[9] This project offers a kaleidoscopic view of this bossa nova craze that swept the United States during the 1960s. It relies on the narrative device that Japanese director Akira Kurosawa adopts in his critically acclaimed film, Rashoman. It tells the history of bossa nova from various vantage points, to quote the title of Pete Travis’ far less critically acclaimed film, Vantage Point. The chapters that follow each describe bossa nova from various perspectives. Sometimes the stories contradict one another. Sometimes they reinforce one another. Sometimes they describe bossa nova as an artistic practice. Other times they describe bossa nova as a labor practice. They all, however, help depict bossa nova in the United States as a heterogeneous style of music.

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[10] Bossa nova in Brazil was equally diverse. And why shouldn’t it have been? Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, writing as early as 1928, recognized the propensity for Brazilian society to “cannibalize” other cultures. His writing on the topic, Manifesto Antropófago, influenced several artists during the 1960s, including poet Augusto de Campos, visual artist Hélio Oiticica, and musician Caetano Veloso. Together, these artists created a movement known as tropicália. Musicians affiliated with this movement, like Veloso, explicitly and deliberately “cannibalized” everything from indigenous Brazilian music, to the music of the Brazilian Northeast, to Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles.          Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, bossa nova musicians in Brazil relied on a similar approach. Musicians like João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim comprised the linha formalística (formal or original line) of bossa nova whose music and lyrics depicted impressionistic and introspective themes. During the mid-1960s, particularly in the aftermath of the military coup of 1964, musicians like Nara Leão helped usher in a linha conteudística (content line) that spotlighted socio-economic issues, oftentimes, in a precursor to tropicália, taking influence from rock and roll and Brazil’s Northeast. Some musicians, like those who performed in groups like the Zimbo Trio and Tamba Trio, created instrumental bossa nova recordings, merging the sounds of samba with the improvisatory idioms of jazz. Bossa nova in the United States similarly sounded varied.

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[11] Brazilian musicians often felt that their musical innovations had been coopted, commercialized, bastardized, and stolen by Americans. During the early twentieth century, American musicians and sheet music publishers stripped the maxixe, a Brazilian style of music, of its Afro-diasporic and Brazilian affiliations. Instead, they discussed the style as akin to tango or to French music.          Carmen Miranda, the famous Brazilian singer and actress of the 1930s and 1940s, suffered a similar fate. Americans often misunderstood Miranda, sexualizing her as a foreign Other or mistaking her Brazilian culture for the culture of Argentina, Venezuela, or Peru.          Brazilians during the 1960s worried bossa nova would be similarly misunderstood. As early as November 1962, Enrique Lebendiger, head of the Brazilian music publishing company Fermata, warned that the amount of bossa nova recorded in the United States would “destroy its original sound and meaning.”          His fears turned out to be correct. Sometimes, such cooptation occurred when English renditions of bossa nova songs stripped the music’s Portuguese lyrical content from its melodic and harmonic content. These new versions simply did not accurately capture the clever interplay between lyrics and music that Brazilian composers and lyricists imbued in their music.          In another example of cooptation, the American dance industry created, out of thin air, a bossa nova dance craze to sell records and lessons.          In another example of such cooptation, DownBeat published several “real histories” of bossa nova during the early 1960s. Some of these histories unconscionably traced the music’s origins to the efforts of bassist Harry Babasin in Los Angeles during the early 1950s.          In response, several Brazilians sent letters to the editor explaining how disappointed they were in how DownBeat essentially called bossa nova American-born music.          I take Lebendiger’s criticisms seriously and do not wish to repeat DownBeat’s errors.          However, a history of bossa nova within the United States shows the complicated process by which musicians, marketers, and audiences understood a foreign product. This is not a history about an ersatz bossa nova or even a comparative study between bossa nova within the United States and Brazil. Rather, this project explores the messy (and perhaps in the eyes of someone like Lebendiger, destructive) ways that Americans understood the genre during the 1960s.

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[12] This is also a history of musical cream cheese. Let me explain. During the 1960s, several musicians dismissed bossa nova for its perceived commercialization. Cannonball Adderley, for instance, wrote an early bossa nova called “Jive Samba” that he subsequently released on his live album, Jazz Workshop Revisited, recorded in September 1962. However, a couple of months later, while on residency at the jazz club Birdland in New York City, he told a New York Amsterdam News reporter that he would not be performing any bossa nova during his sets. "It's too easy to play, too simple," remarked Adderley, “that's why everybody's jumping on the bandwagon. We can play bossa nova to any popular song, and have done it at request, but we don't think anything of it."          Leonard Feather’s famous “Blindfold Tests” in DownBeat consistently offered a forum where musicians lamented the commercialism of bossa nova. After listening to Lalo Schifrin’s rendition of “Desafinado” on Lalo = Brilliance, singer Mel Tormé commented that “the only thing that scares me, Leonard, is that something new like [the bossa nova] comes out, and, immediately, everybody jumps onto the bandwagon and they drive it into the ground."          Pianist Vince Guaraldi made a similar comment in response to Cal Tjader’s rendition of “O barquinho” from Soña Libre. “Most of this Brazilian material is getting done to the bone,” Guaraldi lamented.          Finally, pianist Hampton Hawes offered the most scathing critique of bossa nova’s commercial appeal after hearing Cannonball Adderley’s “Mystified” off the album Domination. Despite Adderley’s promise to not play bossa nova while at Birdland, he recorded a fair amount of bossa nova. He not only wrote “Jive Samba,” but, in December 1962, also was one of the first musicians to record a bossa nova album with other Brazilian collaborators. Largely thanks to the contributions of a strong rhythm section consisting of pianist Sérgio Mendes, bassist Octavio Bailly, Jr., and drummer Dom Um Romão, the press responded positively to the result, which Adderley released as Cannonball’s Bossa Nova in early 1963. However, Hawes levied strong criticisms against one of Adderley’s later albums, Domination, released two years later. “I’m not familiar with that tune,” Hawes said about one of the tracks from the album, “Mystified.” Hawes then speculated on how the song and album were conceived: “probably some fool at a recording company got a bunch of people together and said, ‘let’s make a bossa nova album and maybe it’ll turn out good.’” The pianist continued: “[it] seemed like it was a recording made to sell records instead of to expose good music."          Even amongst musicians who frequently recorded bossa nova, the genre’s commercial appeal found itself the object of scorn and criticism.

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[13] Some writers, like Leonard Feather, tried to counter such critiques. In a defense of bossa nova’s commercial tendencies from 1963, critic Leonard Feather stated, “I don't think there is anyone in jazz who hasn't tried in one way or another to commercialize on something.” He went on to ask, “what were Duke Ellington's motives, do you think, when he recorded ‘Twelfth Street Rag Mambo’ or ‘Isle of Capri Mambo,’ or, more recently, ‘Asphalt Jungle Twist?’ Does this render Ellington any less valuable to the community?"          Feather had a point, with the answer to his question being a resounding “no.” Musicians rarely disregard commercial concerns. Dizzy Gillespie, one of the founders of be-bop, a genre previously understood to be the quintessential example of anti-commercial music, aspired to succeed financially.          Similarly, several first-wave British punk bands were, somewhat ironically, signed to major record labels during the 1970s. Only by the end of the decade did the genre’s anti-corporate ideology take hold.

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[13] However, several of Feather’s colleagues did not share his view. After a rather dismal debut of several Brazilian artists at Carnegie Hall on November 21, 1962, a Pittsburgh Courier columnist shared their thoughts. Most critics panned the performance due to poor acoustics and a bloated program that lasted close to three and a half hours. However, reporter Nathan Weinberg wrote that he was “irked to see a number of first-rate musicians from the Southern hemisphere and of diverse personality and style pound themselves into one standard mold for the greater glory of A&R men and record pluggers.” Weinberg’s criticisms of the concert continued: “the real issue is less one of success or failure for [bossa nova]. It is the question of whether an audience can be delivered like a package of cream cheese, or whether a style of music can be organized as one would a factory, and whether musical artists and their imaginations can be made into standard parts."          To Weinberg, the issues at Carnegie Hall had less to do with microphone placement. Instead, he felt the featured a homogenized repertoire, program, and product that the concert’s organizers manufactured for mass consumers.

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[14] Comparisons between record labels and industrial factories were not unique to bossa nova. Several historians have noted how Barry Gordy, Jr., founder of Detroit’s Motown Records wanted the label to operate like the assembly line of one of the many auto plants that populated Detroit. The result created a centralized record label that turned itself into what commentators called a “hit factory” and adopted the principles of vertical integration that relied on in-house studio musicians like the Funk Brothers. While the organizational structure of Motown led to the exploitation of musicians, descriptions of Motown music as factory-produced generally conjure up positive connotations. The label churned out acts like The Temptations and The Supremes that represented uniformity, cleanliness, reliability, and innovation – descriptions equally applicable to the American-made cars cranked out of the Ford Wayne Assembly Plant where Gordy briefly worked.          However, Weinberg meant for his words to disparage the performance. The recording industry’s efforts to mass produce bossa nova churned out “cream cheese” – connotations that conjure up The Jungle-like images of the turn-of-the-century meatpacking industry. Little wonder, then, that bandleader Russ Morgan commented that “bossa nova can make me ill.”

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[15] However, as Nathan Weinberg may have known, cream cheese companies were producing various flavors during the 1960s. Borden – the famous producer of condensed milk and ice cream – offered Americans cream cheese with chives and cream cheese with pimento. Americans could buy cream cheese with dates and nuts or cream cheese with relish. Borden even made cream cheese with clam and lobster. Sure, on the one hand, bossa nova resembled a factory-made product in the sense that it was seemingly everywhere and packaged and repackaged ad nauseum. Bossa nova albums were “pouring in through windows and the cracks in the floor,” one columnist pointed out as early as winter 1962.          Critic John S. Wilson even noted that Lalo Schifrin’s album from 1964, Gone with the Wind, “ground out” tracks recorded in a bossa nova style like “neatly packaged sausages."          Yet, on the other hand, bossa nova – like Borden’s cream cheeses – had different flavors. It was a “house of many rooms,” as Gene Lees wrote, describing the various bossa nova records available to consumers in the mid-1960s.          It could appeal to everyone. Just change a little ingredient. Add a little pimento here. A little relish there.

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[16] That a wildly commercially successful music like bossa nova appealed to everyone for different reasons should come as no surprise. Mass media never, despite the claims of its most ardent opponents, created a homogenized populace. During the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, drivers of mass culture, such as chain-stores, the radio, and the phonograph, did not unify all Americans into a classless society that listened to the same music, watched the same films, and ate the same food. Rather, the ethnically diverse working class in Chicago and Los Angeles, for instance, still frequented their local grocery stores, listened to Italian records, read Spanish-language newspapers, and listened to their favorite Mexican and Mexican American disc jockeys on the radio.          During the 1950s, a counterculture existed beneath an allegedly prosperous and homogenous postwar society.          Pundits in the 1960s writing in magazines like Sales Management believed that targeting black customers would de-emphasize race consciousness and difference. However, advertisers nevertheless created a “soul market” that adapted to African American consumers’ political and cultural orientations.

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[17] Bossa nova musicians and marketers embraced a similar type of diversity. Bossa nova recorded and listened to in the United States did not adopt a “once size fits all” approach. Its foreignness, in part, made it a tabula rasa onto which musicians and audiences could project all sorts of ideas and fantasies.          On the one hand, records like ¡Amor! The Fabulous Guitar of Luiz Bonfá feature mellow, mellifluous, acoustic music. It served as perfect background music for a sophisticated suburban dinner party. Other records like The Piltdown Men’s “Tequila Bossa Nova” feature the sounds of electric guitars, harder-hitting drums, and a soulful organ. It appealed to the musical interests of American teenagers. Bossa nova during the 1960s was music for adults and music for youth. It was music listened to by black Americans and by white Americans. It was music listened to within the suburban homes of middle-class Americans and within the juke joints and music venues of America’s working-class metropolitan cities. It was carefree music that also contained sophisticated harmonies. It was championed by members of Brazil’s political right while also adopted by civil rights organizers wishing to program African-diasporic music at their benefit concerts. It was recorded in Brazil by original bossa nova musicians like João Gilberto. It was recorded by Brazilian musicians in New York. It found its way into cool jazz, in big band, in hastily conceived pop albums, and soul and funk. It was all these things simultaneously. It was musical cream cheese. The chapters that follow detail its many flavors.