Charlie Byrd Herbie Mann and others brought in bags full of discs from a trip to Brazil in 1961. Stan Getz listened to them and recorded Desafinado
which stayed for 70 weeks on the EBillboardE charts. Since then no one can deny bossa nova’s global appeal and influence upon jazz and world music. While celebrating bossa nova’s 50-year presence in the United States we can learn more about the movement’s champion Jobim through poet and novelist Helena Jobim’s EAntonio Carlos Jobim: An Illuminated ManE. His personal intellectual and professional history comes alive. With a vast intimate and revealing set of photographs and an engaging elegant and unique prose this is the story of a true 20th-century’s genius. Helena Jobim does justice to her brother’s poetic voice. The composer of Waters of March read questioned and re-created the world he lived in not only through mesmerizing melodies but also through down-to-earth poetry.THThe biography also reveals Antonio Carlos Jobim’s serious ecological concerns. To his 400 songs of inexplicable grace he has added his own epigraph in EAn Illuminated ManE: Every time a tree is cut down here on Earth I believe it will grow again somewhere else in another world. So when I die it is to this place that I want to go where forests live in peace.