“He studied each song hundreds of times, syllable by syllable, so that it rang along with the harmony he was making. Gilberto was obstinate, Lyra says, but inspirationally so. He always consulted me about the songs he heard and played – but he was also that person who called at midnight asking you to go out, and got furious if you didn’t go.” “João used to drive a Beetle and, when hitting the speed bumps, he shouted: “Viva Zapata!” He was a person who demanded attention and, if you didn’t watch yourself, you would be around him all the time. Gilberto would then start turning up at his house: “When I arrived, I would find João in my pyjamas, on a mattress next to my bed, having tea with my mother.” They then lived in Mexico for a period. “Sitting in the back of the bar, in the dark, there was João, with his guitar and playing in a super strange way – his hands were placed in a crooked manner,” Lyra says, recalling their first encounter.
Plaza’s bar was a regular destination for Lyra and Gilberto, who used to go there to appreciate the syncopated piano of Johnny Alf (one of bossa nova’s most important forerunners). The two artists had met a few years earlier, on the pavement opposite Copacabana’s Plaza hotel. “We all started looking for new harmonies and ways to play samba, which is when João Gilberto appeared with that syncopated beat,” Lyra says, who had three compositions recorded by Gilberto on Chega de Saudade: Lobo Bobo, Saudade Fêz Um Samba and Maria Ninguém. ‘We all started looking for new harmonies’ … Carlos Lyra in 1954.
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Less than a year later, Gilberto released the album Chega de Saudade, full of the beat he would later become world-famous for. In April 1958, singer Elizete Cardoso recorded Canção do Amor Demais – the first album to present João Gilberto’s bossa nova guitar beat, inspired – mainly, but not only – by samba and American jazz. Lyra, who conjured that state of mind like few others with classics such as Você e Eu and Coisa Mais Linda, turned 90 last week and is one of the only musicians who helped birth the Brazilian genre still alive today. The next day, we would do it all over again. “With our guitars and bottles of homemade drinks, we used to go to the beach at sunset and stay singing through the night.
“Today, I’m actually agreeing with him,” he reflects more than six decades later, while vividly narrating a flashback of the genre’s early days in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. I n 1959, Carlos Lyra’s musical partner and lyricist Ronaldo Bôscoli said that bossa nova is a state of mind.
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