I think we were playing exactly what the Beatles did. We were, we thought that we were playing rock'n'roll, you know. I think Brazil is such a kaleidoscope of information, especially then. There was no information, so we used to pick up music from, t...
He was the embryo of the very thing we were trying to do consciously. He had started with bossa nova, and he had added rhythm'n'blues and rock'n'roll to his thing. And he had a new synthesis that prefigured everything the Tropicalistas wanted to, to...
The main aim of Tropicalism was really shake the environment, the musical and cultural environment. This small group from Bahia thought that violence of our situation and the importance of mass culture had a lot in common, you know, political violenc...
This became known as the festival of booing. Roberto Carlos, the most successful pop star in Brazilian history and the host of a highly successful TV music show, was of course given a hard time. And the winner, predictably enough, was a singer associ...
Joyce was one female Brazilian singer who dared to write her own songs. There were no women song writers at all in Brazilian music, so the first, very first time when I appeared on stage, I was booed off stage. That was 1967, I was 19 years old, and...
In 1966, the co-winner of the TV Record Festival was Chico Buarque, who became an instant star with A Banda. Buarque was praised by traditionalists as the heir to the great samba cancao writers of the 1930s, who would become a symbol of resistance to...
Sergio Mendes ensured that the international image of Brazil was still that of an easy-going, exotic paradise. But back in Brazil, the reality was rather different. Life was not easy. The soldiers had inherited serious economic problems, but the earl...
Mas que Nada became a top ten hit, the first Portuguese language success in American pop history. -That song, Mas que Nada, is magical. I told Jorge Ben the other day I saw him in LA. And I thank him for writing that song because there's not many son...
Modern samba was born in the poorer areas of Rio, and left-wing singers were inspired by the new samba do morro, samba from the hills, that dealt with the harsh realities of life in communities where there were few facilities to cope with the newcome...
(The) military strike in '64 was...the worst thing that ever could happen to this country, because until today, we have never recovered from that. It was bad times. It was bad times. But at the same time, I think that the opposite of that was, that /...
Brazil's history has been expressed through its national passion for music. Samba, the country's dominant musical style, was used by politicians in the '30s in an attempt to create unity and a sense of national identity in this vast multi-racial stat...
Garota de Ipanema, Girl from Ipanema, had been written by Jobim and Vinicius in 1962 as they sat in this bar off Copacabana, watching the girls walk by. They wrote that song just because they saw the same girl passing by the bar, going towards the be...
I don't know. In Brazil they said it was a big mess. But I think it was important there. And the most important thing is that many of the musicians / went there to play in the concert. They stayed there and then they began to work around, like Oscar...
And in April 1962, the two of them released Jazz Samba, reworking Joao Giilberto and Jobim songs like Desafinado. Remarkably for a jazz album, it became a best-seller and stayed in the American charts for a quite astonishing 70 weeks. Bossa nova sudd...
He was the best lyricist. He never made a mistake with a song of mine. And he would come later with the perfect lyric for the song. He was very successful with women and he was not exactly a good-looking man. He was fat, short, bald. But women, I've...
