22 JAZZTIMES SEPTEMBER 2019
Brazilian legend, calls Lyra “one of the
most creative and complete composers
in Brazil. He has an incredible capacity
to renew himself. He understood that
bossa nova was eternal as music but
temporary as a movement. So he took
that sophistication and brought it to
the samba and other forms of Brazil-
ian music, like the marcha-rancho and
the baião.”
Even so, Lyra’s hits grabbed almost
all the attention. Countless songs lan-
guished, unrecorded, some for over 50
years. It was the dream of his wife and
manager, Magda Botafogo, to bring
his non-bossa material into the light,
while giving this lion in winter the
showcase of a lifetime.
This year, the album she produced,
Além da Bossa (Besides Bossa), was
released in Brazil. The songs, which
Lyra wrote between the ages of 23 and
nearly 80, have a gentility and grace
that evoke Heitor Villa-Lobos, one
of Brazil’s most esteemed classical
composers. There are collaborations
with great Brazilian lyricists (Ronaldo
Bastos, Paulo César Pinheiro); settings
of historic poets; and musicians of
high prestige, including Dori Caym-
mi, Marcos Valle, João Donato, cellist
Jaques Morelenbaum, and Assiere.
Due to a shoulder injury in 2015, Lyra
no longer plays guitar. But he always
sang better than his fellow bossa com-
posers, and on this album, his cozy,
conversational baritone is in the fore-
front. Features in major newspapers
have proclaimed him a grand elder
statesman of Brazilian music. “I never
saw so many people paying homage to
me!” Lyra marvels.
Visiting him this past April, I
wallowed in his hilariously dishy yet
astute eyewitness tales from the past,
voiced in Portuguese and near-perfect
colloquial English. Magda and their
friend Red Sullivan, an Irish jazz
flutist who lives in Rio, joined in the
laughs. Lyra knows where the bodies
are buried, and having outlived almost
all his contemporaries, he’s close to
having the last word. Wicked imper-
sonations and opinions tumble out of
him. Of the doe-eyed, deadpan singer
Astrud Gilberto of “The Girl from KAKÁ^ B.MCAFÉBRAGA/Ì
any tourists who land in
Brazil think that bossa nova,
the country’s most renowned
musical export, is still wafting through
the palm trees and pulsing from
oceanside boîtes. The truth is that by
the time bossa had made its American
splash in the ’60s, its six-year Brazilian
heyday had begun to fade. The music’s
blithe, breezy elegance, redolent of
the middle-class good life, had grown
trivial with the dawn of a military dic-
tatorship, which squelched free speech
and tortured dissenters.
Today in Rio, bossa is almost
nowhere to be heard. But on a posh,
tree-lined street in Ipanema lives one
of the music’s last surviving pioneers:
composer and singer Carlos Lyra,- Lyra’s trademark songs—“Você e
Eu,” “Minha Namorada,” “Coisa Mais
Carlos Lyra
One of bossa nova’s last pioneers celebrates his latest
rebirth BY JAMES GAVINOVERDUE OVATION
Linda,” “Primavera”—are so ingrained
in the national psyche that audiences
of a certain age sing along without
prompting. Drawing on the cool,
meticulous swing of ’50s West Coast
jazz and the harmonies of the French
impressionists, his music is exception-
ally refined, and tuneful as anything
bossa produced.
But such was the shadow cast by An-
tonio Carlos Jobim, the genre’s reigning
monarch, that no other writer could
ever compete outside Brazil. Saxophon-
ist Paul Winter, who has championed
Lyra since the ’60s, places his catalog
“right up there next to Jobim’s. As
things happened, Jobim’s body of work
became well-known in America and
Carlos’ didn’t, which in a way makes it
an undiscovered treasure.”
Itamar Assiere, pianist for many ax Feature: Jazz in Rio