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Aguas de Marco has a Bunch of chords. They are so good, though. Jobim's lyric is pure poetry.
Roger, finally listened to the clip on my home system. Your guitar sounds great.
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02-19-2018 09:32 PM
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I have a feeling Aguas makes more sense to play if you know Portuguese
The chords follow the melody and melody follows the words... you can’t go aaba autopilot
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I don’t like the English lyric. The rhythmic stresses are all wrong
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Tom Jobim: Águas de Março
This page groups the lyrics as brief stanzas, which really helps to chart out the changes. Both Portuguese and English are shown, in addition to the ad-libbed fragments at the end of the classic Tom/Elis version.
There are 3 main four bar chord sequences that I have labeled A, B and C, plus 2 special ones played near the end (D, E).
I realize this won't mean much to anyone else, but here's how wacky the progression is:
ABCC
ABAC
ABCA
CAB (Bridge, then ABA instr.)
CDADD (could end here; remaining is ad lib/vamp)
EEEDD
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those of us on this side of the pond have lived with the English lyric version for like forever, and they're embedded into the consciousness of those who know the tune well. Is this a British English thing?
Originally Posted by christianm77
Brazilian writers, musicians, and artists rate WOM as the all time best Brazilian song. That's a WOW!
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RP exquisite tone and timing. Love that WM L5. Thanks for posting.
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Yep, WOM is the best. Jobim sang both the Portuguese and English versions. The both are are great. The flow of the Portuguese is better but Jobim's translation is accurate.
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Elis is to Brasil what Judy Garland , Edith Piaf , and Amalia Rodrigues were to their own counties. Incandescent . Behind category . Originally Posted by Dennis D
the English lyrics sound horrible . My friend who is a singer -musical theatre background —and is fully bilingual in Portuguese agrees 100%.
i generally cringe when I hear English language singers butcher other songs . Find me a better jazz and blues singer than Nina Simone. Very hard . Now listen to her butcher Jacques Brel. Yikes .
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It's not a translation, it's an adaptation - they're quite different. Originally Posted by Greentone
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This thread made me listen to some Caetano, Gilberto, Milton, Jorge, Gal, Chico, Elis, et al. This early morning.
’ how beautiful it is to be alive eh?
That reminds me the Coraçaõ Vagabundo is an incredible ballad that most jazz musicians would have no idea of , because all they know about is Tom , but if it was literally translated into, you know, vagabond heart, that brings up expectations of being a bad country and western or Bon Jovi song.
I remember reading in some national poll that Brazilians voted for Chico Buarque as their most important popular musician of the 20th century. I’ve never heard him discussed at all in jazz circles. Ever.
All they know about is Tom. Chico’s footprint in North America is practically zero.
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Jobim (and Gilberto, Vinicius, etc) were able to reach the whole word, because the music is both brilliant and accesible. The English lyrics and Stan Getz's sax sure heped to.
Chico is much more "Brazilian", I guess. He was a major figure in fighting Brazil's dictatorship and he's probably the best Portuguese lyricist ever, no matter what branch of Portuguese you're speaking of. But his music is not as universal as Jobim, that's why he's not so well known - more angular melodies and harmonies.
Despite that, some modern players do play his music:
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I think Emily Remler used to do a lot of bossa stuff on electric. Might be something on youtube, I know she did a 'latin' instructional video.
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I wouldn’t doubt it. She was comping for Astrud Gilberto for a while. That reminds me of the people comp these rhythms pick style as well, i.e. Strumming. Originally Posted by grahambop
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Nah I’ve just never heard an English language version of the song I’ve liked that much. Cassandra Wilson gets closest turning into a folky thing. Originally Posted by 2bornot2bop
those of us on this side of the pond have lived with the English lyric version for like forever, and they're embedded into the consciousness of those who know the tune well. Is this a British English thing?
Brazilian writers, musicians, and artists rate WOM as the all time best Brazilian song. That's a WOW!
I’m not a Bossa purist in that way, it’s really specific to this song because the melody is so hypnotic and repetitive.
The English lyric doesn’t swing the way the Brazilian original does. It’s just the way the language is; ‘a stick a stone’, very flat
That said it’s really interesting to dig into the original Portuguese lyrics of Bossa lyrics because the meanings are very different, often nothing to do with the original. I think this had something to with publishing rights or licensing iirc.
I wish I knew Portuguese.
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I don't know the true story, but I bet it has a lot more to do with how hard it is to do a decent translation than with rights or licensing. It's the same thing the other way around, if you do a straight translation from an English song to Portuguese, it sounds dreadful. So I bet they just tried the best compromise between keeping some of the original song meaning and having lyrics that made some sense to English-speaking folks. But I'm just guessing, here. Originally Posted by christianm77
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I've got the Emily Remler video somewhere, I think she says it was Astrud who taught her the basics of the style. She also makes the same point you did, i.e. the thumb should be on the beat, not syncopated. Originally Posted by NSJ
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That makes sense. I love listening to these songs in Portuguese and I can now identify a few words and get a bit of the meaning. But sometimes I want to know exactly what all the words mean, so I use a dictionary or the Microsoft app to look them up (some of the CDs I've got give the Portuguese lyrics, or if not you can often find them online). Often the meaning is very impressionistic or poetic, I can see what they are trying to convey, but putting it into English just sort of kills it stone dead somehow. Originally Posted by jorgemg1984
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On The subject of English singers singing translations, I always really loved the Scott Walker Jaques Brel covers. Scott Walker is an American who is pretty much unknown in America, but seemed to have a huge audience in the UK. Since the early 80s, he really turned to very avant-garde music .
But in his heyday, he was a Great crooner .
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Yes, that's an excellent point. Portuguese lyrics tend to sound better when they are more poetic / abstract and English lyrics tend to sound better when they are closer to prose / concrete. IMHO. Originally Posted by grahambop
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This is probably true for people who only listen to jazz, for whom the Brazilian stuff is a nice offshoot of something they primarily like. Can't really blame them for being ignorant to samba, folk and MPB artists. Originally Posted by NSJ
I got into Brazilian music in the 1980s, first (admittedly) through the Getz/Gilberto album, but soon after - and big time - thanks to David Byrne's Brazil Classics collection of CDs that was released starting with Beleza Tropical in 1989.
This got me into all of the classic MPB and Tropicalia artists, and it just grew from there as I picked up links to new musicians through CDs and videos. Brazilian music is, of course, multi-faceted and rich with genres just like any nation's music viewed over a span of decades. Taken as a musical universe, it is in fact probably my favorite music in the world.
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Jobim personally translated the lyrics to English, or so I've read multiple times. It's been suggested the song is basic poetry, with disconnected themes, that in the end refer to the impermanence of life - and living in the moment.
Jobim wrote WOM in 1972 when bossa nova began to lose its vast popularity.
If RP discovered the Getz/Gilberto album in the 80's, then that means I'm old. My dad played it on his Garrard record player in '64 and I instantly became a fan of Getz and bossa nova.
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Originally Posted by 2bornot2bop
This one started it for me.......1962........thank Heaven I had a guitar teacher ( thanks forever Sal ) who showed me all the chords......
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To paraphrase Frank Zappa, music is good, but Brazilian music is the BEST. Originally Posted by rpguitar
The rock star David Byrne actually put out a series of three compilation albums full of MPB and other traditional musical forms in the late 80s that were highly influential. That's where I discovered a lot of it, first. The focus is not on bossa nova, but MPB and older music forms.
Vol 1 Beleza Tropical (MPB superstars: Jorge Ben, Caetano Veloso, Chico B, Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil, etc).
Vol 2 O Samba: more traditional.
Vol 3: Forro, etc.: older music from the Northeast of the country.
From a guitar point of view, it is important to consider that Jorge Ben basically created a style of music because he couldn't play the rhythyms of samba *right*. So, he made *wrong* right, and the rest was history.
Including perhaps the most famous sports song, practically the unofficial international football anthem, Ponta de Lanca Africano.
There were also a LOT of Black Brazilian musicians who were, the late 60s and 1970s, hugely influenced by African-American funk, especially James Brown. This is contained in the great compilation,
O Samba Soul 70!
From the description from Amazon:
"In the late '60s and '70s the funk and soul music of James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and many other African American superstars sparked a cultural awakening of black pride around the world. In Brazil that awakening expressed itself in the music of young people of color from Rio to São Paulo, who Brazilianized those North American styles into their own groove thang. The result was a musical movement called samba soul, and this thrilling 16-track collection offers a sizzling, seductive, and syncopated snapshot of the best singles from the period. The genre emphasized snappy backbeats, deep and funky bass lines, and jazz horn sections with tinges of salsa and homegrown samba. Jorge Ben's uptempo "Cosa Nostra," performed by Erlon Chaves, was the anthem of the era, and organist Ed Lincoln's pioneering De Savoya Combo, along with Trio Mocoto, laid the foundations for the genre with their respective hits "Jogaram o Caxanga" and "Que Nega e Essa." The musical range of Samba Soul reaches from the CTI Records-sounding jazz fusion of Orlandivo's "Onde Anda o Meu Amor" to guitarist Bebebto's discofied shoutout to Africa, "Princesa Negra de Angola," and the proto-bossa nova of Wilson Simonal's "Não Vem Que Não Tem." The great Afro-Cuban conguero Mongo Santamaria is given tribute on Som Tres's south-of-the-equator boogaloo "Homenagem a Mongo." Today DJs from around the globe are sampling this music, but with this disc you can dance and trance to the real thing: a truly African American music on a hemispheric scale. Eugene Holley Jr."
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