By 1962, jazz was beginning to be perceived as hard work if you weren't a dedicated fan. Ornette Coleman had already hurtled out of the west coast with a new way of playing that rejected traditional song structures, and encouraged an ensemble-improv style that could be hard to follow for anyone used to hearing solos taken in orderly turns. John Coltrane was going the other way, taking improvisation over chords to such levels of intensity that his solos were becoming storms of impassioned sound rather than decipherable sequences of notes. Cecil Taylor was doing something similar for jazz piano, playing a mix of classical and jazz phrasing at warp speeds.
There was one more throw of the dice left for old-fashioned jazz lyricism before the Beatles et al changed the musical landscape, and ensured that jazz would never return to its pre-eminent place in popular music. And that was the bossa nova craze of the early 60s.
With 1962 album Jazz Samba, saxophonist Stan Getz and acoustic guitarist Charlie Byrd created a new jazz sensation. Half a million copies were sold within 18 months, making it the only jazz album ever to top Billboard's pop chart. Getz, who had been a teenage star of the Woody Herman Big Band in the 40s and the much-imitated champion of a lyrical sound in the 50s, won a Grammy for his sublime performance.
Jazz Samba's magic formula wasn't hard to identify. In its soft textures, low volumes and unobtrusively chilled-out feel, it was a throwback to the successful 'cool-school' of the previous decade, which reached a wide public by smoothing some of the rough edges off bebop and hard-bop. Getz's distinctively soft and tender tenor-sax sound – widely admired, even by players much edgier than him, including John Coltrane – was as seductive as a whisper, and his natural lyricism often allowed him to improvise better themes than the ones he was playing on. But the clincher was the pulse – the hypnotic rhythms of traditional Brazilian dance music as urbanised, slowed down, and subtly reshuffled by jazz-influenced Brazilian composers Antônio Carlos Jobim and guitarist/vocalist João Gilberto. Jobim's and Gilberto's massaging of old samba forms became known as "bossa nova" – meaning "new wave" or "new trend".
American guitarist Byrd was a former classical player who had been taught by Andrés Segovia, and who continued to use finger-style and an acoustic Spanish guitar in jazz. Byrd travelled to Brazil in 1961 on a state department tour, and was entranced by bossa nova. On his return, he played the music to Getz, who immediately realised that the Brazilian song-forms and swaying, beach-sauntering rhythms would perfectly complement his sensuous sound and devotion to understatement. The pair persuaded Verve Records to get behind the recording that became Jazz Samba.
Desafinado (see the clip above) was to be Jazz Samba's most iconic tune, but the album – almost all of which was composed by Brazilians – glowed with memorable material, including Jobim's and Newton Mendonça's Samba de Una Nota So (One Note Samba), the shimmering Bahia, and the wistful Samba Triste. The notoriously irascible Getz fell out with Byrd over royalties and their partnership stalled, but the music stayed on a roll for a couple of years, passing through various mutations including a big band that mostly sounded unsuited to the idiom's delicacy, despite some haunting interplay between Getz and trombonist Bob Brookmeyer.
The jazz-bossa style is mostly remembered for Girl from Ipanema (a Jobim song performed by Gilberto's wife, Astrud, and accompanied by Getz) – seen here on a memorably cheesy scene from the 1964 movie Get Yourself a College Girl. No prizes for spotting a 21-year old Gary Burton – a jazz-vibraphone genius in waiting – in front of the baffling snow scene behind this lazy summer music.
