The Boss of the Bossa Nova

Don’t let the title put you off, this is a handy, single-disc anthology of bossa alchemist João Gilberto’s first three Odeon albums in their entirety, together with a rare EP of songs from the film Black Orpheus. Nor do the compilers shirk on the liner notes, with reprints from both the original Brazilian releases and their gauchely renamed North American equivalents featured. Among the nuggets are the revelations that Gilberto forged his iconic voice-and-guitar style over eight months in his sister’s acoustically sympathetic bathroom in Diamantina, and that the gently alliterative cadences of ‘Bim Bom’ came to him while watching ‘ laundresses on the banks of the São Francisco River balance loads of clothes on their heads’. However bossa nova came to him, it came to stay; his debut single, ‘Chega de Saudade’, and album of the same name, distilled and softened the clean lines of modernism and Pacific cool of West Coast jazz into music of unparalleled elegance and intimacy. The late critic Gene Lees called the album ‘one of the greatest vocal LPs ever made’. Heard today, amid the 21st century’s incessant chatter, its brevity, reticence and confidentiality sound as radical as ever, even if Antonio Carlos Jobim’s orchestrations – as radical in their own way at the time – inevitably date it. The phrasing occasionally gets more garrulous through the subsequent O Amor, O Sorriso e a Flor and eponymous João Gilberto albums, but the style essentially remains the same, definitive and destined to be imitated for decades to come. History never sounded so self-effacing.