The complex, melodic lilt of the 1950's invention known as bossa nova is the trademark sound of the classically trained Brazilian songwriter/composer Antonio Carlos Jobim and his compatriot, the singer, songwriter and guitarist Joao Gilberto. Both these pioneering musicians have at various times been burdened with the rather vague label 'Father of Bossa Nova'.
It was Jobim who took the percussive syncopated rhythms of the Portuguese/African hybrid known as samba, fusing them with contemporary jazz to create a unique laid-back sound which is said to 'sway' rather than 'swing'. The bossa nova sound is exemplifed by Jobim's most famous song Garota De Ipanema, probably better known worldwide as The Girl From Ipanema, a song first popularised in 1964 by Joao's then wife Astrud Gilberto to the English lyrics of Norman Gimbel.
Joao Gilberto's genius was in managing to simplify the complex rhythms of samba so that it could be played on a solo guitar. He was thus the first artist to record Jobim's songs in the late 1950's, thereby effectively launching the bossa nova worldwide, aided enormously by his collaborations with US saxophonist Stan Getz, whose cool jazz renderings spread the phenomenon throughout his homeland.

Although the bossa nova craze ran out of steam in the late 1960's it became one of the strands of what came to be known as 'tropicalia', the other strands being rock & roll and folk music. The tropicalia movement, which was as much about art, theatre and literature as it was about music, was spearheaded by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, the latter often being referred to as the 'Bob Dylan of Brazil' due to the hard-hitting left wing politics evident in his songwriting. Tropicalia, now included within the wider category of Musica Popular Brasiliera, was essentially an attempt to widen the accepted values of Brazilian culture by cannibalising disparate influences and fusing them with the Brazilian tradition in an attempt to create something unique. As such it was often necessarily highly political in its subject matter, its songs placing lyrical content above melody, as shown in Chico Buarque's 1965 song Pedro Pedreiro and Veloso's Supercabana.

With the arrest and subsequent exile of Veloso and Gil in 1968 the tropicalia movement was effectively silenced, though it is known to have had an influence on international artists such as Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, Nelly Furtado Devendra Banhart, Beck and many others, and is present in the music of Clara Nunes, whose songs are very much a part of Brazilian culture today

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