Estudando a Bossa

Tom Zé has remarked that Brazil began the year of 1958 as a lowly exporter of raw materials to industrialized countries and finished it triumphantly as a country that exported art. He made Estudando a Bossa to illustrate and explain his point. Bossa Nova was not only an extraordinary musical innovation; it was also the soundtrack to a hopeful period of national modernization and development. The new sound also located Brazil on the map for an international audience previously ignorant of the fact that the largest nation in Latin America spoke Portuguese, not Spanish. It’s worth recalling that Brazil’s greatest pop icon, Carmen Miranda, had been cast years earlier in a Hollywood production called Down Argentine Way. With this in mind, we can better understand the wry humour of the recurring motif that frames the album: “On the day bossa nova invented Brazil/ It had to be done right, my dear gentlemen/ Because Buenos Aires was our capital back then.”