(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



New Day Cafe: the Bossa Nova Craze [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2023-05-29

TikTok may be today’s primary mechanism for setting viral dance crazes aloft, but dance crazes go back far earlier. Ethnomusicologist Kariann Goldschmitt took a recent look at the rise of the bossa nova in the 1960’s US.

“Goldschmitt writes that the music known as bossa nova (“new wave” or “new trend” in Portuguese) was born in the 1950s in a wealthy part of Rio de Janeiro. Musicians including João Gilberto, Antônio Carlos Jobim, and Vinícius de Morãe transformed Afro-Brazilian samba music to suit the tastes of a cosmopolitan Brazilian elite. The sound mixed in global influences including American “cool” jazz and French impressionism. It de-emphasized samba’s danceable rhythms and vocal melody in favor of greater harmonic and lyrical complexity.

Bossa nova first arrived in the US in a big way with jazz guitarist Charlie Byrd, who heard the style and picked up some recordings on a State Department-sponsored tour of South America. Together with saxophonist Stan Getz, Byrd recorded the 1962 album Jazz Samba, reworking the Bossa Nova sound for the tastes of US jazz fans. The music industry was wowed. Billboard Magazine asked ‘Is The Bossa Nova the New Twist?’

But, to be a sensation like the twist, the music would need an iconic song and an accompanying dance. Billboard reported that “a lot of pop record men are sitting up nights trying to come up with such a record-dance combination.” One issue was that most versions of bossa nova dances took some time to learn. Another was that they were couples’ dances in which the man led the woman.

‘It was perhaps because the twist and bossa nova were so different—one disrupting gender and social class hierarchies and the other restoring them—that that bossa nova was doomed to fall short of industry expectations,’ Goldschmitt writes.”

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/29/2171529/-New-Day-Cafe-the-Bossa-Nova-Craze

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/