Requiem for Bossa Nova

I have just retired from teaching at the University of Brasilia and one of the high points of the course I taught - British Culture and Institutions - was always, when talking about British popular music, to be able to say to my students: “You may be younger than me, with your lives in front of you and all these beautiful young women to grow close to, but you will never know the 1960s in Britain and the USA, as I did”.

Neither will they know the 1950s in Brazil, when for one brief, shining moment bossa nova sprang forth and captivated Brazil and the rest of the civilised world.  And yet where is bossa nova today?  Jazz sprang up in New Orleans and Chicago and is still with us but it would be difficult to find anyone today outside Brazil who could name a singer or musician from the bossa nova period.

One of the explanations for this might be the language.  Of the world’s population, only a small proportion speaks Portuguese, but I don’t think this is valid; last year in Prague I bought a CD from a jazz group playing on the Charles Bridge, the French (who have no particular love for the English language) have taken jazz to their hearts, and readers of a certain age will recall the wonderful Dutch Swing College Band (whatever happened to them?).  No, apart from a certain amount of interest shown by Stan Getz and Frank Sinatra (not forgetting Sara Vaughan), bossa nova remained anchored within Brazil and died there, which is an immense tragedy since it represents one of the highest points reached by popular music in the modern world.

Perhaps one of the problems with bossa nova is that, surprisingly, it was quite a bourgeois phenomenon.  It may have had its inspiration in the sambas rooted in Brazil’s black musical tradition but its best-known exponents were middle-class white musicians who brought to it some of the disciplines of academic music.  I’ve always found it significant that two of the most famous bossa nova songs are Desafinado (Out of Tune) and Samba de uma Nota Só (One-note Samba), rather self-conscious references to techniques of music-making.

It is also possible that one of the reasons for the bossa nova reaching out to the world like a new wave of music but then also retreating as waves retreat, is that it is inextricably linked to the world of Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s.  Today, Rio is at one level part of a mechanised global tourist industry and at another level it exists in a state of virtual civil war with drug dealers dominating the slums which are invaded from time to time by the police for the benefit of the Governor’s public relations office.  In 1950s, for those blessed with a certain level of income, it was possibly the nearest physical and spiritual situation to heaven on earth.  Firstly, although the slums on the hills were there, they and their criminal elements were not oppressing the city as they do today.  Secondly, if you looked out to sea, you could enjoy what is probably the most beautiful combination of landscape and seascape in the world.

In terms of social life, the point has been made, even by respectable sociologists, that the currency of daily life in Brazil is, to put not too fine a point on it, sex.  While our natural delicacy makes us hesitate to impose this concept upon the sensitive natures of our gentle readers, practical experience unfortunately leads us to the same conclusion.  For the middle-class musicians of Rio in the 1950s, life followed a laid-back routine of social life in bars or private houses fuelled with imported whisky and cigarettes and then the amorous activities these elements apparently often provoke.  Out of this toxic mix arose the relaxed tension, if that is not too foolish a concept, of the bossa nova.

In contrast to North American blues, the themes of bossa nova are generally upbeat celebrations of love rather than lamentations of the loss of love and the hard conditions of life in general.  This is not surprising, since many of the Brazilian composers lived a privileged life and the composers of North American blues and jazz generally lived a pretty rotten one.  Nevertheless, although there was racial discrimination in Brazil at that time, it was less oppressive and clear-cut than that of the USA and this situation may have softened musical themes, as Brazilian culture softens everything it touches. 

How can we dare say this? First of all, the fact of the USA being a highly developed nation meant that those with the money were socially far distant from the poor.  Brazil, being an extremely underdeveloped nation in the 1950s, had a small social elite but the majority of the population, white, mixed-race and black, all had to put up with the same rather primitive conditions.  Secondly, the geographical proximity of the USA to Europe meant European women were imported in colonial times and although white slave masters had children with female slaves, the physical difference between whites and blacks in the USA was then, as now, more marked than it is in Brazil, where the distance from Europe meant that the Portuguese colonisers produced children with local indian women as well as with their black slaves.  The result is that the less marked physical differences between the southern European Portuguese (carrying a strong genetic element from the 800 years of Moorish colonisation of Iberia) and the gentle gradation of colours from mulatto to pure black, means that it is difficult for a ‘white’ Brazilian to look down upon a darker one.  As a recent ‘white’ President of Brazil said: his family has “one foot in the kitchen”.

The bossa nova is an exact reflection in music of this situation.  The academic elements of ‘white’ music fused with the samba created by the descendants of black slaves.  In the USA, modern jazz contains many of the same elements of a cool, laid-back style in which frequently white, often academically trained musicians adapt grassroots jazz for their own purposes.  Unfortunately, to my mind at least, American modern jazz lacks the essential charm of the bossa nova; it is the music of the Bauhaus rather than the carioca boteco.  One of the popular figures in Rio society in the 1950s was the pencil-moustached malandro – the womanising, money-borrowing, cachaça-drinking likeable rascal, and it is he who symbolises the bossa nova while the rather preppy martini-drinking Newport Jazz Festival to me at least, represents the modern jazz musician.

And yet, American jazz of all kinds survives, whereas bossa nova lingers only in specialised radio stations and the car stereos of fading addicts such as me.  The reasons for this?  To a certain extent democracy, that old enemy of Art, is to blame.  In all sections of the arts in Brazil the 1960s and 70s saw a search for ‘authenticity’ that ruled out the rather elite group responsible for the bossa nova.  The Tropicalismo movement saw the focus of music shift from Rio to Salvador in the Northeast, where Afro-Brazilian culture is strongest.  If bossa nova was difficult to export, Tropicalismo was even more provincial.  In the 1980s I went to a concert in London given by some of its foremost exponents (Gilberto Gil, Maria Bethânia and Caetano Veloso) and the audience was almost completely made up of expatriate Brazilians.

Subsequent developments from Tropicalismo have been, to put not too fine a point on it, disastrous and you would not really travel too far from home to listen to modern Brazilian popular music.  I did recently travel a few kilometres from home to listen to the son of the peerless guitarist Baden Powell.  This extremely pleasant young man is in a tragic situation: how can he possibly compete with his father?  His answer is to play everything at 100 miles an hour and to produce a show full of sound and fury, signifying very little, rather reminiscent of the overrated Jimi Hendrix, whose frantic scrabbling embodies the spirit of onanism in music.

Our conclusions? Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.  Arriving in Brazil in the late 1960s, I missed the Golden Age of bossa nova, but it was still in the air.  Today, as my grandchildren rush around frenetically manipulating their ipads, MP3 players and for all I know, teletransporting devices I feel regret for them and a selfish pleasure for me that the Rio Carnival of that time involved listening to the old tunes in bars and then walking in the early hours of the morning through streets where the street-lights filtered green through the trees, without the threat of assault, to have breakfast in a flat overlooking Guanabara Bay as the sun came up.  If my little ones went to Carnival today they would be taken to the segregated Sambódromo area by taxi, because no sane visitor would walk in the streets at night, and they would see the highly-structured, very professional and very predictable tourist operation that Carnival has become.  Eheu fugaces.....

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