It’s time for another instalment from the Cubist sessions. I’m a huge fan of Bossa Nova. To me it’s some of the greatest music this world has produced as it contains so many special elements: complex harmonic structures borrowed from jazz and classical music, intricate rhythms from Latin and African music and great melodic songwriting. Plus everything sounds good in Portuguese.
According to an Argentinian guitar player I know – Bossa is the brain child of the musical intelligentsia in Brazil who were listening to the jazz greats from America like Ellington and Basie and constructing a whole new style of playing in the dark, smoke filled cafes of Rio de Janeiro. It all sounds very romantic to me.
The fourth song in this series of videos is a short tribute to Bossa and in particular one of it’s greatest composers Antonio Carlos Jobim. I first heard this song, Samba do Aviao, on a Baden Powell record that I found randomly when I was around 14 and it blew me away – the composition and the playing.
When I finally got down to learning it I gained even more respect for the difficulty involved in playing these complex rhythmic patterns with their sliding melodies over constantly changing harmonic progressions. It was a difficult song to learn but well worth the effort. It’s a real pleasure to play.