Antonio Carlos Jobim

Charlie Byrd, Herbie Mann, and others brought in bags full of discs from a trip to Brazil in 1961. Stan Getz listened to them and recorded “Desafinado ” which stayed for 70 weeks on the Billboard charts. Since then, no one can deny bossa novas global appeal and influence upon jazz and world music. While celebrating bossa novas 50-year presence in the United States, we can learn more about the movements champion, Jobim, through poet and novelist Helena Jobims Antonio Carlos Jobim: An Illuminated Man. His personal, intellectual, and professional history comes alive. With a vast, intimate, and revealing set of photographs, and an engaging, elegant and unique prose, this is the story of a true 20th-centurys genius. Helena Jobim does justice to her brothers poetic voice. The composer of “Waters of March” read, questioned, and re-created the world he lived in not only through mesmerizing melodies, but also through down-to-earth poetry.
The biography also reveals Antonio Carlos Jobims serious ecological concerns. To his 400 songs of inexplicable grace he has added his own epigraph in An Illuminated Man: “Every time a tree is cut down here on Earth, I believe it will grow again somewhere else, in another world. So, when I die, it is to this place that I want to go, where forests live in peace.”