A son of the Bay of Rio, of the illuminations of Brazilian modernity revealed at the end of the 1950s and beyond, Sergio Mendes ended up deserting, trapped in the United States, like many of his colleagues, after the memorable concert given in 1962 at Carnegie Hall in New York to promote bossa nova.
The cool music of Rio later transmuted into a Pan-American genre under the leadership of Stan Getz and Frank Sinatra. Sergio Mendes developed a very American sound, very enlightened, with an ethereal freshness that was unlike any other.
Brazil, annoyed, turned its back on him, before giving his music the definitive and disdainful label of “Americanized pop”. He settled in California. Brazil got rid of him, France loved him and everyone was happy. “In the United States I found the ideal market, the technology, the complement of romantic inspiration that is natural to us”declared to Worldduring the launch of her album Brazilin 1992.
Of Brazil ’66, Released in 1966, with which the Brazilian, born on February 11, 1941 in Niteroi, had become one of the world leaders in record sales, he had advanced his pawns by marrying bossa-nova with American pop, funk and jazz fusion. Sergio Mendes died on Thursday, September 5, after a long Covid. He was 83 years old.
American defector
Sergio Mendes had settled in Los Angeles, and was one of the linchpins of the back and forth between the jazz of the crooners of the late fifties (Frank Sinatra, with whom he toured, Bing Crosby, etc.) and the music of the South. Cono. The son of a doctor, a distinguished pianist since the age of 7, he recorded in 1961. modern dancecontaining a re-reading of Ho-ba-la-laby João Gilberto. He later founded the Sexteto Bossa Rio with saxophonist Paulo Moura (1932-2010).
At 19, he played with Cannonball Adderley, a special envoy to Rio from the US State Department, in charge of international relations and concerned about the US implantation in Brazil, using cultural soft power. The saxophonist takes him to the studio to record Bossa Nova by Cannonball (Concordia, 1962). The United States then acted as a magnet for the creators of bossa nova: Tom Jobim, João Gilberto and his wife Astrud, Marcos Valle and Eumir Deodato made long stays there.
Passing through Paris in 2015 with his wife, singer Gracinha Leporace, married for five decades, Sergio Mendes, in a floral shirt and in good humour, recalled his bossa years and his status as an American defector. “A conservatory student, I come from Niteroi. [la ville qui fait face à Rio] By boat there was not yet a bridge across the bay. We played at the Bottles Bar in Copacabana, at the Beco das Garrafas, with Tom Jobim, Jorge Ben, Nara Leão. I was surprised by a concert by Dave Brubeck. Art Tatum, Horace Silver were our teachers without knowing it. We didn’t earn anything, but it was a pleasure to play such new music! »
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