Antônio Carlos Jobim
1927 – 1994 · Brazil
Known for: Brazilian composer, father of bossa nova and of The Girl from Ipanema
“The sound of Rio de Janeiro, turned into songs the world still sings.”
Biography
Antônio Carlos Jobim was born on 25 January 1927 in Tijuca, a middle class district of Rio de Janeiro, the son of a writer and diplomat and of a mother who was barely sixteen. His parents separated while he was an infant, and Nilza Brasileiro de Almeida took her two children to Ipanema, the beachside neighbourhood whose name he would one day carry around the world. His father died in 1935; the stepfather who followed, Celso da Frota Pessoa, gave the boy his first piano and argued him out of the notion that the instrument was no business of someone who preferred football. He studied with Lúcia Branco and from 1941 with Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, and he listened as closely to Debussy and Ravel as to Pixinguinha and Ary Barroso. Through the 1940s he made his living at the piano in the bars and nightclubs of Rio, and afterwards as an arranger for a record company.
The first Jobim composition to be recorded was Incerteza, sung by Mauricy Moura in April 1953 to words by Newton Mendonça. Three years later he joined the poet and diplomat Vinicius de Moraes to write the music for the play Orfeu da Conceição, and when it was filmed as Orfeu Negro in 1959 the producer asked for an entirely new score, which the two of them, with Moraes posted to Montevideo, put together largely over the telephone. Out of that partnership came bossa nova, samba slowed to the pace of a quiet room and shaded with the harmony of cool jazz, a way of writing and singing that changed popular music far beyond Brazil. Garota de Ipanema, written with Moraes, has been recorded more than two hundred and forty times and stands among the most recorded songs ever written. The 1964 album Getz/Gilberto, which carried several of his pieces, won three Grammy Awards and became the first jazz record named Album of the Year, while the single of Garota de Ipanema took Record of the Year.
In 1967 Jobim recorded an album with Frank Sinatra that was nominated the following year for Album of the Year. He went on writing to the end, about love and longing but also about the rivers, birds and Atlantic forest of his country, which he named as the source of his music and defended early and persistently. He died in New York on 8 December 1994. His last studio album, Antônio Brasileiro, received the 1995 Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album, and in 1999 the international airport of Rio de Janeiro was given his name.