The Girl From Ipanema is a far weirder song than you thought

free, okay this is going to be a pretty long video so here's a quick synopsis. Here is a video that is too long. I did not see it. If you've ever listened to The Girl from Ipanema, this background music was played in the bass clef instead of the D-flat clef. you're hearing a relic of American cultural hegemony codified by decisions made at Berkeley College of Music in the 1970s. Yes, the

song

is a lot stranger than you ever

thought

. The Girl from Ipanema is the second most recorded

song

in the history of humanity. He represented Brazil. the 2016 olympic games both in the opening ceremonies and in their official mascots vinicius and tom after the composers of the song, but for a tune so internationally popular and so representative of brazilian pride, it is actually a rather strange song, the Harmony on the bridge is nothing short of haunting. is a chord progression that is notoriously difficult to understand using traditional analysis, which makes it even stranger how the song is used in popular culture. is auditory shorthand for light and frivolous background music as in v for vendetta v is humming along with the ibaema

girl

. in light, sweet tones and the breakfast scene, which is intended to create a kind of whiplash of humor with the action of the rest of the film taken at face value, the song written by Vinicius Morius and Tom Jobim is a light trifle about eating ogling women on

ipanema

beach, but this kind of kitschy reputation surrounding the song, I don't know, has always bothered me and it's not just because the music itself is quite complicated if you look at the harmony and the melody, now it actually goes a little bit deeper than that and to explain what I mean, first we must talk about the history of bossa or the new wave or the new style or the new style sometimes the translations are not very Well, it's bossa nova, any bossa nova that comes from the Rio nightclubs of January of the 1950s and 1960s is one of the many descendants of samba, that uniquely Afro-Brazilian syncopated musical and dance form that has dominated Brazilian culture. during the last 100 years.

Bossa nova and samba appeared very frequently in the film Orfeo Negro or Black. orfeo based on a work by vinicius moraeus who wrote the lyrics to iphoneima's

girl

orfeonegro tells the story of orfeo and eurydice set in a favela during the rio de janeiro carnival the film became an international success winning the palme d'or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 and launched Brazilian culture and music into the international spotlight. In addition to samba, Basanova also has its roots in Choro, an earlier instrumental style also from Rio de Janeiro. The choro features acoustic guitars playing syncopated bass lines along with string accompaniment, often these basses are played by guitarists. lines on seven-string guitars see how a non-cohen band does it a brazilian seven-string guitarist put bassists out of work long before metal musicians made the most gent the height of bossanova's popularity in The international stage arrived with Getz Gilberto in 1964, a collaboration between Brazilian guitarist Texel Gurberto and American saxophonist Stan Getz that included Ibnema's Girl.

Part of the international success was undoubtedly the inclusion of an English verse sung by Jiao Guberto's wife Astrid, who was apparently the only person who could sing in English at the recording session. Goberto had developed a unique way of playing the guitar which he called viola gago or stuttering guitar by imitating specific elements of samba percussion with the thumb and other fingers, one of the reasons why American saxophonist Stan Getz fits so well within it. of this bossa nova town. The aesthetic is due to the fact that Brazilian composers of the time had been borrowing harmonic concepts from American jazz.

Jerry Mulligan's arrangements on Miles Davis's Birth of Cool were instrumental in creating the sound of cool jazz in North America and apparently also deeply influenced Tom Jobim, but the American influence also came through. how the songs were arranged the girl from iponema uses an aaba song form that was very popular in american musical theater, as well as in earlier tin pan alley compositions by composers such as cole porter and irving berlin the girl from

ipanema

also has a verse bold or a flowing intro that sets up the song this kind of thing was very popular in musical theater in North America, but you didn't see that often in Brazil all of these American influences on Brazilian songwriting of the time, specifically bossa nova , it was seen in some circles as a whitewashing of samba, a diminution and commodification of the rich Afro-Brazilian syncopated style to appeal to the sensibilities of upper- and middle-class whites across class and racial distinctions, the influence of American jazz music. and musical theater music were seen as American Cultural imperialism and so bossa nova was treated with suspicion.

This cultural friction between Brazilian identity and the international success of bossa nova music interestingly continues to this day, for example the key in which you play the girl from Iponema really matters, so there's like a 90. Percent chance that every time you hear the girl from Ipanema play live by a live band like at cocktail hour or something, they'll play it in the key of f, that's the key to trap music published, as well as the key that frank sinatra sang it and that is why it has become something default among american jazz musicians for the girl from ibenima.

This is stevie wonder playing the girl from ipanema in f in springfield, massachusetts. There is a problem with that, although you see the version of The Girl from Ipanema that is on Getskillberto, the recording that made Bossanova famous, it is actually in the key of D flat, so because of that D flat it is considered the key more authentic Brazilian, so when Stevie Wonder plays the girl from Ipanema in Brazil, you better do it. I think he is playing it in D flat, in this case the key of D flat has a certain prestige because it helps to quell any questions of authenticity that may arise around the invasion of American influence on Brazilian culture and bossa nova if you do.

You play in the key of D flat. of D flat you are a real musician if you play it in bass clef you are a fake American musician who said that for this video we will analyze it in bass clef mainly because it is much easier there there are a lot less flats, but also because that is the key which I learned then, so anyway let's look at the melody first. Today's Epinema girl melody will be sung by Martina Da Silva. So thanks Martina, the melody of section A is. based on a simple repeated melodic cell, so we'll start on the note g to send a third to e and then we'll go down one step to d and then we'll repeat that pattern and this kind of syncopated lilting melody, that third pattern down and then it repeats one step up down in measures five and six, except now it's transposed one step down in the bass clef, so it's now f d and c.

That little melodic pattern is transposed again, so we end the phrase with an e lowered a third to a c. go down a step to B flat and finally resolve to a ch. This idea of ​​taking the same pattern but then moving it in the key is called tonal sequence. Sequences are a very powerful tool for developing musical ideas, which is why the word glory has so many syllables that you probably know this little number too. A very interesting thing about the iponema girl is that it is built entirely from sequences, each part of the melody is a repetition of something that came before or is itself the beginning of a new sequence. which is useful because the repetition legitimizes the repetition after section a is repeated, well we get to section b which begins a new sequence, it is clear that we are no longer in the key of f because there are many flats on the sheet . music, so what key are we in?

Well, we can tell just by using our ears, if I played you the melody without accompaniment and without any harmony, you can hear quite clearly that the first four bars of the bridge are in the key of D flat, check it out. I discover that that is the chord that the melody wants to resolve to or at least wants to resolve if we follow European tonality standards, which we are not. The next thing that happens is that the exact phrase is transposed a minor third on each interval. is transposed to the key of E major, this is called a real sequence to differentiate it, I suppose, from all those false sequences.

Wow, that sounds so real, now we get another iteration of the sequence again, a minor second up to the key of f where we started. The sequences are like comedy, generally following a rule of three. You have to give someone the same melody long enough for them to get the point, but not repeat it too much, so you're just beating a dead horse. The letter in the girl's a section. from infanima when we are in the key of f we talk about the beauty and grace of this girl from ipanema, this changes quickly in section b where we start to modulate where the lyrics become much more introspective and is about how the narrator is a man lonely. sad little boy in the tin pan alley tradition american musical theater songwriting in aaba form will generally change the keys in the bridge the b section cycling through different keys take us on a journey we have the feeling of traveling we have a new emotional perspective of the music that we have been listening to the keys that we travel to D flat E and F are distantly related they do not have notes in common between all of them but because we have a simple sequence of a musical sequence clear idea that we do not care repetition legitimizes repetition legitimizes legitimacy of the repeat the second half of the bridge which is 16 bars long by the way it's a very long bridge but anyway I'm rambling, rambling, rambling the second half gives us our final sequence we have an octave jump down from C and then a scalar up to a G sharp that resolves to a and then that whole pattern repeats again down one step, so the melody of the girl from ipanema is just three finely crafted sequences, three sequences and then we get the haunting, lilting melody of the ibaema girl, so why do I say it's so strange?

Because this technique has been used since Bach and honestly the song so far sounds like something that could have been written in American Tin Pan Alley, well the bridge to The Girl from Ipanema features a prominent countermelody on the piano, it's You can hear on the famous Gets Gilberto recording that line, although it sounds like the pianist was fiddling around a bit, it appears on many recordings from that era, you can hear it. On Frank Sinatra's later recordings in the schmaltzy dramatic unison string orchestration, whenever Zhao Gurberto and Tom Jobim perform together, you'll hear that baseline and you can also hear it in early vocal arrangements like this one by Brazilian vocal group Oskariokas The Counter melody consists of two short phrases in the bridge built from the blues scale of the key in which they are played, so for the first four measures where we are in the key of D flat, we play a blues scale in D flat beginning on the fifth, the next four measures of the E key bridge have a slightly different phrasing using an E blues scale.

The important point of this counterpoint is that the blues scale was not used very often in Brazilian music before bossa nova, but musicians working in nightclubs in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s, immediately before the explosion of bossa nova, it very freely borrowed blues vocabulary from African Americans, brian mccann points this out in his essay blues and samba, another side of the bossa nova story, bossa nova has often been derided as the whitewashing of the samba a samba for the cocktail-drinking sophisticate, but Brazilian jazz musicians of the late 1950s knew that by incorporating more blues influence into their playing they were tapping into the sources of African-American music.

You can definitely hear that blues influence in the melody. moyeta by sergio mendes reminiscent of some r b sacks playing at the time mccann suggests that part of the reason American musicians so enthusiastically embraced bossa nova was because of this blues influence that can be heard in cabo blues green by horace silver the subtle blues girl by ipanema The countermelody has largely been erased from the collective musical consciousness of jazz musicians performing today and the reason for this is that because of this stupidity, the actual book the The actual book is a collection of jazz standards collected at the Berkeley School of Music in the 1970s.

These were transcriptions of recordings made by students that were later codified as a kind of jazz canon. The transcript thatmade for the real girl from ipanema book did not include the blues countermelody and so on since the publication of the real book. That melody has rarely been performed without that countermelody, there is an unfortunate side effect of the popularity of jazz education and the actual book. Young musicians learn music from the real book, not from recordings, and we now have 50 years of ebonema girl adaptations. the second most recorded song in human history without its blues roots and this is simply because the guy from Berkeley who transcribed the girl from Iponema didn't think the countermelody was worth writing, so maybe he didn't do it. they made.

I know the history of its inclusion in all those recordings, I don't know, so the result is that the girl from Ipanema has become a kind of photocopy of photocopies, as if the music had been jpasted too many times, which coincides with bossa's original review. nova as a dilutor of Brazilian culture, I honestly think this has something to do with the public understanding of the ibenima girl as a bit kitsch and I think it's unfortunate because the song to me is very beautiful and I think a big part of that Beauty comes from the harmony of the song.

The girl in the eponymous section uses roughly the same harmonic progression as Duke Ellington's take the a train, which is a chord progression that tom jabim apparently really liked because he also included in the a section for his sodanso samba melody, take the a train progression sounds like this, we start on f major seven, one major seven, tonic home base then we go to a g7 a secondary dominant the five of five now we are developing the harmony then we go to a g minor seven the two chords minor seven and then a c7 a five seven chord and finally we come home to F major seven, the biggest problem with the seven is that those are not the chords of the iponema girl, they could be written in the real book, but the Actual chords as played by Gial Guberto and Tom Jobim are a little more subtle and a little more ambiguous transposed to the key of F.

The first chord that Gial Guberto plays is not an F major seven but an F six over C without the f the bassist ends up playing the root of the F chord but joe guberto only plays three notes and is not playing the F anywhere something strange, that's the same for the next chord in the progression g7 over D without G very strange the next one chord is a G minor seven over D without G followed by a diminished D flat. The chord that replaces C7 is like a C7 chord, but instead of C there is a D flat which then resolves to F6 over C.

All of these chords They are like ambiguous reharmonizations of the original chord progression without changing the chords at all. very cool, check it out, there is a sneaky little twist that is then included at the end of the a section in some arrangements that go in minor 7 a flat 7 d flat major 7 g flat major 7. frank sinatra occasionally used this arrangement himself jobim was a little hesitant to play this change, he deliberately doesn't play the change when it happens in the orchestration, each one she passes, but later in his career he ended up liking it enough to start playing it, then we got to the infamous bridge. which uses a pretty ambiguous harmonic scheme, there's a whole cottage industry of YouTube videos and articles trying to understand what the bridge is really about, which is a little strange to me because remember this is the second most recorded song on the history of humanity. and the bridge is still a mystery to people, this is because, and I'm simplifying a bit, improvisers need to know what key a chord is in in order to improvise around that chord progression, so let's say I have a chord g7 in the bass clef Knowing that it is in the bass clef is very useful for me because I can take the notes of the G7 chord and then fill all the spaces with notes from the bass clef to create a scale from which improvise in a very ingenious way. but let's say you had a g7 and the key of C minor, now there's a different context, there are different notes to fill in between the spaces of the chord tones, so there's a different scale you could improvise with if you know the key the chord is in you will know in advance which notes will sound good with the chord an important clue to discovering the key of chords is a pattern called two-five is the sound of a minor seventh chord descending from a fifth to a seventh chord dominant that pattern is used everywhere an American popular song from the first half of the 20th century because that repertoire is what jazz musicians train in, they are programmed to be able to identify two five patterns and I literally mean wiring that I participated in A study from two years ago titled Improvisation Experience Predicts How Musicians Categorize Musical Structures where subjects heard examples of harmony and jazz musicians, presumably because of their experience, were able to identify functional relationships like two fives more easily than others. musicians.

That's why jazz musicians everywhere can lower jazz standards just by looking at the ireal pro app on their phone, but that kind of pattern recognition doesn't work for the chord progression that tom jobim wrote in the bridge of the girl from iponema. The chords appear to be in key, but they don't follow the same kind of ordered relationships of two fives as they do in American jazz standards as we might expect a chord we've seen a million times to function as a noun but for some reason in the Bridge of the Girl from Ipanema works as a verb, we might have a general idea of ​​what it's supposed to mean, but the grammar is really strange.

Let's listen to what the harmony in the bridge might sound like with the modulator keys with a typical vocabulary of 2 to 5 with secondary dominance settings. up the new keys this is the girl from iponema in the style of tin pan alley like cole porter or irving berlin my american jazz and my brazilian bossa nova can use spicy chords but the brazilian chords will always be a little more ambiguous in function, the question, of course, it's how Jobim chose the chords he used well to realize that we're going to do a real professional jazz move and listen to the original commercial recording of the girl from ipanema from 1963, a year before jiao. guberto and stan getz recorded their version let's listen to perry riviera's version perry ribeiro which is actually in treble clef the original is in treble clef not d flat interesting but most people don't know that soji no Anyway , doesn't have the same kind of cultural cachet as D-flat, so Perry Ribeiro's version doesn't really sound like bossa nova.

He is singing with this broad vibrato in the vein of singers of the time with this rich, lush etude. orchestra backing it up, but the arranger he used for this version of ibenima's girl wrote some really interesting chords in the bridge that act as a sort of missing link between the old American style and the new style, bossa nova part five punch We're going to see Perry Ribeiro's version along with Getsculberto, which seems to be the version that Tom Jobim decided to transpose to the same key. Both versions start on G flat major 7. The melody tells us that we are in the key of D flat, so this G flat major 7 works as a 4 major 7 chord from there, in Perry Ribeiro's version we have an F sharp minor seven and a harmonic G flat minor seven, the four minor seven and the key of D flat goes to ab seven the seven flat seven jazz musicians call this four minor the seven flat seven the back door 2 5 progression because it wants to resolve in the back door to the one major 7 so very nice gilberto on the other hand it just goes straight from the g flat major 7 to the b7, so simplify the progression a little bit, Perry Ribeiro then just takes exactly the same chord progression from before and transposes a minor third to the key of E like the melody.

Now we have a major seven? the four major sevens and the key of E going to a minor seven the four minor sevens to a d7 the flat seven seven the same progression that we had before Gilbert replaces the major seven the major four with an F sharp minor seven the two The minor chords two and four have subdominant functions within the keys, so they substitute each other, but by substituting chords you are breaking the nice symmetry of having the same chord progression in each line of the bridge, you are making the chord progression more ambiguous and difficult to understand, goberto then does not end up playing the minor seven or the minor seven, but simply goes directly to the d7 chord and moves on to the third line. ribeiro repeats the chords in exactly the same order, just half up. step B flat major seven the four major sevens in the key of F flat minor seven the four minor sevens in the key of F and then E flat seven the seven flat sevens Gilbert chooses to do the same trick of replacing the four major sevens with the two minor seven What makes this complicated is that we have been changing keys without even playing the one chord when we were in D flat we never had any D flat chords when we were in E we never had any E chords this is what's confusing because the chord progression is giving us a different tonal logic than the melody.

This is what makes bossa nova so special. I think it's ambiguity. Here we go. That's the bridge. I applaud you for coming this far. Thank you for being with everyone. It's time. To put the song into some much-needed context, this kind of chord progression and melodic analysis might surprise my fellow jazz musicians because this is not the way I was taught the bridge, the iponema girl, I think, looking at three versions of the bridge a hypothetical tin pan alley american style of harmonizing the bridge a version of the missing link of harmony that was provided by perry ribeiro and finally the version we got the ambiguous harmonization of gel guberto we have a clearer picture we have harmony that was built and then deconstructed we have american jazz and then we have brazilian bossa nova composer and conductor leonard bernstein gave a series of lectures at harvard university in 1973 which he called the unanswered question and used these lectures to explore a grammar universal for musical language it is debatable whether he was successful or not, but one point that I think is relevant is his point about the importance of elimination in poetry and music his example was Shakespeare's phrase juliet is the son juliet is the son a famous classic example of this is that it is beautiful and it is also totally illogical because juliet is not in fact the sun juliet is a human organism the sun is a star how do they come to be the same?

You could construct a more logical sentence with more words like Juliet is beautiful and radiant and The sun, a star, is also beautiful and radiant, so Juliet is like the sun in terms of her shared radiance. Logical but silly, even if you boil it down to something less wordy, like Juliet, it's radiant like the sun. It may be beautiful, but it's not that poetic. Like Juliet is the sun, things tend to be more beautiful when you take away what is not necessary for their beauty, even if it is not logical. Just like harmony for the epinema girl, my

thought

is that harmony for the epinema girl could have been very different, it could have been more logical but less beautiful, but through the process of elimination and reharmonization, Gilberto's chords become much more poetic.

This harmonic poetry is the core of Brazilian bossanova and, in my opinion, is what distinguishes it from American jazz. harmony even though it comes from very similar or foreign roots, so when researching this video I found a really interesting historical document. I found a recording of the first time the girl from ipanema performed live in public at the end of August 1962. show at the gourmet obon nightclub in copacabana rio de janeiro where tom jobim gel guberto and vinicius de marias sang the girl from ipanema for the first time in front of a live audience and there are some fascinating things we can learn from this recording - the countermelody is there, as well as gial gerberto's deconstructed chords in the bridge - but there are also some really interesting things that never appeared on no future recordings and I thought it would be fun to listen to this recording and give my commentary on it as we listen to it, of course I can't really do that in this video because I can only play five to seven seconds of commercial recordings because of YouTube and the YouTube ID content.

Yes, this recording is owned by Universal Music Group, but there is a place. which you can listen to with my commentary and which is in the extended version of this video that was uploaded exclusively to nebula, the creator-owned streaming service that I joined specifically so I could talk more about commercial recordings without having to worry about getting blocked and Demonetized The Way Music Education Should Be Nebula Features many of YouTube's favorite educational channels such as Up In Atom Thomas Frank Legal Eagle Who Knows 12 Tones Best and many, many more It's a great place to watch and discover content really excellent, withoutadvertising and support. your favorite creators I hope you enjoyed this guys, thank you very much for watching.

I hope you understand my interest in the topic because you know there is a very deep history there and it is a great way to talk about Brazilian music and bossa nova music. And you know, unless we're constantly thinking about the deeper history of the media that we engage in, we're going to end up with the real version of the music in a book and the real version of the story in a book, and I don't think that's a good idea.