After twenty-one years away, I’m back in the city where I was born, the city that gave me my name. I’ve swapped my daycare (Mamãe eu quero ir/ ‘Mommy I want to go!’) for university (PUC-Rio); I’m living in Copacabana instead of Leme; my parents are in another country; Rio is rapidly gentrifying and touristifying (one thing about Brazilians: we love to make up words); the ocean is probably less clean and per kilo food is more expensive, but otherwise, I imagine, things are as we left them. We even have Lula in office.
At PUC, I’m taking five classes, including a mandatory Portuguese for Foreigners course (Brazil can be unbearably Kafka-esque, and neither a passport nor fluency spared me this seminar)— but my favorite is a lecture on the history of Brazilian music. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I alternate between taking vigorous notes, practicing the thumb-fingers-wrist-palm tambourine rhythm of samba on my thigh, mouthing lyrics to myself, and tearing up. The obsessive notes are, first and foremost, to sear this most brilliant of courses into my memory, and second, to report the day’s stories back to my parents (and now, to you).
Today’s lesson—all credit to my brilliant professor, Paulo Cesar de Araújo— is on the song that, he says, changed destiny. Feel free to guess what it is. I’m not going to tell you right away.
Instead, let’s back up a bit. A lot. To 1958, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If you’re listening to recorded music at the time, you’re listening to the radio. You’re hearing an ensemble of crooning radio kings and queens, Disney-like arrangements, operatic vocals, and oh-so-much melodrama. While you (the you of 2025) cook or organize or do whatever you’re doing while reading this, take a few minutes to listen to a bit of some of these:
This one is my favorite in this style:
If you’re not a fan, though, don’t fret. Some radio royalty were also recording classic sambas. In fact, because carnaval season was when most records were sold, anything that was too melancholy to pass for a parade tune (like all the melodrama above) was referred to as “música do meio do ano”— “middle-of-the-year music.” Carnaval music, I suppose, was just ‘music’:
And if those don’t do it for you, there was also the Northeastern forró/baião (my favorite genre):
But regardless of which of those styles you like most, on July 10, 1958, a then-unknown artist would record a single that sounded absolutely nothing like any of them. It would, quite literally, redefine Brazilian music and culture, from vocal technique to social gatherings. (I’m building so much suspense, aren’t I!?)
To build some more, here’s a quick summary of some of the Brazilian artists who have testified to our mystery song being either a) the reason they became musicians or b) the reason they decided to play this kind of music:
Our song played on the radio for the first time when Gilberto Gil was around sixteen years old. He had been eating at home when it came on and he lept up when it ended, running to the local pharmacy to call in to the radio station and beg to know who had been singing. What was that song called? What was that music?
Chico Buarque, who had wanted to be an architect or maybe a writer (he did go on, eventually, to also be the latter) decided he wanted to be a musician when he heard the record, and played it so many times his father thought he was unwell.
Caetano Veloso heard it and promised to learn the guitar.
Gal Costa said that when she listened to the song, it “bateu em mim como destino”— it hit me/ pounded in me like destiny.
Milton Nascimento, who was working at a radio station at the time, called the disc an illumination.
These five singers, who would go on to be the greatest artists of their generation, of my mother’s generation, and of mine, were in awe. (A nearly fifteen-year running survey of the students enrolled in my class—hundreds of ~18-23 year olds since 2012—revealed that Caetano and Chico were the two artists most frequently listed as students’ favorite Brazilian musicians. At eighty-something, they remain our superstars.)
But alas, all that to say that the impact of this record was immense, and the tapestry of sound woven from its thread is outstanding in its beauty and abundance. My professor, before revealing the record, said earnestly that it was in each of our DNA.
The song, the side A of its singer’s first hit single, was this one:
(Here’s a translation of the lyrics.)
A tsunami of questions crashed over the city. What genre was this? Was it samba (the disc itself said so, but where was the tambourine?) Was it a baião? Why was he singing so colloquially, as if the voice itself were an instrument? What was this democratized sound, voice and guitar on the same plane, simple, revelatory? Tom Jobim, in his blurb, didn’t have all the answers. But he knew to praise his partner for transcending the limitations of a body: “When João Gilberto accompanies a guitar, it is him. When an orchestra accompanies João, the orchestra, too, becomes him.”
And he knew that there had never, ever, been anything like this. Young people loved it; stations refused to play it (how could he call himself a singer? How could this be music?). But a few radio plays were enough. The record exploded.
Its B-side, meanwhile, was even stranger than its twin (before you ask, no, “bim bom” doesn’t mean anything in Portuguese):
It’s fitting, though, that Gilberto’s introduction to the world was scatting reminiscent of a heartbeat. And that yet again, he reconfigured himself— body and voice— as an instrument. When I heard Bim Bom in class, I immediately thought of a song by Gal Costa that had been stuck in my head for days. In it, she mimics an instrument (no spoilers) until they, too, merge gloriously into one:
Ah! I’m getting ahead of myself! Gal Tropical is from 1979. Back to 1958!
Quickly, our world-shattering single was such a success that it demanded another one. And this time, Gilberto responded to his haters perfectly, marvelously—with a tune that was sweet but sharp. (Ha- ha; didn’t even mean for that to be a pun.)
He recorded Desafinado.
Here’s an English version, “Slightly Out of Tune.”
It’s here, in a phrase of Desafinado, that Gilberto names, for the first time, the genre he has invented. “Isso é bossa nova,” he sings. “Isso é muito natural.” (“This is bossa nova, this is very natural.”) <3
Some sixty years later, on another continent and in another century, I sang Desafinado with my high school jazz band. A jazz band that I joined because my dad, after falling in love with bossa nova, learning Portuguese, moving to Brazil, meeting my mom, and having me, asked me, sixteen years after my birth in Rio, to please audition for my school band so that I could sing his favorite songs.
What a record indeed.
I'm a huge fan of Bossa Nova but this detailed history was new to me.