I nev­er real­ly liked the­o­ry class­es very much. To be hon­est, I was nev­er that good at them. I’ve def­i­nite­ly learned more from using my ears rather than my brain.  

- Musi­cian Jacob Col­lier

I too, find music the­o­ry con­found­ing, but unlike musi­cal poly­math Col­lier, I don’t have much of an ear to fall back on.

Which is pos­si­bly why I learned so much from his appear­ance on Vox’s Ear­worm, above. He lent me his ears.

Ten min­utes in, I think I maybe, sort-of under­stand what chro­mati­cism is.

Rather than pull exam­ples from a num­ber of sources, Col­lier con­cen­trates on his “musi­cal crush” Ste­vie Won­der’s chart top­ping 1976 trib­ute to jazz leg­end Duke Elling­ton, “Sir Duke.” As Col­lier told Time Out Israel’s Jen­nifer Green­berg:

I believe that when you lis­ten to music, it gives you this periph­ery of great stuff in your ears and then when you sit down to make music of your own, those are your teach­ers, those are your guid­ing forces. It’s bet­ter to have Ste­vie Won­der as a ref­er­ence point than say “this text­book that I read in class” …Ste­vie is my num­ber one. As a kid, he rep­re­sent­ed every­thing that I real­ly loved about music: he had all the chops, he had all the chords, he had all the funky stuff, all the groove, but then had that voice and behind the voice, he had this soul and feel­ings, and he also had this sense of humor mixed with this human­i­ty.

Col­lier has the innate know-how to break down those grooves, from the big band feel of the open­ing drums to the Motown sound back­beat of the verse.

Aid­ed by series pro­duc­er Estelle Caswell and some graph­ics that visu­al­ize such fun­da­men­tal­ly aur­al con­cepts as har­mo­ny and the pen­ta­ton­ic scale, Col­lier artic­u­lates in pure­ly musi­cal terms what makes this endur­ing hit so catchy.

Cer­tain­ly, the exu­ber­ant shout cho­rus doesn’t hurt.

Col­lier has delved into Wonder’s cat­a­logue before, leap­ing on the oppor­tu­ni­ty to har­mo­nize with him­self.

That’s him above, at age 17, per­form­ing an a cap­pel­la “Isn’t She Love­ly,” his melod­i­ca stand­ing in for Won­der’s icon­ic har­mon­i­ca solo.

And Wonder’s “Don’t You Wor­ry ‘Bout A Thing,” below, pre­sent­ed his great­est chal­lenge as an arranger, due to such quirks as “unex­pect­ed sus­pen­sion chords” and the dia­ton­ic descend­ing melody. Hold on to your hats at the 2:26 mark when the screen splits into over a dozen sec­tions, in an attempt to con­tain all the tal­ent on dis­play.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Con­cept of Musi­cal Har­mo­ny Explained in Five Lev­els of Dif­fi­cul­ty, Start­ing with a Child & End­ing with Her­bie Han­cock

See Ste­vie Won­der Play “Super­sti­tion” and Ban­ter with Grover on Sesame Street in 1973

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Visu­al­iza­tion of the Bass Line for the Motown Clas­sic, “Ain’t No Moun­tain High Enough”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Her hus­band was grat­i­fied to see Jacob Col­lier shares his affin­i­ty for Crocs. No shame. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

If you first heard the work of great Brazil­ian gui­tarist and singer João Gilber­to in a lit­tle tune called “The Girl From Ipane­ma,” you’re in the com­pa­ny of mil­lions, whose intro­duc­tion to Gilber­to and the sounds of bossa nova jazz came from that song, record­ed with sax­o­phon­ist Stan Getz. When the L.A. Times’ Ran­dall Roberts com­pares their col­lab­o­ra­tive album Getz/Gilberto to the arrival of the Bea­t­les in the U.S., this may sound like an exag­ger­a­tion. But bossa nova, like rock and roll, was already huge­ly pop­u­lar, and sound of this record was a qui­et rev­o­lu­tion.

Gilber­to, who died this past Sat­ur­day at age 88, was “one of the most influ­en­tial musi­cians of the 20th cen­tu­ry.” He and “his peer and col­lab­o­ra­tor Anto­nio Car­los Jobim helped cre­ate and pop­u­lar­ize bossa nova, a toned-down and roman­ti­cized take on Brazil­ian sam­ba music.” Jobim may have writ­ten “The Girl From Ipane­ma,” but Gilber­to first turned Amer­i­cans on to its charms, and to what Allmusic’s John Dougan calls “the sig­na­ture pop music of Brazil.”

Called O Mito, “the leg­end,” in his home coun­try, Gilberto’s influ­ence is incal­cu­la­ble and has “res­onat­ed in the work of artists includ­ing Cae­tano Veloso, Sade, Gal Cos­ta, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Stere­o­lab, Seu Jorge  and pret­ty much every Brazil­ian song­writer since 1960,” writes Roberts. His coun­try­man Veloso has said, “I owe João Gilber­to every­thing I am today. Even if I were some­thing else and not a musi­cian, I would say that I owe him every­thing.”

Many peo­ple have said sim­i­lar things over the years about John Lennon or George Har­ri­son, but an unas­sum­ing acoustic croon­er singing in Por­tuguese? Could he real­ly have that kind of cul­tur­al sway world­wide? It may be hard to see it now, but “bossa nova inte­grat­ed itself into the glob­al con­ver­sa­tion in much the same way rock ‘n’ roll did.” Yet instead of rebelling, it dressed up; rather than “upping the tem­po, atti­tude and ener­gy,” it “soothed and seduced.”

Bossa nova pro­vid­ed a coun­ter­point to the raw ener­gy of Amer­i­can and British rock, but not in the com­fort­ing, nos­tal­gic way of soft, soporif­ic music like that of Lawrence Welk. Rather—partly through its influ­ence on jazz musi­cians like Getz, Dizzy Gille­spie, and Char­lie Byrd—bossa nova became its own kind of hip pop­u­lar idiom, cool instead of hot, but still sexy and new. Elvis even tried to cash in on the music’s grow­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty in 1963 with his “rol­lick­ing ‘Bossa Nova Baby’” from the movie Fun in Aca­pul­co.

The shoes didn’t quite fit. Bossa nova was sub­dued and sub­tle, a sound cre­at­ed for small spaces and small moves. It’s said that Gilberto’s qui­et style of play­ing “devel­oped in 1955 when he sequestered him­self inside of a bath­room at his sister’s house so as not to dis­turb her fam­i­ly,” writes Felix Con­tr­eras at NPR, “and to take advan­tage of the acoustics pro­vid­ed by the bath­room tiles.” This inti­mate ori­gin sto­ry aside, his was also a style that demar­cat­ed class lines in pop music.

Pop­u­lar among a slight­ly old­er set of lis­ten­ers, in Brazil bossa nova first attract­ed “a new mon­eyed class eager to move away from the more tra­di­tion­al sam­ba sound of explo­sive drums and group singing.” In its influ­ence on Amer­i­can jazz, bossa nova also telegraphed lux­u­ry, with its deeply relaxed atmos­phere and lush, unhur­ried tex­tures. It is the sound of sea­side resort hotels and upscale night­clubs, of yacht par­ties, art gal­leries, and pent­house apart­ments. “The Girl from Ipane­ma” sounds like the singing six­ties worlds of James Bond and Hugh Hefn­er, not Haight Ash­bury.

Nonethe­less, the song is an absolute clas­sic for good rea­son, with Gilberto’s then-wife Astrud “on a sul­try vocal” in Eng­lish, repeat­ing his under­stat­ed Por­tuguese, and a “now-icon­ic tenor sax solo” by Getz. “It was a world­wide hit and won the 1965 Gram­my for record of the year. Getz/Gilberto won album of the year and would go on to become one of the high­est-sell­ing jazz albums of all time.” For a time, bossa nova was every­where, then it gave way to the hard­er-edged Trop­i­calia move­ment of younger musi­cians like Veloso and Gilber­to Gil, and its vocab­u­lary became absorbed into so many dif­fer­ent kinds of music that we are hard­ly aware of its pres­ence any­more.

If “The Girl from Ipane­ma” was the first, and maybe, the last, you heard of João Gilber­to, you owe it to your­self to learn more of his work. And, if you’re already a life­long fan, you’ll appre­ci­ate all the more these live per­for­mances from Gilberto’s career. At the top, see him per­form “The Girl From Ipane­ma” with the song’s com­pos­er and his old col­lab­o­ra­tor Jobim; fur­ther up, Gilber­to plays “Desa­fi­na­do” and “Car­in­hoso” live in con­cert,” and, just above, see him play “Cor­co­v­a­do.”

Gilber­to was cut out of his biggest glob­al hit for the 1964 TV per­for­mance above. Pro­duc­ers opt­ed to make Astrud the face and voice of “The Girl from Ipane­ma.” But the mil­lions who bought the record heard his mes­mer­iz­ing vocal and gui­tar work, and then kept hear­ing their influ­ence on records released for decades after­ward around the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Girl from Ipane­ma” Turns 50; Hear Its Bossa Nova Sound Cov­ered by Sina­tra, Krall, Methe­ny & Oth­ers

The Strange His­to­ry of Smooth Jazz: The Music We All Know and Love … to Hate

The Exis­ten­tial Adven­tures of Icon­o­clas­tic Brazil­ian Musi­cian Tim Maia: A Short Ani­mat­ed Film

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness