Bossa Nova's Influence on American Popular Guitar Music

[We_Love_Lime]

Hey y’all

I’m a drummer working on a PhD in music history. Feel free to make any jokes you would like. But I’m working on a project that looks at bossa nova’s influence on ‘60s music that we wouldn’t really consider bossa nova. My first section dealt with bossa nova drum patterns showing up in the Beatles and the Doors and James Brown, and now I’m interested in looking at some of the innovations by bossa nova guitarists. How might they have influenced American popular music during the 1960s?

As a drummer, and in general, I’m a bit out of my element in here. So I decided to ask some guitar enthusiasts who might know better. Hope this is the right spot. To give you an idea of what I’m thinking of, check out this Simon and Garfunkel song, “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” (1970). Nobody would really consider it a bossa nova, but that opening Ebmaj7 chord seems so indebted to bossa nova harmonies and voicings.

Anybody have any similar songs they can think of, or general ideas or thoughts? I would really appreciate it.

Thanks,

Rami

[rpjazzguitar]

Thoughts, yes.

There are lots of interviews with the founders of Bossa Nova. They all agree that they were influenced by American Jazz, mentioning, in particular a Julie London album with Barney Kessel, whose voicings they copied.

They also attribute their style to living in apartment buildings with thin walls, forcing them to play quietly.

Their guitars were mostly nylon string instruments and they loved open string chords more than many Americans at the time. This may have been because of a classical influence. Or, it may have been because of the importance of rhythm -- Brazilians' chord melodies are generally played in strict time, which is facilitated by using open strings.

One of the things Bossa did (and Salsa 15 years earlier) was bring a different groove into American music. Everyone learned to play Bossa, at least a little and every jazz group played some bossa influenced grooves.

A lot of charts were marked "Latin", which is kind of a joke to musicians in so-called Latin countries, since the styles are numerous and diverse. But, it did seem to mean even eighths and more syncopation.

Even Rock bands, as you point out, were influenced. The Doors' drummer John Densmore has said that he thought of Break on Through as a bossa. (For that matter, they thought the Am Bm solo section of Light My Fire was Coltrane style).

[ronjazz]

It may not fit the time frame, but "She's Come Undone" definitely has a boss influence.

[mr. beaumont]

I saw your thread title and the first song that came to my mind was "So Long!"

The influence definitely extends past just the 60's...here's one of my favorite "indie rock" bands of the 90's-00's playing a decidedly "Bossa" tune...

going back further, I suppose this is a stretch, but I always felt a bossa filtered through r&b kind of thing going on here...

And again here...

[MarkRhodes]

There are lots of interviews with the founders of Bossa Nova. They all agree that they were influenced by American Jazz, mentioning, in particular a Julie London album with Barney Kessel, whose voicings they copied.

I remember reading about this in a Kessel bio. I had not known his playing influenced Bossa Nova players. (I hadn't listened to much bossa at the time.) Go, Barney! ;o)

[rpjazzguitar]

I remember reading about this in a Kessel bio. I had not known his playing influenced Bossa Nova players. (I hadn't listened to much bossa at the time.) Go, Barney! ;o)

Older samba styles had simpler harmony, for the most part. I'm not sure what the guitar styles were like back then.

The bossa nova movement used samba rhythms, played them softly, sang softly and used an American jazz guitar sensibility. I'm not enough of a musicologist to know where Kessel and other of his era got their harmonic sensibility. The rhythms are basically samba.

Julie/Barney recorded that in 1955 and Barney's guitar style included a lot of what I later heard in Jim Hall's playing.

Charlie Christian's comping was entirely different, and more rooted in swing. The swing guys, like, say, Allen Reuss, also sounded nothing like Barney in 1955.

Does anyone know how things evolved to the point where Barney did this in 1955?

Did this go "though" Johnny Smith? Chuck Wayne?

[MarkRhodes]

This was my first dose of Julie London and Barney Kessel together. I still love it.

[Steven Herron]

I know this was mentioned a couple of replies earlier but the one song that stands out above them all in my mind is "Undun" which was a hit song for The Guess Who somewhere around 1970.

Randy Bachman who was their lead guitarist wrote the song shortly after one of his neighbors - who just so happened to be Lenny Breau - showed him a bunch of jazz chords one afternoon.

How cool is that!

[ragman1]

Thoughts, yes.

There are lots of interviews with the founders of Bossa Nova. They all agree that they were influenced by American Jazz, mentioning, in particular a Julie London album with Barney Kessel, whose voicings they copied.

They also attribute their style to living in apartment buildings with thin walls, forcing them to play quietly.

Their guitars were mostly nylon string instruments and they loved open string chords more than many Americans at the time. This may have been because of a classical influence. Or, it may have been because of the importance of rhythm -- Brazilians' chord melodies are generally played in strict time, which is facilitated by using open strings.

One of the things Bossa did (and Salsa 15 years earlier) was bring a different groove into American music. Everyone learned to play Bossa, at least a little and every jazz group played some bossa influenced grooves.

A lot of charts were marked "Latin", which is kind of a joke to musicians in so-called Latin countries, since the styles are numerous and diverse. But, it did seem to mean even eighths and more syncopation.

Even Rock bands, as you point out, were influenced. The Doors' drummer John Densmore has said that he thought of Break on Through as a bossa. (For that matter, they thought the Am Bm solo section of Light My Fire was Coltrane style).

Informed posts are so nice :-)

[Jonah]

It's interesting... because rock and pop music the bossa influence was not always concious... these patterns just merged into songs due to general cultural enviroment.. for example The Beatles - I can't say for sure of course.. but probably they did not think of bossa it just came up as if it was natural... and the general style and sound of the group did not change significantly through this.
So the this is more like real influence from my pov.

With jazz it was much more direct... bossa was litterally taken and dilivered into jazz.
So it's not quite an influence but incorporation... it became one of the jazz styles.

So if we speak not about playing bossa by jazz players but about its influence on other jazz styles.. when they perform straighahead or bop or whever

I think the most significant influence could probably be
- straight 8ths playing
- quite loose colouristic harmonic extensions (often led through a few bars and often loosely connected from point of view of trad voice-leading and harmony
that probably could influence more on development of modal jazz into more 'sweet' and 'cool' direction - rather than r'n'b - ish hard-bop...))) I believe players like Pat Metheny are influenced by it for sure (yes Pat was actually living in Brasil for a while and studying this music)
If we speak about influence to me Pat is probably the best example... almost all his music sounds influenced by bossa but it is seldom sounds like straight bossa)))


- and for guitar technuque - probably fingerstyle technique (not sure about the connection with bossa but could be)
- and for equipment usinf classical acoustic gutra with nylon strings - this is what I am almost sure about that it was bossa influence

That's just kind of a brainstorm.. I am not ready to provide any proofs

[christianm77]

Nylon string is just common throughout Latin America - not necessarily 'classical guitar' - used in all sorts of music in Brazil, including Choro...

[John A.]

I think the main influence was rhythm and overall feel rather than anything particular in the harmonies. The most obvious example of 60s pop being influenced by Bossa Nova I can think of is the Beatles "And I Love Her"

John

[Papawooly]

I'm not buying it... Unless Barney was touring at 16...

This song is from 1939

[Papawooly]

... OK... I hear you.... it's more of a Samba

[grahambop]

[rpjazzguitar]

This thread has me thinking about jazz harmony.

Unfortunately, I'm not enough of a musicologist to conclude anything. Maybe someone else will know, or at least have a more informed opinion.

Jazz in the 50s was still standards based, with the harmony seeming to be more advanced than in the early 40s'. I'm basing this on the handful of records I had -- mostly Charlie Christian, Lionel Hampton and Johnny Hodges. Maybe if I had more of Ellington's earlier work I'd have a different view.

But, the small groups I heard at the time remind me of Barney on that Julie London album. Standards, but with embellishment of the chords. The harmonies often followed the usual pattern of ii V with shifting keys.

The Bossa Nova guitarists, in way, didn't go far beyond that, at least not at first. What they did do was alter the way the chords were voiced. They were more likely to put half steps or whole steps on adjacent strings and let them ring. Voice leading could hardly have been smoother. But, it was still ii V with key changes.

Then, in both the US and Brazil things changed. I'm not referring to early modal jazz, although it was certainly important.

Rather, I'm referring to the innovations that one hears, for example, in Wayne Shorter's music (which, I confess, I don't understand as well as I'd like to). Shorter's compositions involve altered chords and a different way of making the harmony flow.

Around the same time, harmony was also being transformed in Brazil. Listen to, for example, Mountain Flight by Toninho Horta. Some of it is ii V based but the key shifts are not those of USA based jazz. And, some of it sounds like modal influenced jazz. Prato Feito is another. Slick, complex harmony and not something an American would be likely to write. Other composers who demonstrate that kind of harmonic complexity are Chico Pinheiro, Andre Mehmari (sp), Swami Jr, Lea Freire, Hermeto Pascoal, Dori Caymmi, and more.

Even now, I think there's a difference between the way jazz players in the USA vs Brazil conceptualize harmony. Hard to put into words, but the Brazilian music strikes me as less angular somehow, if that makes any sense.

[Jonah]

Nylon string is just common throughout Latin America - not necessarily 'classical guitar' - used in all sorts of music in Brazil, including Choro...

I meant that Bossa could have influenced jazz guitar players to pick nylon string acoustics...

[Jonah]

Even now, I think there's a difference between the way jazz players in the USA vs Brazil conceptualize harmony. Hard to put into words, but the Brazilian music strikes me as less angular somehow, if that makes any sense.

Inside Brazilian mnusic there are also other styles beyond bossa... like Choros... it's extremely influential and probably in Brazil is considered to be more authentic than bossa...

Some general speculations..

basic harmonies imho are much more influenced by Southern European urban and popular music (more miditerranean but not only of course... that is variete/cabaret style...) I find that French chanson or Italian popular music or Spanish and Portuguese traditional urban music has a lot of similartity in basic harmonic turnarounds...
These typical melodic minor key changes for romances and romanceros...
Basically I believe it's simplification and adaption of classical parlour songs and romances...

North American music is much more influenced by Northern European folk tradition with plenty of major key songs and minor keys often natural or other scales... rather than harmonic and melodic minor...

[christianm77]

I was taught that Choros come from Polka, like Ragtime.

[christianm77]

As Jonah says, that whole sort of era of popular music (early 20th C) is kind of similar-ish chord wise.... In fact if anything Brazilian Choro has a bit more going on than early jazz... But you'll see lots of familiar basic chord progressions.

And, I think it's reasonable to say that this basic framework carried on up until the Modal revolution in the late 50s in jazz. Jazz was originally innovative not in it's harmony but in it's rhythmic feel and the way that tied in with ensemble improv and syncopation of the melody.... It grew up in a world of many Polka-derived popular musics, in the US, ragtime, society marches and so on, as well as the strands Jonah identified.

I think we have a massively distorted picture of 'jazz harmony' from the vantage point of the early 21st century where jazz musicians are really the only non-classical musicians who learn to deal with harmony, and have their own theoretical structure for it (CST.)

A similar trend has happened when 'All the Things You Are' is identified as a 'Jazz composition' (even Adam Neely made that mistake!) - it is of course, not a jazz composition. It is a popular song. But ATTYA is a song most people would encounter as a jazz tune, so the distortion and confusion is understandable....

Also, I don't mean to be rude, but many jazz improvisers have a simplified view of harmony based on II-V-I's so they look at stuff like Insensatez, and say silly things like 'oh non functional harmony' - whereas in fact, those progressions are super functional and go back to Chopin. They are just not II-V-I's....

As far as added note chords - esp for major and minor - 6/9, m6/9, maj9, min(add9) - the typical colours we hear in Bossa... I would be really interested in learning more about the history of those.

[christianm77]

Also another strand - it has been noted that Bossa Nova harmony uses many of the same shapes as Gypsy Jazz harmony.... Let me take the tune 'Tears' by Django as an example...

The A section progression, with its use of a chromatic bassline and rich chords could have been written by Jobim.

Where is Django from - well Gypsy music of course, and American jazz, but also Bal Musette, Polka, Passo Doble, and classical music, Chopin, Ravel, Debussy... These are many of the same influences as Tom Jobim, incidentally.

I also want to point out that there was a greater diversity of common progression pre war - after Bird, musicians started to reharmonise everything with II-V-I's but pre war there was a greater diversity of progressions in common use - in fact as Conrad Cork says, bebop simplified the underlying harmony of songs to make them more open for improvisation.

So, many of the progression we see in Jobim tunes were in fact pretty common. Which isn't to say that Jobim never wrote anything surprising in his harmony.... More that I can see the derivation from or at least affinity with songwriters like Cole Porter...

Lastly the added notes I have come across in Jobim tunes can be understood often as diatonic suspensions in the upper voices...

[christianm77]

This thread has me thinking about jazz harmony.

Unfortunately, I'm not enough of a musicologist to conclude anything. Maybe someone else will know, or at least have a more informed opinion.

Jazz in the 50s was still standards based, with the harmony seeming to be more advanced than in the early 40s'. I'm basing this on the handful of records I had -- mostly Charlie Christian, Lionel Hampton and Johnny Hodges. Maybe if I had more of Ellington's earlier work I'd have a different view.

Hah you would - Ellington is mental. It’s all too easy to build a stereotype of early jazz harmony from Dixieland common practice. Much of the music was like that, but quite a lot of it was not.

It wasn’t like musicians were ignorant back then. Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg were all active in ‘serious’ music circles and some of it crossed over that far back. OTOH people like Ellington and Jelly Roll were able to write interesting harmony without this direct European influence.

As a side bar I hear the Hot Club of France playing 6/9 chords and so on in the 30s.... Or actually - Django was... His physical limitations probably contributed to his harmonic choices.

I think this ‘advanced harmony’ thing needs to be couched in terms of the grammar of the music. To go to an extreme example, there has never been more advanced harmony than Bach but the chordal resources at his disposal were far obviously more limited than the average jazz guitarist.

To take the jazz narrative, I think the move has been to simplify or abstract the composed harmony from the originals to facilitate a certain approach to improvisation.

Also certain chord progressions have fallen out of favour. Take the progression of a Smooth One recorded by Benny Goodman. A variant of a very common prog during the ‘30s but unfamiliar to many jazz musicians today. Try playing those changes with ii V licks. This is more like Jobim’s harmony actually, again.

But, the small groups I heard at the time remind me of Barney on that Julie London album. Standards, but with embellishment of the chords. The harmonies often followed the usual pattern of ii V with shifting keys.

The Bossa Nova guitarists, in way, didn't go far beyond that, at least not at first. What they did do was alter the way the chords were voiced. They were more likely to put half steps or whole steps on adjacent strings and let them ring. Voice leading could hardly have been smoother. But, it was still ii V with key changes.

True, apart from the bit about the ii V’s. I have to say comparing US versions the changes of Bossa standards to Brazilian if anything it’s the US changes that insert more ii V’s. I would characterise Bossa harmony as focussed more heavily on the bassline.

When you think about the way the bass plays in Bossa and ‘20s and ‘30s jazz, as opposed to bop, it makes sense.

Metheny, an avid student of Jobim etc, helped bring back bassline oriented harmony into contemporary jazz - James is a good example.

The jazz musician preoccupation with ii Vs stems - I think - from the way our performances are organised. We see things through our filter.

Then, in both the US and Brazil things changed. I'm not referring to early modal jazz, although it was certainly important.

Rather, I'm referring to the innovations that one hears, for example, in Wayne Shorter's music (which, I confess, I don't understand as well as I'd like to). Shorter's compositions involve altered chords and a different way of making the harmony flow.

Around the same time, harmony was also being transformed in Brazil. Listen to, for example, Mountain Flight by Toninho Horta. Some of it is ii V based but the key shifts are not those of USA based jazz. And, some of it sounds like modal influenced jazz. Prato Feito is another. Slick, complex harmony and not something an American would be likely to write. Other composers who demonstrate that kind of harmonic complexity are Chico Pinheiro, Andre Mehmari (sp), Swami Jr, Lea Freire, Hermeto Pascoal, Dori Caymmi, and more.

Definitely a two way street.

But I also hear the rock/pop/tropicalia influences in people like Joyce. And lots of American style jazz guitar on Hard Bossa!

Even now, I think there's a difference between the way jazz players in the USA vs Brazil conceptualize harmony. Hard to put into words, but the Brazilian music strikes me as less angular somehow, if that makes any sense.

Brazilian people I think have more of a tolerance for the smooth and euphonious maybe? New York has a different vibe.

Certainly my old Brazilian flat mate, a great guitar player, had more of an appreciation for what I would think of as smooth music.

But this is an interesting story because unlike a lot of discussions of harmony - it is a GUITAR story....

[Jonah]

At 5:16 begins a piece that sounds like a pure Choro

[rpjazzguitar]

Bass lines in bossa are commonly samba based, root, 5, movement often in half or whole steps. in 2/4 with emphasis right on two and, to get it to groove, that note has to be placed just right.

Right thumb plays alternating bass or just repeats the root.

Right hand fingers pluck in a highly syncopated manner.

They are clever with the voicings and the Chediak books show them.

The tricky part is the feel.

This is Bossa Nova on Netflix currently shows some of it. Every player did it a little differently.

When a Brazilian plays that stuff you feel like dancing in 2/4. It's easy to get close and hard to really nail.

The harmony does strike me as older fashioned samba plus that album of Julie London's. Barney's use of
9ths, passing tones and subs is all reflected in bossa. Of course, the original Bossa artists were familiar with sophisticated harmony, but perhaps Barney was the first they heard put it on guitar.

I'm just wondering about the path from Charlie Christian's chord work, which was influenced, to my ear, by the 30s guys, and Barney, just 15 years later. I haven't listened to much late 40's guitar.

[sgcim]

Speaking of bossa- Today is Jobim's birthday, and you can hear 24 hours straight of his music commercial free here:
WKCR 89.9FM NY