Antônio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim (25 January 1927 – 8 December 1994), also known as Tom Jobim (Portuguese pronunciation: [tõ ʒoˈbĩ] ), was a Brazilian composer, pianist, guitarist, songwriter, arranger and singer. Jobim is considered a great exponent of Brazilian music and one of the fathers of bossa nova for having merged samba with cool jazz in the 1960s as a pioneer of the genre. He is also regarded as one of the most celebrated songwriters of the 20th century, and his compositions have been played and recorded by many singers and instrumentalists internationally since the early 1960s.
Jobim is best known for his composition "Garota de Ipanema (The Girl from Ipanema)", which has been recorded over 240 times by other artists, and is believed to be one of the most recorded popular songs in history. Along with "Garota de Ipanema", many of Jobim's compositions are included in jazz and pop standard repertoires. Several of these compositions are featured on the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto, which won the Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Instrumental Album – Individual or Group, Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, and was the first jazz record to win Album of the Year. The recording of "Garota de Ipanema" that features on this album also won Record of the Year when released as a single. His 1967 album with Frank Sinatra, Francis Albert Sinatra & Antônio Carlos Jobim, was nominated for Album of the Year in 1968 and album Antônio Brasileiro was awarded the 1995 Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album.
Antônio Carlos Jobim was born at 23:15 BRT on 25 January 1927 in the middle-class district of Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro. His father, Jorge de Oliveira Jobim (São Gabriel, Rio Grande do Sul; 1889–1935), was a writer, diplomat, professor and journalist. He came from a prominent family, being the great-nephew of José Martins da Cruz Jobim, senator, privy councillor and physician of Emperor Dom Pedro II. While studying medicine in Europe, José Martins added Jobim to his last name, paying homage to the village where his family came from in Portugal, the parish of Santa Cruz de Jovim, Porto. Antônio's mother, Nilza Brasileiro de Almeida (c. 1910–1989), was of partly indigenous descent from northeastern Brazil. Brasileiro de Almeida was only 16 years old when she gave birth to Antônio Carlos Jobim at their home in Tijuca on Rua Conde de Bonfim.
When Antônio was still an infant, his parents separated and his mother moved with her children (Antônio Carlos and his sister Helena Isaura, born 23 February 1931) to Ipanema, the beachside neighborhood the composer would later celebrate in his songs. In 1935, when the elder Jobim died, Nilza married Celso da Frota Pessoa (died 2 February 1979), who would encourage his stepson's career; he gave Jobim his first piano. Jobim credits his stepfather with encouraging him to pursue music. In an interview with Roberto d'Ávila in 1981, he said, "I hated the piano, I thought it was a girly thing, I liked to play soccer...I had a great stepfather who really helped me get involved with music and convinced me that the piano was not a girly thing." As a young man of limited means, Jobim earned his living by playing in nightclubs and bars and later as an arranger for a recording label before starting to achieve success as a composer.
Later on in the interview with Roberto d'Ávila, Jobim talks about his feelings toward his upbringing. He notes a conversation he had with Erico Verissimo, a friend of his father, in which Verissimo said that Tom Jobim should be sombre due to the absence of his father from a young age. Jobim told d'Ávila: "I was left without a father, clinging to my mother's skirts…some [men] have 'excessive' fathers, the excessive presence of their fathers is a problem, but the absence of a father is also a problem." Jobim continued with d'Ávila, sharing that it takes something of great influence to bring someone to dedicate their life to music. He said that "people who play the piano well are all handicapped". He mentions the health struggles of both Sérgio Mendes, who had osteomyelitis, and Luiz Eça, who had polio. "It takes something really strong to make you leave reality behind and begin to write songs," Jobim shared. With d'Ávila he alludes to his sadness as a young man as being the driving force that motivated him to further his pursuit in music, that he needed to be sad in order to play the piano and write. He concludes on the topic with d'Ávila that, at that point in his life (the interview having taken place in 1981) that he no longer needed to be sad to create music, that he was no longer sad as he was at the beginning of his career.
Jobim's musical roots were planted firmly in the work of Pixinguinha, the legendary musician and composer who began modern Brazilian music in the 1930s. Among his teachers were Lúcia Branco and, from 1941 on, Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, a German composer who lived in Brazil and introduced atonal and twelve-tone composition in the country. Jobim's mother established a school where Jobim would begin taking lessons on the piano; this is when he would meet Koellreutter. Jobim was also influenced by the French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and by the Brazilian composers Ary Barroso who has been described as Jobim's "most important musical influence". Among many themes, his lyrics talked about love, self-discovery, betrayal, joy and especially about the birds and natural wonders of Brazil, like the "Mata Atlântica" forest, characters of Brazilian folklore and his home city of Rio de Janeiro. In a segment with the NBC Today show in 1986, hosted by Jane Pauley, Jobim spoke about his music's origins of inspiration, saying "My music comes from this environment here, you know, the rain, the sun, the trees, the birds, the fish."
In the 1940s Jobim started to play piano in bars and nightclubs of Rio de Janeiro, and in the first years of the 1950s he worked as an arranger in the Continental Studio, where in April 1953 he had his first composition recorded, when the Brazilian singer Mauricy Moura recorded Jobim's composition "Incerteza", with lyrics by Newton Mendonça.
Jobim became prominent in Brazil when he teamed up with poet and diplomat Vinicius de Moraes to write the music for the play Orfeu da Conceição (1956). The most popular song from the show was "Se Todos Fossem Iguais A Você" ("If Everyone Were Like You"). Later, when the play was adapted into a film, producer Sacha Gordine did not want to use any of the existing music from the play. Gordine asked de Moraes and Jobim for a new score for the film Orfeu Negro, or Black Orpheus (1959). Moraes was at the time away in Montevideo, Uruguay, working for the Itamaraty (the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and so he and Jobim were only able to write three songs, primarily over the telephone ("A felicidade", "Frevo" and "O nosso amor"). This collaboration proved successful, and de Moraes went on to pen the lyrics to some of Jobim's most popular songs.
In 1958 the Brazilian singer and guitarist João Gilberto recorded his first album with two of Jobim's most famous songs, "Desafinado" and "Chega de Saudade". This album inaugurated the Bossa Nova movement in Brazil. The sophisticated harmonies of his songs caught the attention of jazz musicians in the United States, principally after his first performance at Carnegie Hall, in 1962.
A key event in making Jobim's music known in the English-speaking world was his collaboration with the American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz, the Brazilian singer João Gilberto, and Gilberto's wife at the time, Astrud Gilberto, which resulted in two albums, Getz/Gilberto (1964) and Getz/Gilberto Vol. 2 (1966). The release of Getz/Gilberto created a bossa nova craze in the United States and subsequently internationally. Getz had previously recorded Jazz Samba with Charlie Byrd (1962), and Jazz Samba Encore! with Luiz Bonfá (1964). Jobim wrote many of the songs on Getz/Gilberto, which became one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time, and turned Astrud Gilberto, who sang on "Garota de Ipanema" ("The Girl from Ipanema") and "Corcovado" ("Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars"), into an international sensation. At the Grammy Awards of 1965 Getz/Gilberto won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group and the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. "The Girl from Ipanema" won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year. Among his later hits is "Águas de Março" ("Waters of March", 1972), for which he wrote both the Portuguese and English lyrics, and which was then translated into French by Georges Moustaki (as "Les Eaux de Mars", 1973).