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

[JSngry]

THE FIRST PUBLIC PERFORMANCE EVER, i WANT THIS RECORD:

 

yeah, THIS record:

 

[CJ Shearn]

This was cool.  I saw it the other day.

[mjzee]

Way too long.

[danasgoodstuff]

3 hours ago, mjzee said:

Way too long.

The song or the explanatory clip?

[JSngry]

Attention spans are like penises, some are longer than others.

[clifford_thornton]

I've always liked Shepp's version. It was a great day when in my college jazz history class (taught by the late Dick Wright), he crammed both free jazz and bossa nova into one class, using that as the segue. We bonded over our shared love for Roswell Rudd's Impulse! album, Everywhere. Owe that dude a lot.

[JSngry]

I was unaware of the "cultural significance" of playing it in Db vs F. I do recall one jam session decades ago in Albuquerque where it was called in Db, but there were no Brazillian people within miles, and I thought they were doing it just to be all psyche-out the new guy in town. Fortunately for me, I had already figured out the math/formula for the bridge, which was where people start looking at you to see ok, what's gonna happen NOW....

I do hate what has happened to the melody, though, I guess between the Real Book and Astrud's English  lyrics....the Brazillian lyrics make for a much more...musical melody..

[kh1958]

The best version of that song I ever heard was by Dave Burrell in a live solo performance.

[clifford_thornton]

50 minutes ago, kh1958 said:

The best version of that song I ever heard was by Dave Burrell in a live solo performance.

I can imagine!!

[Dan Gould]

She's purty and has a lovely voice. That's how I got thru it.

[jazzbo]

I haven't had a chance yet to watch all this video . . . . But I've come to the conclusion that Jobim was a genius. . . the mellowest genius ever. His genius writing perhaps declined in his final decade. . . but he was still a master performer.

I have almost all the recordings he's made, and I snap up choice albums covering his compositions. They are wonderful compositions for the most part.

[gmonahan]

For me Sinatra's last truly great album was the one he did with Jobim. The interplay was lovely.

[Teasing the Korean]

I have often wondered why Americans who play the tune instrumentally often stick to the boring rhythmic phrase of the English lyric.  When I play the tune, I always play it with the Portuguese melody, which is rhythmically much more interesting.  

[danasgoodstuff]

Does anyone know is there an easy way to get sheet music with the counter-melody he talks about, easier than trying to get a screen shot from the video?

[sgcim]

4 hours ago, danasgoodstuff said:

Does anyone know is there an easy way to get sheet music with the counter-melody he talks about, easier than trying to get a screen shot from the video?

Just put it on pause, and copy it down like I did.

I don't know if the counter-melody was meant to be from the blues scale of each particular key. Since ACJ has said that he was more influenced by Debussy and Villa Lobos, it's more likely just a descending 13th chromatic figure to the fifth and then a leap downwards leap to the ninth, followed by a minor third leap to the min.7th of the new chord; something Impressionistic composers might do.

Analyzing the bridge from the standpoint of those three different keys was interesting, but too much info to memorize could lead to confusion on the gig. When the 'chick singer' on the gig would do it in a different key, I'd just start from the first chord of the bridge, and raise it up a half step, and proceed intervallically until it hit the iii7 chord of the home key, and the long journey would be over.

[JSngry]

The "trick" I used to learn the bridge was that after the first four bars, which is just a basic I-IV (albeit a half-step up from where you just were)  that m7 chords always went down a major 3rd to a dominant7 that was actually the V chord for the next m7 chord...it's a lot easier to internalize than it is to verbalize…but knowing that the "thirdy" movement was just getting you to a simple V chord made the math really easy for me, for whatever reason.

F#m7 to a D7 is easy once you realize in advance that even though the root movement is a major 3rd, that D7 is just going to go to a Gm7, V-i, easy, right? Don't think of getting to the D7 from the F#m7, that's "weird". Think about getting from the D7 to the Gm7, that's "easy"! And then, if you want to, you can break it up/down more. But first, get it easy. I got confused thinking that the dominants were landing points instead of pivot points. DUH!

It's the placement of it, the internal symmetry, the way the "shock" "relaxes", that is genius.

 

[Quasimado]

Chet didn't cover this on record or on bootleg somewhere? Be nice to hear what a supposedly pure(?) ear player did with it. Of course what the rhythm section was     doing would be meaningful ... 

[sgcim]

16 hours ago, JSngry said:

The "trick" I used to learn the bridge was that after the first four bars, which is just a basic I-IV (albeit a half-step up from where you just were)  that m7 chords always went down a major 3rd to a dominant7 that was actually the V chord for the next m7 chord...it's a lot easier to internalize than it is to verbalize…but knowing that the "thirdy" movement was just getting you to a simple V chord made the math really easy for me, for whatever reason.

F#m7 to a D7 is easy once you realize in advance that even though the root movement is a major 3rd, that D7 is just going to go to a Gm7, V-i, easy, right? Don't think of getting to the D7 from the F#m7, that's "weird". Think about getting from the D7 to the Gm7, that's "easy"! And then, if you want to, you can break it up/down more. But first, get it easy. I got confused thinking that the dominants were landing points instead of pivot points. DUH!

It's the placement of it, the internal symmetry, the way the "shock" "relaxes", that is genius.

 

That's a good way to think of it for the usual version in F, but if you've got a 'chick singer' who is intent on singing "The Boy From Ipanema" in her key, you've still got to find those third and fourth chords of the bridge in the new key. I used to do it by remembering that the third chord was going to be a minor seventh using the first chord's root, and the chord following that, the bVI7 of that third chord (which is the same thing as your method of going down a major 3rd) which then became the V7 of the next minor 7th chord, as you said.

The weird thing is that you're on the ii chord when you've reached the fifth chord of the bridge, but it's going down a major third (or up a minor 6th), not to anything in the key like the V chord. If you've made it that far, then it's just a iii VI ii V turnaround and your journey is over.

Where it really gets funny is when there's a male and female singer on the gig, and they start alternating A and B sections! The female decides she's going to come in on the bridge- IN HER KEY!!  Then it's time for you to solo, in her key! Then the male singer wants to come in on the bridge back in the original key! There were never any rehearsals for these gigs, so it was every man/woman for themselves.

I just remember laughing my head off and getting totally lost the first time that happened, but somehow we made it through without a train wreck..After that, I knew what to expect

[JSngry]

I remember the architecture math better than I do keys alone, so it works for me, just how my mind works. Bridge = 1/2 step up/IV/back to to the 1/2 step up m7/down a major third to a dominant. Some people can play Giant Steps in any key because they get the architecture. I can't play it in ANY key, but I can do that on the Ipanema bridge! I feel blessed?

One thing that helped in the fun was that functionality of F#m7 and D7 is one thing, but an altogether other thing is that in terms of basic chord structure is that its the same notes in both chords with the critical/fun difference that the C# in the F# minor chord can be moved, must be moved, either a half-step up or down when you get to D7, that's where the pivot is in terms of a melodic improvisation, that change. Not the chord/scale, just that one note. You can even keep the G# in there, it's a nifty (if cliched) #11 over the D7, no problem if that's what you want. But the key is to move that C# out of there completely, that thing is gone now.

It's one of those things, imo, where if you think in terms of melody first, the theory kinda fixes itself. Or maybe it's the other way around. Either way, it's math, architecture.