Antonio Carlos Jobim

Antonio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim was born on January 25, 1927, in the Tijuca district of Rio de Janeiro ^[1]. His father, Jorge de Oliveira Jobim, was a diplomat and writer who separated from the family when Antonio Carlos was still an infant and died a few years later. His mother, Nilza Brasileiro de Almeida, moved with her two children to Ipanema, then a quiet residential quarter by the sea, and later founded a school to support the household ^[2]. The beaches, hills, and birdsong of that stretch of the city stayed with Jobim for the rest of his life and surfaced constantly in his lyrics.

His stepfather, Celso Frota Pessoa, encouraged the boy's musical curiosity and bought the family a piano. As a teenager Jobim studied with Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, a German-born composer who had settled in Brazil and who introduced his students to modern European harmony, including the music of Debussy and the twelve-tone school ^[1]. Jobim absorbed the impressionists alongside the Brazilian concert composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, whose blending of folk material with classical technique became a lifelong model for him ^[3].

Music was not his first plan. Jobim briefly studied architecture, a practical choice for a young man in postwar Rio, but he abandoned the drafting table within a year. By his early twenties he was earning a living at the piano in the bars and nightclubs of Copacabana, playing dance music into the small hours and learning the working musician's trade from the inside ^[2].

The apprenticeship paid off in an unglamorous but useful job. In the early 1950s Jobim was hired as an arranger and music copyist at the Continental record label, transcribing songs for singers and orchestras, and he soon moved to the Odeon label as an artistic director ^[2]. The work sharpened his craft and put him in contact with the leading performers of Brazilian radio. His own songs began to circulate, and singers such as Dick Farney recorded his early compositions.

The decisive partnership of his career began in 1956, when the poet and diplomat Vinicius de Moraes asked him to write music for the stage play Orfeu da Conceicao, a retelling of the Orpheus myth set during Carnival in the hills of Rio ^[1]. The play later inspired the French-Brazilian film Black Orpheus, released in 1959, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, spreading Brazilian music to audiences far beyond South America ^[4].

In 1958 the singer and guitarist Joao Gilberto recorded Jobim's song "Chega de Saudade", with lyrics by Moraes, using a hushed vocal delivery and a spare, syncopated guitar pattern. The recording is widely treated as the founding document of bossa nova, the "new wave" style that pared samba down to an intimate, harmonically rich chamber music ^[3]. Gilberto's 1959 album of the same name, built largely on Jobim's compositions and arrangements, made the new style a national phenomenon among young middle-class listeners in Rio ^[1].

Bossa nova crossed the equator quickly. American jazz musicians touring Brazil brought the records home, and in November 1962 Jobim appeared with other Brazilian musicians at a famous bossa nova concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, an event that introduced the style to the American press and public ^[2]. Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd had already scored a hit that year with their instrumental version of Jobim's "Desafinado", which won a Grammy Award and set off a bossa nova craze in the United States ^[4].

The peak of that craze arrived with the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto, which paired Stan Getz with Joao Gilberto and featured Jobim at the piano. Its single, "The Girl from Ipanema", sung in English by Astrud Gilberto, became a worldwide hit and won the Grammy for record of the year, while the album itself took album of the year, a first for a jazz record ^[4]. Jobim had written the tune in 1962 with Moraes after watching a young woman, Helo Pinheiro, walk past a bar near Ipanema beach; the song went on to become one of the most recorded compositions in popular music history ^[1].

Among the clearest Antonio Carlos Jobim achievements is the sheer size of his songbook. "Corcovado" (known in English as "Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars"), "Wave", "Insensatez" ("How Insensitive"), "Agua de Beber", "One Note Samba", and "Triste" all entered the standard repertoire of jazz and popular singers ^[3]. In 1967 he recorded the album Francis Albert Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim with Frank Sinatra, a collaboration that confirmed his standing in American popular music; the record was nominated for the album of the year Grammy ^[2]. Later instrumental and orchestral works, including the album Stone Flower in 1970 and the extended piece "Saudade do Brasil", showed his debt to Villa-Lobos and his ambitions beyond the three-minute song ^[3].

Jobim married Thereza Otero Hermanny in 1949, when he was still an obscure nightclub pianist, and the couple had two children, Paulo and Elizabeth. The marriage ended in divorce after nearly three decades. In 1986 he married the photographer Ana Beatriz Lontra, with whom he had two more children, Joao Francisco and Maria Luiza ^[2].

Friends and collaborators knew him as Tom, the nickname by which most Brazilians still refer to him. He was a devoted naturalist who filled his songs with the names of Brazilian birds, rivers, and trees, and he spoke often about deforestation and the destruction of the Atlantic forest around Rio ^[5]. Songs such as "Aguas de Marco" ("Waters of March"), written in 1972 and built from a cascading inventory of everyday objects and natural images, reflect that attention to the physical world; Brazilian critics and musicians have repeatedly voted it among the greatest Brazilian songs ever written ^[5].

For all his international fame, Jobim kept Rio de Janeiro at the center of his life. He divided his later years between homes in Brazil and New York, complained cheerfully about both, and continued to write with Brazilian partners including the lyricist Chico Buarque and his own son Paulo, who joined his touring group ^[2].

After the bossa nova boom faded in the late 1960s, Jobim entered a long and productive middle period. Albums such as Matita Pere in 1973 and Urubu in 1976 mixed songs with orchestral movements and drew on Brazilian folklore, birdcalls, and the sound world of the forest ^[3]. Reviewers at the time were sometimes puzzled, but these records are now regarded as among his most personal work.

In 1984 he formed the Banda Nova, a family-centered ensemble that included his son Paulo, his daughter Elizabeth, and his second wife Ana among its singers and players. With this group he toured Europe, Japan, Brazil, and the United States through the 1980s and early 1990s, recording the albums Passarim in 1987 and Antonio Brasileiro, released shortly before his death ^[2].

Jobim died of cardiac arrest on December 8, 1994, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, where he had undergone surgery; he was 67 years old ^[6]. Brazil declared official mourning, and his body was flown home to Rio de Janeiro, where crowds accompanied the funeral procession. He was buried in the Sao Joao Batista cemetery, the resting place of many Brazilian artists ^[6].

Anyone asking who was Antonio Carlos Jobim can begin with the numbers: his songs have been recorded thousands of times, by artists ranging from Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan to classical guitarists and electronic producers, and "The Girl from Ipanema" remains among the most covered songs ever written ^[4]. Jazz musicians treat his harmony, with its shifting chord colors and long melodic lines built on repeated notes, as a school of its own.

Brazil has honored him in concrete ways. In 1999 the international airport of Rio de Janeiro was renamed Galeao Antonio Carlos Jobim International Airport, so that most visitors to the city now arrive under his name ^[2]. A seaside park in Ipanema also bears his name, and his manuscripts and papers are preserved and studied by the Instituto Antonio Carlos Jobim, which maintains a digital archive of his scores, lyrics, and recordings ^[7]. In the United States he received a posthumous Grammy for the album Antonio Brasileiro and was later inducted into the Latin Grammy Hall of Fame.

Among the enduring Antonio Carlos Jobim facts is this: he managed to be simultaneously a national symbol and an international standard-setter. Bossa nova reshaped jazz singing and guitar playing worldwide, influenced songwriters from the Beatles' generation onward, and gave Brazilian popular music a permanent seat in the global repertoire ^[3]. Composers and critics often place him beside George Gershwin as one of the great melodists of the twentieth century, a comparison that has appeared in obituaries and histories since his death ^[6].