He was very successful with women and he was not exactly a good-looking man. He was fat, short, bald. But women, I've seen myself... He was just a killer.

 

  Just off Rio's Copacabana Beach, there's an alleyway that back in the early '60s was the musical hub of Brazil. It was in the bars here that the bossa set got together to play and started to collaborate with local jazz enthusiasts like Sergio Mendes. 

 

  Rio was wonderful. There was a bar in the Bottles Bar and that’s where I started, you know, playing there with a trio. And everybody used to come there every night, you know, ?????/ and there was a club on the end of the street called The Little Club. And there, we would do jam sessions there and every jazz musician that would come to Rio would stop by. And, you know, it was just wonderful, wonderful times, you know, the early '60s in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro.

 

  Jazz had been one of the influences on bossa and now jazz and bossa began to mix, a fusion helped by the US State Department when it sponsored jazz musicians like Charlie Byrd and Herbie Mann to visit Brazil where inevitably they would end up playing in Bottles' Alley.

 

  I think the reason that jazz musicians like bossa nova is because every voice follows a path and it makes sense, not only the melody, but the harmonies also, singing the song also. It 's because it came from classical music. The way to spread the voice is around, you know, the chromatics.

 

  When Charlie Byrd returned home to the States, he enthused about bossa to his friend, the saxophonist, Stan Getz.