The Best Bossa Nova Albums of the '60s

Creed Taylor booked A&R Studios in March 1963 with Phil Ramone engineering, and the result became the first jazz LP to win the Album of the Year Grammy. The Girl From Ipanema still turns on its handoff — João murmuring the Portuguese verse, Astrud answering in unschooled English. Spotify's 1964-dated edition is otherwise clean but appends the two 45 edits as bonus tracks.

Odeon released it in 1959 with Jobim directing the sessions, and the whole genre unpacks from João Gilberto's guitar — the stuttering violão gago beat under Chega de Saudade, his voice mixed as close as breath. Bim Bom lasts under two minutes and wastes none of them. No original master streams: the linked edition is a 2022 Ultimate Mix restoration, the best copy Spotify has.

Recorded in one February 1962 session at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., because Charlie Byrd liked the room, and it went to number one on Billboard's pop album chart. Desafinado won Getz a Grammy and keeps Byrd's nylon strings in charge of the time. The streaming edition appends a second take of Desafinado as an eighth track.

Claus Ogerman's strings and Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs room give this 1967 set its finish, with Creed Taylor producing and Ron Carter on bass. Wave itself is the tell: piano states the melody, a trombone shadows it, and nothing rises above conversation level — which is the whole argument of the record. The closest thing bossa has to a second founding.

Verve brought Jobim to New York in 1963 for his first album under his own name, Creed Taylor producing and Claus Ogerman arranging, nearly all of it instrumental. It holds his own first recording of The Girl From Ipanema, a year before the hit version. Corcovado is the keeper — single-note piano over muted strings, the melody doing all the work.

Candomblé ritual, not the beach, is the subject: Baden Powell and Vinícius de Moraes cut these eight afro-sambas for the Forma label in 1966 with Quarteto em Cy on vocals. Canto de Ossanha opens on a minor-key guitar vamp Powell brought back from Bahia, half incantation. Border case — bossa harmony meeting ritual drumming. Spotify renders the title Os Afro - Sambas De Baden E Vinícius.

The whole movement dates from two tracks here: João Gilberto's guitar on Outra Vez and Chega de Saudade, the first recordings of the bossa beat, set behind Elizeth Cardoso's formal samba-canção voice on an all-Jobim-and-Vinícius program for the tiny Festa label in 1958. A 1958 record on a '60s list on purpose — the founding document rides with the movement it started.

Nearly every song is Jobim's, and he sits in on guitar — Verve built her 1965 solo debut around the composer, whose feature credit on Água de Beber is right there on the tracklist. Her flat, vibrato-free delivery was mocked by Brazilian critics and copied by half the singers who came after. The record does more in twenty-eight minutes than most manage in fifty.

Two duets with Carlos Lyra close her 1964 debut, but the tell is the material: Zé Keti's Diz Que Fui Por Aí and Baden Powell's Berimbau, morro samba sung in the small, dry voice of bossa's Zona Sul muse. Within a year she had taken the same instincts into open protest song, so this LP is the hinge between beach and barricade. Spotify titles it Nara (1964).

A&M's founding trumpeter put his own name on the sleeve when he signed Mendes in 1966, and Lani Hall's lead vocal on Mas Que Nada — Jorge Ben's song, sung in Portuguese — carried Brazilian pop onto American AM radio. Border case flagged: this is bossa turned into supper-club pop, pianos doubled, drums up front, and it belongs here for what it exported.

Lalo Schifrin and Oscar Castro-Neves are credited across this 1963 Verve set, but the center is Bonfá's guitar doing three jobs at once — bass, chords, melody. Manhã de Carnaval, his own theme from Black Orpheus, gets a slower, drier re-recording here than the film version. Spotify's tracklist carries the US release's bilingual titles, so every song shows an English twin.

Cut for Verve during Valle's American stay, with his wife Anamaria sharing the vocals, this is the crossover record done right — his own hits re-sung in English over Rio rhythm playing. Crickets Sing for Anamaria, the English-language Os Grilos, skips along on double-time percussion and the pair's unison singing. Twenty-seven minutes, eleven songs, zero fat.

Half the scene learned guitar at the academy Menescal ran with Carlos Lyra before he made this instrumental set in 1963, and it plays like a syllabus: Desafinado, Garota de Ipanema, and his own Nós e o Mar, the guitar carrying every theme over a small group. No vocals anywhere — the argument is that the songbook stands without words.