Tom Jobim
Antônio Carlos Jobim was the composer most responsible for turning bossa nova from a Rio de Janeiro apartment-party style into Brazil's defining musical export, merging samba rhythm with jazz harmony and the cool, close-miked restraint João Gilberto brought to the guitar. Songs he wrote with lyricist Vinícius de Moraes, including 'Garota de Ipanema,' became some of the most recorded compositions in popular music history. His harmonically adventurous songbook, indebted in part to French impressionist composers, has been mined by generations of Brazilian pop artists since, Anitta included.
enthusiast, ear-level
listen forJoão Gilberto's hushed vocal delivery and tightly syncopated guitar batida on 'Chega de Saudade' in 1958 gave Jobim's compositions their rhythmic identity and effectively inaugurated bossa nova as a style. You can hear the same understated, conversational cool carried forward, minus the guitar, in Jobim's own vocal phrasing on 'Corcovado.'
enthusiast, ear-level
listen forVinícius de Moraes co-wrote most of Jobim's best-known songs and pushed further into Afro-Brazilian rhythm and Candomblé-inflected melody on his 1966 album with Baden Powell, 'Berimbau.' The same plainspoken, image-driven lyricism shows up in the flowing, list-like verses of Jobim's own 'Águas de Março,' written a few years later.
enthusiast, ear-level
listen forJobim found real affinity with Debussy's impressionist harmony, and biographers point to whole-tone scales and blurred, ambiguous chord centers in his writing that were unusual for the samba-canção tradition he came out of. Put the drifting, unresolved chords of 'Clair de Lune' next to the cool, floating harmony of Jobim's own 'Wave' and the family resemblance is hard to miss.