The soundtrack of director Fina Torres new romantic comedy Woman on Top echoes with the sounds of Brazilian popular music of the last 50 years, particularly bossa nova. From samba to bossa nova, Torres intensively researched Brazilian music in preparing the film, which features classic tracks by Xavier Cugat, Baden Powell, Luiz Bonfa, and others, plus onscreen performances of six new songs, dubbed by the acclaimed Brazilian singer/guitarist Paulinho Moska. Several classic bossa nova songs are included on the soundtrack, including two ("Sonho Meu and "Falsa Baiana") that have been remixed by the hot new group Bossa Cucanova. Bossa nova is a form of Brazilian popular music that emerged in the late 1950s, taking its shape from the classic samba and its personality from the tantalizing personal styles of singer/guitarist/songwriters Antonio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto. In the 1960s, bossa nova became an international sensation, making stars of Jobim, Gilberto and Gilberto's then-wife Astrud. Largely from Jobim's output, bossa nova songs became worldwide hits - "The Girl from Ipanema," "Meditation," "Corcovado," "The Waters of March" and many more. The term "bossa nova" comes from the slang of Rio de Janeiro, where "bossa" means, roughly, cleverness, or special ability. The words leaped out of the lyric to Jobim's song 1959 "Desafinado," which virtually defines bossa nova style - an intimate expression, seductive but deceptively and unusually complex in melody, harmony and rhythm. Unlike the samba, it was not meant merely to accompany a singer or provide dance music. It brought a striking new subtlety and sense of "cool" to Brazilian popular music, with its lack of extremes in color, texture or dynamics, and its apparent echoes of a style of folk singing popular in northern Brazilian. Though Jobim and his colleagues were memorable melodists, melody itself seems inseparable from rhythm and harmony in bossa nova, and the bossa nova singer ideally delivers the song in a relaxed, almost conversational manner. Jobim and Gilberto realized this in their first important recording together in 1959, Chega de saudade. When bossa nova swept the world in the 1960s, it was coarsened and commercialized by the American pop scene - the Eydie Gorme novelty hit "Blame It On the Bossa Nova" suggested that bossa nova was a dance, which it was never intended to be. Bossa nova eventually regained its quiet elegance when the pop craze ran its course, and the music found a permanent home in the jazz world. Both Jobim and Gilberto had drawn inspiration from American jazz artists, and guitarist Charlie Byrd encountered the sound when he made a State Department-sponsored tour of South America in 1961. Though Jobim died in 1994, bossa nova has enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s. Jobim and Gilberto continue to be revered as its founding fathers, but a new generation of interpreters - including Gilberto's daughter Bebel - is bringing a new energy and new influences to music that has been become inseparable from Brazilian culture.
