a simple-sounding melody, then Bonfá's 'De Cigarro em Cigarro.' Listen for the same trick: a plain, singable tune riding on harmony that keeps sliding somewhere a straight samba wouldn't go.