Ipanema” fame—they dated brief-
ly—Lyra says: “She wasn’t very smart.
No brain.” About her ex-husband, the
fabled singer/guitarist João Gilberto:
“I called him Dracula because he was
a vampire. He never came out in the
light.” Lyra recalls Stan Getz, with
whom he toured in the ’60s, as “a fun
guy, but he was always drunk.”
Yet musically, as Lyra doesn’t mind
telling you, he was an “aristocrat.”
Though born a few neighborhoods
away, he flowered in Ipanema, which
Magda describes as “a very calm place.
Jobim used to swim in the lake. Rio
was the capital of Brazil, so all the pol-
iticians used to meet in
the bars and restaurants,
discussing the country.”
Lyra’s grandfather was a
poet, his father a naval
officer. At home were re-
cords ranging from Ravel
and Debussy to Gerry
Mulligan, Chet Baker,
and Shorty Rogers—
whose style, says Lyra,
was “very classical. It was
my direction in life, the
coolness, the classical
posture in art.”
He and his young
musical friends, all from
well-to-do families, shared a disdain
for Brazil’s overwrought star singers.
“They would scream, they would roll
their r’s, that kind of shit. But bossa
nova canceled all that. It was like
talking. Everything was cool, like you
were whispering in the ear of your
love. I call it ‘the discreet charm of the
bourgeoisie.’”
Bossa exploded in 1958 with the first
João Gilberto album, which contained
three Lyra songs. Philips Records
signed Lyra to his own contract. In
1962, when bossa made its gala Carn-
egie Hall debut, Lyra was among the
performers.
Government officials were leery
of his participation. While the bossa
crowd was largely right-wing, Lyra
liked the socialists’ interest in culture
and education, and he briefly went
Communist. As musical director of
the Centro Popular de Cultura, a
Communist-leaning arts center in Rio,
he helped bring black samba masters
from the slums to public attention. He
was at the CPC when a guerrilla group
riddled it with bullets. On April 1,
1964, a military coup plunged Brazil
into a 21-year dictatorship. “It was the
end of a dream,” Lyra says.
New ones awaited him in Manhat-
tan, to which he moved. Bossa was
now a U.S. sensation thanks to Stan
Getz and Charlie Byrd’s 1962 No. 1 hit
album Jazz Samba, and Getz’s subse-
quent smash single of “The Girl from
Ipanema,” which featured its composer
Jobim on piano, as well as both Gil-
bertos. Paul Winter, a Co-
lumbia recording artist,
had recorded two Lyra
songs on his album Jazz
Meets the Bossa Nova, a
favorite of the First Lady,
Jacqueline Kennedy.
Winter persuaded Co-
lumbia to let him make
a whole Lyra album with
the composer. Then Getz
hired him to go on tour.
Unfortunately, Lyra
and Getz never recorded
together, and the album
with Winter, The Sound
of Ipanema, failed to ride“[Bossa nova]
was like
talking. Ev-
erything was
cool, like you
were whisper-
ing in the ear
of your love.”
the wave. “I never had the marketing
spirit that Jobim had,” Lyra admits. A
few translations of his songs wound up
on albums but went mostly unnoticed.
Bossa—absurdly marketed as a dance
craze—lapsed into what Lyra calls “a
joke.”
When the Getz group passed
through Mexico in 1966, Lyra stayed;
Mexicans loved bossa and work was
plentiful. Five years later he and his
American wife, actress Kate Lyra,
returned to Rio and bore a daughter,
Kay, today a bossa nova singer. Lyra
had plenty to say about the country’s
political realities, and he got a bitter
taste of them when his 1975 album of
protest songs, Heroí de Medo (Hero of
Fear), was zapped by censors.
He never stopped performing or
composing, but time had to pass
before he acquired the golden glow
of a legend. In 2015, Lyra returned to
New York for the first time in 50 years
to play Birdland, in a smash engage-
ment shared with Marcos Valle. And
in February of this year, he reunited
with Paul Winter after 54 years for a
concert in São Paulo.
Now, with Além da Bossa, Lyra is lov-
ing his latest rebirth. “I always sang to
demonstrate my songs,” he says. “Now
I’m singing to demonstrate me.” JT