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

this video is brought to you by curiositystream sign up with the link in the description and also get access to my streaming service nebula for free okay so this is going to be a rather long video so here is a brief synopsis here's a too long didn't watch if you ever hear the girl from ippanima this background music performed in the key of f instead of the key of d flat you're hearing a relic of american cultural hegemony codified by decisions made at the berkeley college of music in the 1970s yeah the song is far weirder than you ever thought [Music] [Music] [Music] is the second most recorded song in human history it represented brazil in the 2016 olympics both in the opening ceremonies and in its official mascots vinicius and tom after the song's composers 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 less than [Music] haunting [Music] [Applause] is it's a chord progression that's notoriously difficult to understand using traditional analysis which makes it all the more strange how the song is used in popular culture it's auditory shorthand for light frivolous background music like in v for vendetta v is humming along to the girl from ibanema in light dulcet tones and the breakfast scene which is meant to set up a kind of mood whiplash with the action of the rest of the movie taken at face value the song written by vinicius morius and tom jobim is a light trifle about ogling women on the ipanema beach but this kind of kitsch reputation that surrounds the song has i don't know always rubbed me the wrong way and it's not just because the music itself is actually fairly involved 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 we need to first talk about the history of bossa nova um or the new wave or new flare or new style sometimes translations aren't very good it's bossa nova whatever bossa nova comes from the nightclubs of rio de janeiro of the 1950s and 1960s it's one of the many descendants of samba that uniquely afro-brazilian syncopated musical and dance form that has dominated brazilian culture for the past 100 years bossa nova and samba were featured very prevalently in the film orfeo negro or black orpheus based on a play by vinicius moraeus who wrote the lyrics to girl from ipanema orfeonegro tells the story of orpheus and eurydice set in a favela during carnival in rio de janeiro the movie became an international success winning the palm d'or at the cannes film festival in 1959 and thrust brazilian culture and music into the international spotlight aside from samba basanova also has its roots in choro an earlier instrumental style also from rio de janeiro chorro features acoustic guitars playing syncopated bass lines along with chordal accompaniment often these guitarists play these bass lines on seven string guitars check out how a not cohen's band does it [Music] brazilian seven-string guitarist putting bassists out of work long before metal musicians ever did maximum gent the height of bossa nova's popularity on the international stage came with 1964's getz gilberto a collaboration between brazilian guitarist tachel gurberto and american saxophonist stan getz which featured the girl from ibenema part of the international success no doubt was the inclusion of an english verse sung by zhao gurberto's wife astrid who apparently was the only person who could sing in english at the recording session gilberto had developed a unique way of playing the guitar that he called via lao gago or the stuttering guitar by mimicking specific elements of samba percussion with his thumb and other fingers one of the reasons why the american saxophonist stan getz fits so well within this villago bossa nova aesthetic is because brazilian composers of the time had been borrowing harmonic concepts from american jazz jerry mulligan's arrangements on miles davis's birth of the cool were instrumental in creating the cool jazz sound in north america and apparently also deeply influenced tom jobim but american influence also came in how the songs were arranged the girl from ipanema uses an aaba song form which was very popular in north american musical theater as well as earlier tin pan alley songwriting from composers like cole porter and irving berlin the girl from ipanema also has a cheeky verse or a free-flowing introduction that sets up the song this kind of thing was very popular in musical theater in north america but was not seen that frequently in brazil all of these american influences on brazilian songwriting of the era specifically bossa nova 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-class and middle-class whites [Music] beyond the class and racial distinction the influence of american jazz music and musical theater music was 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 continues in interesting ways to this day for example the key in which you play the girl from iponema actually matters so there's like a 90 percent chance that whenever you hear the girl from ipanema played live by a live band at like a cocktail hour or something like that they'll be playing it in the key of f that's the key of the published cheat music as well as the key that frank sinatra sang it in [Music] and because of that it kind of has become the default among american jazz musicians for the girl from ibenima this is stevie wonder performing the girl from ipanema in f in springfield massachusetts [Music] [Applause] [Music] there's a problem with that though you see the version of the girl from ipanema that's on getskilberto the recording that made bossa nova famous is actually in the key of d flat so because of that d flat is seen as the more authentic brazilian key so when stevie wonder performs the girl from ipo nema in brazil you better believe that he's playing it in d-flat [Music] there's a certain prestige in this case to the key of d flat because it helps quell any questions of authenticity that might arise around encroaching american influence on brazilian culture and bossa nova if you play it in the key of d flat you are a real authentic musician if you play it in the key of f you are a fake american musician that said for this video we're going to be analyzing it in the key of f mainly because it's just a lot easier there are a lot less flats but also because that's the key that i learned it then so anyway let's first check out the melody melodia the melody of the girl from ipanema today will be sung by martina de silva so thank you martina the a-section melody is based on a simple repeated melodic cell so we'll start on the note g descend down a third to e and then descend down a step to d and then repeat that pattern and this syncopated lilting kind of melody that pattern of a third down and then a step down is repeated in measures five and six except now it's transposed down a step in the key of f so now it's f d and c that little melodic pattern is transposed again so we finish out the phrase with an e down a third to a c down a step to a b flat then finally resolving to a c [Music] this idea of taking the same pattern but then moving it around in the key is called a tonal sequence sequences are a very powerful tool for developing musical ideas they're why the word gloria has so many syllables [Music] you also probably know this little number a very cool thing about the girl from ipanema is that it's built entirely from sequences every bit of the melody is either a repetition of something that came before or is itself the start of a new sequence which is useful because repetition legitimizes repetition legitimizes repetition after the a section repeats okay good we get to the b section which starts a new sequence it's clear that we aren't in the key of f anymore because there are a lot of flats on the sheet music so what key are we in well we can actually tell just by using our ears if i played you the melody unaccompanied without any harmony you can pretty clearly hear that the first four measures of the bridge are in the key of d-flat [Music] that's the chord that the melody wants to resolve to or at least it wants to resolve to if we're following european standards of tonality which we aren't the next thing that happens is that exact phrase gets transposed up a minor third every interval is transposed up to the key of e major this is called a real sequence to differentiate it i guess from all those fake sequences [Music] wow sounds so real we get another iteration of the sequence again now up a minor second to the key of f where we started sequences are like comedy they generally follow a rule of three you need to give somebody the same melody enough time so they get the point but not repeat it too much so you're just beating a dead horse the lyrics in the a section of the girlfriend infanima when we're in the key of f talk of the beauty and grace of this girl from ipanema this rapidly changes in the b section where we start modulating where the lyrics become much more introspective and are all about how the narrator is a lonely little sad boy in the tradition of tin pan alley american musical theater songwriting tunes in aaba form generally will change keys on the bridge the b section by cycling through different keys we're taken on a journey we have the feeling of traveling we have a new emotional perspective on the music that we've been listening to the keys that we travel to d flat e and f are distantly related they don't have any notes in common between all of them but because we have a simple sequence of a clear musical idea we don't mind repetition legitimizes repetition legitimizes repetition legitimacy the second half of the bridge which is 16 bars long by the way it's a very long bridge but anyway i digress i digress i digress the second half gives us our final sequence we have an octave leap down from c and then a scalar run up to a g sharp resolving to a and then that whole pattern repeats again down a step so the tune the melodies with the girl from ipanema is just three finely crafted sequences three sequences and then we get the haunting lilting melody of the girl from ibanema so why am i saying that it's so weird because this technique has been used since bach and honestly the song so far sounds like it's something that could have been written out of american tin pan alley well [Music] the bridge to the girl from ipanema features a prominent counter melody in the piano you can hear it on the famous gets gilberto recording [Music] that line even though it sounds kind of like the pianist was noodling a little bit shows up in many recordings from that era you can hear it in later frank sinatra recordings in the schmaltzy dramatic orchestration of unison strings whenever zhao gurberto and tom jobim perform together you'll hear that background line and you can also hear it in early vocal arrangements like this one from the brazilian vocal group os kariokus the counter melody consists of two short phrases in the bridge built from the blues scale of the key in which they're played so for the first four measures where we're in the key of d-flat we're playing a d-flat blues scale starting on the fifth the next four measures of the bridge in the key of e have a slightly different phrase using an e blues scale the important point of this counterpoint is that the blues scale was not used very frequently in brazilian music prior to bossa nova but musicians working in nightclubs in rio de janeiro in the 1950s immediately before the explosion of bossa nova very freely borrowed blue's vocabulary from african americans brian mccann points this out in his essay blues and samba another side of bossa nova history bossa nova has often been derided as the whitening of samba a samba for cocktail sipping sophisticates but the brazilian jazz musicians of the late 1950s knew that by incorporating greater blues influence into their playing they were tapping into the headwaters of african american music you can definitely hear that blue's influence on the tune maria muyta by sergio mendez reminiscent of some r b sacks playing at the time mccann suggests that part of the reason why american musicians so enthusiastically embraced bossa nova was because of this blues influence you can hear it on horus silver's cape verdean blues the girl from iponema's subtle blues counter melody has been largely erased from the collective musical consciousness of jazz musicians performing today and the reason for that is because of this stupid thing the real book the real book is a collection of jazz standards put together at the berkeley college of music in the 1970s these were transcriptions of recordings that were done by students that later became codified as a sort of jazz canon the transcription that was done for the real book of the girl from ipanema did not include the blues counter melody and so since the publication of the real book that melody has rarely been performed not having that counter-melody in there is an unfortunate side effect of the popularity of jazz education and the real book young musicians learn music from the real book not the recordings and now we have 50 years of girl from ebonema adaptations the second most recorded song in human history whitewashed of their blues roots and this is purely because the kid at berkeley that transcribed the girl from eponima didn't think that the counter melody was worth writing down so they didn't maybe they didn't know the history of its inclusion in all of those recordings i don't know so the result is the girl from ipanema has become kind of a xerox of a xerox like the music has been jpegged one too many times which plays into the original critique of bossa nova as a watering down of brazilian culture i honestly think that this has something to do with the public understanding of the girl from iponema as being a piece of kitsch a trifle and i think that's unfortunate because the song to me is very beautiful and i think a big part of that beauty stems from the songs [Music] harmony the girl from ipanema's a 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 it in the a section for his tunes so down so samba the take the a train progression sounds like this we start on an f major seven the one major seven the tonic home base we then go to a g7 a secondary dominant the five of five we're now developing the harmony we then go to a g minor seven the two minor seven chord and then a c seven five seven chord and finally come back home to f major seven the one major seven problem is those aren't the chords to the girl from ipanema they might be written in the real book but the actual chords as they were performed by jiao gurberto and tom jobim are a little bit more subtle and a little bit more ambiguous transposed to the key of f the first chord that gial guberto plays is not an f major seven but rather an f6 over c without the f the bass player ends up playing the root of the chord the f but gel guberto only plays three notes and he isn't playing the f anywhere kind of weird that's the same for the next chord in the progression g7 over d without the g very strange the next chord is a g minor 7 over d without the g followed by a d flat diminished chord substituting for c7 it's like a c7 chord but instead of c there's a d flat in there that then resolves to f6 over c all of these chords are like ambiguous re-harmonizations of the original chord progression without actually changing the chords at all it's very cool check it out [Music] there's a sneaky little turnaround that's then included at the end of the a section in some arrangements which goes a minor seven a flat seven d flat major seven g flat major seven frank sinatra occasionally used this jobim arrangement was a little hesitant to actually play this turnaround he purposely does not play the turnaround when happens in the orchestration each one she passes goes [Music] but later on in his career he ended up liking it enough to start playing it [Music] we then come to the infamous bridge which uses a fairly ambiguous harmonic scheme there's a whole cottage industry of youtube videos and articles out there trying to make sense of what the bridge is actually all about which is kind of strange to me because remember this is the second most recorded song in human history and the bridge remains a bit of a mystery to people this is because and i'm simplifying a little bit here improvisers need to know what key a chord is in in order to improvise around that chord progression so say i have a g7 chord in the key of f knowing that it's in the key of f is very useful for me because i can take the notes from the g7 chord and then fill in all the gaps with notes from the key of f to create a scale from which to improvise very nifty but say i had a g7 and the key of c minor now there's a different context there are different notes to fill in between the gaps of the chord tones so there's a different scale that i might use to improvise with if you know the key that the chord is in you will know ahead of time what notes will sound good with the chord an important clue to figure out the key from the chords is a pattern called a two-five it's the sound of a minor seventh chord descending down a fifth to a dominant seventh chord that pattern is used everywhere an american popular song from the first half of the twentieth century because that repertoire is what jazz musicians train on they're hardwired to be able to identify two five patterns and i literally mean hardwired i took part in a study two years ago entitled improvisation experience predicts how musicians categorize musical structures where subjects listen to examples of harmony and jazz musicians presumably because of their experience were found to be able to identify functional relationships like two fives more readily than other musicians it's why jazz musicians everywhere can half-ass jazz standards just by looking at the ireal pro app on their phone but that kind of pattern recognition does not work for the chord progression that tom jobim wrote on the bridge of the girl from iponema chords seem to be in keys but they don't follow the same kinds of tidy relationships of two fives like they do on american jazz standards like we might expect a chord we've seen a million times to function as a noun but for whatever reason on the bridge of the girl from epinema it's functioning as a verb we might get the general sense of what it's supposed to mean but the grammar is really odd let's hear what the harmony on the bridge with the modulating keys might sound like with a typical 2-5 vocabulary with secondary dominance setting up the new keys this is the girl from ipanema in the style of tin pan alley like cole porter or irving berlin [Music] both american jazz and brazilian bossa nova might use spicy chords but the brazilian chords are always going to be a little bit more ambiguous in function the question of course becomes how did jobim pick the chords that he used well to figure that out we're going to pull a real pro jazz move and listen to the original commercial recording of the girl from ipanema from 1963 a full year before jiao guberto and stan getz recorded their version we're going to listen to perry rivieras [Music] perry ribeiro's version which is actually in the key of g the original is in the key of g not d flat interesting but most people don't actually know that so g doesn't have the same kind of cultural prestige as d flat does anyway so perry ribeiro's version doesn't really sound like bossa nova all that much he's singing with this wide vibrato along the lines of the crooners of the era with this rich and lush studio orchestra backing him but the arranger that he used for this version of the girl from ibenima wrote some really interesting chords on the bridge which act as this kind of missing link between the old american style and the new style the bossa nova party cinco we're going to check out perry ribeiro's version side to side with the getsculberto which seems to be the version that tom jobim settled on transposed to the same key both versions start on a g flat major 7. the melody tells us that we're in the key of d-flat so this g-flat major seven functions as a four-major seven chord from there in perry ribeiro's version we have an f sharp minor seven and harmonic g flat minor seven the four minor seven in the key of d-flat going to a b7 the flat 7 7. jazz musicians call this 4 minor 2 flat 7 7 the back door 2 5 progression because it wants to resolve in the back door to the one major 7 like this very nice gilberto on the other hand just goes directly from the g flat major seven to the b7 so simplifying the progression just a little bit [Music] perry ribeiro then just takes the exact same chord progression from before and transposes a minor third to the key of e like the melody does we now have an a major 7 the 4 major 7 and the key of e going to an a minor 7 the 4 minor 7 to a d7 the flat 7 7 the same progression that we had before gilberto replaces the a major 7 the 4 major with an f sharp minor seven the two minor twos and four chords both have subdominant functions within keys so they're substitutes for one another but by substituting chords you're breaking the nice symmetry of having the same chord progression on each line of the bridge you're making the chord progression more ambiguous and hard to figure out gulberto then doesn't end up playing the a minor seven that four minor seven instead he just goes directly to the d7 [Music] chord [Music] moving on to the third line ribeiro repeats the chords in the exact same order just up a half step b flat major seven the four major seven in the key of f b flat minor seven the four minor seven in the key of f and then e flat seven the flat seven seven gilberto elects to do the same trick of replacing the four major seven with the two minor seven what makes this tricky is that we've been changing keys without ever hitting the one chord when we were in d flat we never had any d flat chord when we were in e we never had any e chord this is what's confusing because the chord progression is giving us a different tonal logic than what the melody is this is what makes bossa nova so special i think it's ambiguity [Music] there we go that's the bridge i applaud you for making it this far thank you for sticking around everybody it's time to put the song in some much needed context contesto this kind of chord progression and melodic analysis might come as a bit of a surprise to my fellow jazz musicians because this is not the way that i was taught the bridge to the girl from iponema i think by looking at three versions of the bridge a hypothetical tin pan alley american style of harmonizing the bridge a missing link version of the harmony that was provided by perry ribeiro and finally the version that we got the ambiguous gel guberto harmonization we have a clearer picture we have harmony that was constructed and then deconstructed we have the american jazz and then we have the brazilian bossa nova the composer and conductor leonard bernstein gave a series of lectures at harvard university in 1973 that he called the unanswered question he used these lectures to explore a universal grammar for musical language it's debatable on whether or not he succeeded but one point that i think is relevant is his point on the importance of deletion in poetry and in music his example was shakespeare's phrase juliet is the sun juliet is the sun a famous classic example of this is that it's beautiful and it's also totally illogical because juliet is not in fact the sun juliet is a human organism the sun is a star how do they get to be equal you could construct a wordier and more logical sentence 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 their shared radiance logical but dumb even if you reduce that to something less wordy like juliet is radiant like the sun it might be beautiful but it's not quite as poetic as juliet is the sun things tend to become more beautiful when you remove what is not necessary for their beauty even if it's not logical just like the harmony for the girl from ipanema my thought is that the harmony for the girl from eponima could have been very different it could have been more logical but less beautiful but through the process of deletion and re-harmonization gilberto's chords become much more poetic this harmonic poetry is at the core of brazilian bossanova and it is the thing in my opinion that distinguishes it from american jazz harmony even though it comes from very similar roots [Music] [Music] foreign so in researching this video i found a really interesting historical document i found a recording of the very first time the girl from eponimo was ever performed live in public in late august of 1962 there was a show at the obon gourmet nightclub in copacabana rio de janeiro where tom jobim gel guberto and vinicius de marias all sang the girl from iponema for the very first time in front of a live audience and there's some fascinating things that we can learn from this recording the counter melody is there as well as jiao guberto's deconstructed chords on the bridge but there's also some really interesting stuff there that just never made it into any future recordings and i thought it'd 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 content id yes this recording is owned by universal music group but there is a place that you can hear it with my commentary and that is on 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 about commercial recordings more without having to worry about getting blocked and demonetized the way that music education should be nebula features many of youtube's favorite educational channels like upon atom thomas frank legal eagle knowing better 12 tone and many many more it's a great place to watch and discover really great content ad-free as well as support your favorite creators nebula is supported in part by curiosity stream the go-to source for the best documentaries on the internet with thousands of titles to choose from if you sign up to curiosity stream with either the link in the description or curiositystream.com adamnelly you'll get a subscription to nebula for free what's more is that for a limited time the price for an annual subscription to both curiosity stream and nebula is now just 14.99 instead of 19.99 a 25 discount by signing up the curiosity stream you'll not only be supporting this channel but the entire educational community over at nebula we're trying to build a platform and a community that's dedicated to engaging the world in a thoughtful and meaningful way like making over long documentaries on the girl from ipanema i hope you enjoyed this guys thank you so much for watching i hope you guys understand with my interest in the subject matter because you know there's a really deep history there and it's a great way of talking about you know brazilian music and bossa nova music and you know unless we constantly are thinking about the deeper history of the media in which we engage uh we'll end up with the real book version of music and the real book version of history and i i don't think that's a good idea

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 2,432,559

Rating: 4.9175873 out of 5

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: OFWCbGzxofU

Length: 33min 9sec (1989 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SuperGandalfBros]

Watched this yesterday. I love Adam Neely. Always has really interesting theory videos

[u/logatwork]

Brazilian here. This was very interesting indeed!

Thank you for sharing.

[u/Tagard_McStone]

Deep Rising had Benni in the elevator humming to this. Sweet movie.