Homage to Jobim

I remember now—it was nearly 20 years ago—listening on my car stereo to a compilation of Stan Getz on a ragged dubbed cassette tape, one late night on a lonely, windswept South Carolina beach while trying to sleep off on the hood of my car an evening of too much booze. Sometimes, place and music conspire to produce a moment so full of life force, so new, so actual, that the moment becomes fused into one’s hard wiring. It was the first time I ever heard Getz play (a friend’s older brother had lent the tape to me), and I was transfixed. Not being a musician, I’ve always marveled at how musicians can coax unique sounds from their instruments, sounds that are theirs and theirs alone, and Getz’s sound was (nay, is) certainly unique, a deep, warm cooing, almost too organic to come from mere brass.

But there was something else. It wasn’t just the brilliant playing; the songs themselves were sublimely beautiful. A sort of syncopated plaintiveness. Samba on barbiturates. Years later I came to learn of the source of many of those songs, the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim (1927-1994). I was born long after the bossa nova craze of the 1960s had come and gone, so for me—and many in my generation—the music was a revelation. The popular music of the 1980s on which I cut my teeth was largely composed of the gaudiness of “jazz fusion” and the tetchy anxieties of New Wave, which is not to say they didn’t have their charms, I suppose, but their appeal proved quickly perishable. So for me, the rediscovery of Jobim was a lightning bolt of musical clarity in a sky clouded over with the excesses of the age.

And how lucky for me that I could have Jobim freshly picked, as it were, picked clean from his own age of excess, during which his music, particularly his bossa nova, was brought to market by purveyors of a kind of faux middle-class sophistication à la Hugh Hefner. Once you remove Jobim from the plastic exoticism of James Bond movies and West-Coast turtleneck jazz, you discover an amazingly durable music. I realize that many of an older generation will never be able to do so, much as I’ll never be able to judge disco on its own merits due to the cultural associations (sparkles, mascara, thick-seamed jeans, bad 70s hair, &tc.) and overexposure.