Blame It on Bossa Nova: A Quiet Voice for a Noisy World.

When he used to circle around my feet in the kitchen while I cut the cantaloupe melon he loved so much, I would put Bossa Nova records on in the background.

In my mind, those summer afternoons in Düsseldorf took on the scent of the sea and of sun-warmed, well-trodden sand, washed in the salmon glow of sunset.

When my son heard music, he did not dance intuitively the way small children often do.

He was five at the time, and instead he reproduced rhythmic figures and melodies in little onomatopoeic fragments.

Moments like that intoxicated the young mother I was.

Yesterday we had one of those summer evenings again — my son Henning, now a grown man, and I.

For our duet rehearsal we met outside, close to the Rhine in the Japanese quarter of Niederkassel.

“Bossa Nova is to blame,” he said, letting out a satisfied “mmm” as he settled into the sun-scorched grass.

Startled, I asked whether he meant the German Schlager song [1] of the same title from the 1960s.

It would have been quite atypical for him to become devoted to a kind of music he had never taken especially seriously at that age — Brazilian music in particular.

No, he told me.

Ever since receiving my invitation to join the tour in Brazil, he had turned his attention back to Bossa Nova.

“Mum — Bossa Nova puts me in a generous mood. It smells of cantaloupe. It reminds me so strongly of our kitchen when I was little. It touches me gently; it does things to my instrument.”

With those words he began demonstrating the song he would sing at our concert in Fortim, Ceará, Brazil, on 14 July that summer.

He reminded me of myself when, in my twenties, I bought albums by João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim for the first time.

For readers less familiar with the world of Bossa Nova, João Gilberto is widely regarded as the spirit of the style, the musician who helped revolutionize Brazilian music in Rio de Janeiro at the end of the 1950s.

As a singer and guitarist he wrote relatively few songs himself, but his interpretations created an incomparable atmosphere.

Bossa Nova has always struck me as enveloping and gentle, melancholic and joyful, poetic and percussive.

For that reason, not only musically but anthropologically, Bossa Nova, for me, embodies Brazilian dialectics at their most vivid.

In Bossa Nova, inspired melodies meet dissonant harmonies.

Apparent opposites dissolve and recombine into a unique musical language that allows you to look deeply into the Brazilian spirit.

I do not know why, as I write this, the longing in the sound of N’penxheren e zotëris’sate seems to me like the longing in Gilberto’s songs — the kind that can undo you from within.

I mean that longing, perhaps that beauty, which swallows everything.

The chords Gilberto discovered on the guitar are ethereal.

Then there is his sotto voce [2] singing, that intoxicating vocal manner that recalls the veiled sensibility of con sordino [3] in the strings: evidence that he never threw his voice directly at the listener or used its full volume.

This way of singing characterizes his personality and gives the song a narrative lightness touched by con dolore [4].

“I want you to hear something I hope you’ll like, Mum. I’m going to sing it in Fortim,” my son says as he tunes the guitar and almost acquires the grace of Orpheus sitting beside Eurydice in the film Orfeu Negro [5] — except that I am his mother.

And it felt like déjà-écouté.

The first time he had asked me to listen like this, he was only fourteen and played on guitar the motif of Qaj Maro, which he had heard on my album Statement.

Aos Pés da Santa Cruz [6], sung by João Gilberto, came from the songwriting workshop of Marino Pinto and José Gonçalves and was originally sung by Orlando Silva.

Henning had only recently learned to sing in Portuguese, a language that suits his voice beautifully.

“The rhythm itself, with all its syncopation, is like a language in its own right. When it joins the Portuguese-Brazilian language, there is no escaping the snare of falling in love,” he says with the pick held at the corner of his mouth.

By moving from instrument to voice and back again, Henning reminded me that music as a symbol has more to do with the possibility of experiencing, remembering and feeling more deeply than with necessarily formulating one specific new experience.

The movement between voice and instrument also becomes two forms of narrative that keep one another alive through structure and emotional quality.

I am delighted by the way he wraps words in the sound of a dreamy, yearning, sweet voice — at times fragile, almost delicate — with the clarity of the Bossa Nova tradition and a modest homage to Gilberto’s vocal restraint.

For reasons beyond maternal feeling — more professional than maternal — I want to understand how he imagines melancholy by entering the sound of a language, a poem, the percussive root of a culture and country he has never physically visited, although spiritually he certainly has.

The challenge in all this is to leave room for “less is more” — a craft demanded by the song and not at all easy to master.

And it seems that his love for Gilberto’s art tells him he is not content with the mythic posture of jazz musicians who imagine jazz must always sound like Miles Davis.

This minimalist form needs no orchestration, no strings, no effects.

Only an unforced voice and his guitar.

And the pleasure continues.

While he sang, without really thinking, I recorded him on my iPhone, grateful for the spontaneity technology makes possible and for the very reason the repeat button was invented for recordings like this.

So I am attaching here a version of Aos Pés... sung and played on guitar by Henning Jung in video form.

After the recording that made Bossa Nova famous across the world in the best possible way — I am thinking of the album Getz/Gilberto — many jazz musicians began using early Bossa Nova compositions, often transforming their 2/4 feel into 4/4.

Their relationship with Bossa Nova led to modern hybrid forms, just as remixers of the genre continue to do today.

The “new wave” — Bossa Nova — is still washing around the world.

At airports and on cruise ships, in bars and lifts, waiting rooms and stadiums, Bossa Nova can be heard everywhere.

And it remains highly current today, thanks to artists — according to my personal taste — such as Tom Misch, Yussef Dayes, Melody Gardot, Rita Payés, Linda Rukaj and, why not, Henning Jung.

Photo by Eda Zari

When it comes to personal stories, especially those told from a mother’s perspective, I try to keep myself on a strict diet when it comes to publishing them.

At the same time I ask:

Why should I not think that such inspiring experiences between mother and son, with music as their shared compass, deserve to be published?

Perhaps it is the small, precious, unusual and quiet things — shared tastes — that invite people to enjoy together the forgotten tenderness within a noisy world.

Perhaps the sounds of Bossa Nova return us to a nostalgia for a time in which we gave and received something from the divinity within ourselves — something we may have lost.

After all, it is summer, and perhaps the most fitting wish in this context is:

May Bossa Nova’s guilty pleasure stay close to us, like a passing moment of happiness.

Eda Zari 24 June 2022, Düsseldorf

All rights reserved.

Notes

[1] Schlager is a particular form of popular music associated with German-speaking countries. Schlager songs are usually sung in German and designed as entertainment; lyrics and melodies tend to be straightforward and highly sentimental, shaped by the idiom of their period.

[2] Sotto voce: literally “under the voice”; softly, in a subdued or almost whispered manner.

[3] Con sordino: an instruction to use a mute. The technique is used with various instruments to soften the sound, creating an aesthetic veiling or damping of tone.

[4] Con dolore: a musical expression marking a painful, sorrowful character.

[5] Orfeu Negro — Black Orpheus — is a 1959 film that relocates the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the Carnival of Rio de Janeiro. Its musical significance lies especially in the score by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá. The film helped present what later became Bossa Nova classics, including A Felicidade and Manhã de Carnaval, alongside traditional rhythms and samba.

[6] Aos Pés da Santa Cruz, a samba from 1942 by Marino Pinto and José Gonçalves, means “At the Foot of the Holy Cross”. The text describes a promise of great love sworn in the name of Jesus and then broken — a meditation on the heart making promises that reason itself cannot explain.