A child of the bay of Rio, of the illuminations of Brazilian modernity revealed at the end of the 1950s and following, Sergio Mendes had ended up deserting, swallowed up by the United States, like many of his colleagues, after the memorable concert given in 1962 at Carnegie Hall, in New York, in order to promote bossa-nova.
Rio’s “cool” music was then transmuted into a pan-American genre, under the leadership of Stan Getz and Frank Sinatra. Sergio Mendes developed a very North American sound, very enlightened, with an airy freshness, which was equal to no other.
Brazil, vexed, turned its back on him, before attaching to his music the definitive, and disdainful, label of “Americanized pop.” He settled in California. Brazil did without him, France loved him, and everyone was happy. “In the United States I had found the ideal market, the technology, the complement to the romantic inspiration that is natural to us.”he declared to the Mondewhen his album was released Brazilianin 1992.
From 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, from 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 1950s (Frank Sinatra, with whom he went on tour, Bing Crosby, etc.) and the music of the Southern Cone. The son of a doctor, a distinguished pianist from the age of 7, he recorded in 1961 Modern dancewhich contains a rereading of Ho-ba-la-laby João Gilberto. He then founded the Bossa Rio Sextet with the saxophonist Paulo Moura (1932-2010).
At 19, he played with Cannonball Adderley, special envoy to Rio of the American State Department, in charge of international relations and concerned with the establishment of the United States in Brazil, with the help of cultural soft power. The saxophonist dragged him into the studio to record Cannonball’s Bossa Nova (Concord, 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, Eumir Deodato would spend long periods there.
Passing through Paris in 2015 with his wife, the singer Gracinha Leporace, married five decades ago, Sergio Mendes, wearing a floral shirt and in good spirits, looked back for us on his bossa years and his status as an American defector. “A student at the conservatory, I came from Niteroi [la ville qui fait face à Rio] by boat, there was no bridge across the bay yet. We played at the Bottles Bar in Copacabana, at Beco das Garrafas, with Tom Jobim, Jorge Ben, Nara Leão. I had been amazed by a Dave Brubeck concert. Art Tatum, Horace Silver were our teachers without knowing it. We didn’t earn anything, but there was such pleasure in playing such new music!
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