Antônio Carlos Jobim
Antônio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim, also known as Tom Jobim, was a Brazilian composer, pianist, guitarist, songwriter, arranger and singer, and is considered one of the great exponents of Brazilian music. Jobim merged samba with cool jazz in the 1960s to create bossa nova, with worldwide success; as a result, he is regarded as one of the fathers of bossa nova, and as one of the most celebrated songwriters of the 20th century. His songs have been performed by many singers and instrumentalists internationally since the early 1960s.
In 1965, the album Getz/Gilberto was the first jazz record to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. It also won Best Jazz Instrumental Album – Individual or Group and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. The album's single "Garota de Ipanema ", composed by Jobim, has become one of the most recorded songs of all time, and the album won the Record of the Year. Jobim composed many songs that are now included in jazz and pop standard repertoires. "Garota de Ipanema" has been recorded over 240 times by other artists. His 1967 album with Frank Sinatra, Francis Albert Sinatra & Antônio Carlos Jobim, was nominated for Album of the Year in 1968 and album Antônio Brasileiro was awarded the 1995 Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album.
Early life
Antônio Carlos Jobim was born at 23:15 BRT on 25 January 1927 in the middle-class district of Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro. His father, Jorge de Oliveira Jobim, was a writer, diplomat, professor and journalist. He came from a prominent family, being the great-nephew of, senator, privy councillor and physician of Emperor Dom Pedro II. While studying medicine in Europe, José Martins added Jobim to his last name, paying homage to the village where his family came from in Portugal, the parish of Santa Cruz de Jovim, Porto. Antônio's mother, Nilza Brasileiro de Almeida, was of partly indigenous descent from northeastern Brazil. Brasileiro de Almeida was only 16 years old when she gave birth to Antônio Carlos Jobim at their home in Tijuca on Rua Conde de Bonfim.When Antônio was still an infant, his parents separated and his mother moved with her children to Ipanema, the beachside neighborhood the composer would later celebrate in his songs. In 1935, when the elder Jobim died, Nilza married Celso da Frota Pessoa, who would encourage his stepson's career; it was he who gave Jobim his first piano. Jobim credits his stepfather with encouraging him to pursue music. In an interview with Roberto d'Ávila in 1981, he said, "I hated the piano, I thought it was a girly thing, I liked to play soccer...I had a great stepfather who really helped me get involved with music and convinced me that the piano was not a girly thing." As a young man of limited means, Jobim earned his living by playing in nightclubs and bars and later as an arranger for a recording label before starting to achieve success as a composer.
Later on in the interview with Roberto d'Ávila, Jobim talks about his feelings toward his upbringing. He notes a conversation he had with a friend of his father's, Erico Verissimo, where Verissimo said that Tom Jobim should be sombre due to the absence of his father from a young age. Jobim told d'Ávila, "I was left without a father, clinging to my mother's skirts…some have 'excessive' fathers, the excessive presence of their fathers is a problem, but the absence of a father is also a problem." Jobim continued with d'Ávila, sharing that it takes something of great influence to bring someone to dedicate their life to music. He said that "people who play the piano well are all handicapped". He mentions the health struggles of both Sergio Mendes who had osteomyelitis and Luiz Eça who had polio. "It takes something really strong to make you leave reality behind and begin to write songs," Jobim shared. With d'Ávila he alludes to his sadness as a young man as being the driving force that motivated him to further his pursuit in music, that he needed to be sad in order to play the piano and write. He concludes on the topic with d'Ávila that, at that point in his life that he no longer needed to be sad to create music, that he was no longer sad as he was at the beginning of his career.
Musical influences
Jobim's musical roots were planted firmly in the work of Pixinguinha, the legendary musician and composer who began modern Brazilian music in the 1930s. Among his teachers were Lúcia Branco and, from 1941 on, Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, a German composer who lived in Brazil and introduced atonal and twelve-tone composition in the country. Jobim's mother established a school where Jobim would begin taking lessons on the piano; this is when he would meet Koellreutter. Jobim was also influenced by the French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and by the Brazilian composers Ary Barroso who has been described as Jobim's "most important musical influence". Among many themes, his lyrics talked about love, self-discovery, betrayal, joy and especially about the birds and natural wonders of Brazil, like the "Mata Atlântica" forest, characters of Brazilian folklore and his home city of Rio de Janeiro. In a segment with the NBC Today show in 1986, hosted by Jane Pauley, Jobim spoke about his music's origins of inspiration, saying "My music comes from this environment here, you know, the rain, the sun, the trees, the birds, the fish."Career
In the 1940s Jobim started to play piano in bars and nightclubs of Rio de Janeiro, and in the first years of the 1950s he worked as an arranger in the Continental Studio, where in April 1953 he had his first composition recorded, when the Brazilian singer Mauricy Moura recorded Jobim's composition "Incerteza", with lyrics by Newton Mendonça.Jobim became prominent in Brazil when he teamed up with poet and diplomat Vinicius de Moraes to write the music for the play Orfeu da Conceição. The most popular song from the show was "Se Todos Fossem Iguais A Você". Later, when the play was adapted into a film, producer Sacha Gordine did not want to use any of the existing music from the play. Gordine asked de Moraes and Jobim for a new score for the film Orfeu Negro, or Black Orpheus. Moraes was at the time away in Montevideo, Uruguay, working for the Itamaraty and so he and Jobim were only able to write three songs, primarily over the telephone. This collaboration proved successful, and de Moraes went on to pen the lyrics to some of Jobim's most popular songs.
In 1958 the Brazilian singer and guitarist João Gilberto recorded his first album with two of Jobim's most famous songs, "Desafinado" and "Chega de Saudade". This album inaugurated the Bossa Nova movement in Brazil. The sophisticated harmonies of his songs caught the attention of jazz musicians in the United States, principally after his first performance at Carnegie Hall, in 1962.
A key event in making Jobim's music known in the English-speaking world was his collaboration with the American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz, the Brazilian singer João Gilberto, and Gilberto's wife at the time, Astrud Gilberto, which resulted in two albums, Getz/Gilberto and Getz/Gilberto Vol. 2. The release of Getz/Gilberto created a bossa nova craze in the United States and subsequently internationally. Getz had previously recorded Jazz Samba with Charlie Byrd, and Jazz Samba Encore! with Luiz Bonfá. Jobim wrote many of the songs on Getz/Gilberto, which became one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time, and turned Astrud Gilberto, who sang on "Garota de Ipanema" and "Corcovado", into an international sensation. At the Grammy Awards of 1965 Getz/Gilberto won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group and the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. "The Girl from Ipanema" won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year. Among his later hits is "Águas de Março", for which he wrote both the Portuguese and English lyrics, and which was then translated into French by Georges Moustaki.
In talking about his creative process when writing and creating "Girl From Ipanema", Jobim told Roberto d’Ávila in 1981, "It comes to me in a way, then it changes one or two times and all of the sudden, it becomes something that makes sense…it's like the profile of a woman…the profile of a woman, something very discernible, then you say: ‘hey, this is really beautiful…’ then you stare and as soon as you stare, it's gone, I mean it becomes part of the past." Jobim continues, "I mean, every time you draw something it turns into, it's something static… that portrait remains forever."