Write a Bossa Nova Song Like Antônio Carlos Jobím

[00:00:00]Hi everybody. My name is Jeremy Siskin.

[00:00:02]I'm the author of the solo standards for piano books, the jazz piano fundamentals books. There's three of them. Playing solo jazz piano. There's only one, but one is more than enough. Um, and also kind of relevant to today's video. I'm the author of a a newish book called Fundamentals of Songwriting. Um, and so today what I want to teach you about is how to write a song in the style of Antonio Carlos Shobim, the great songwriter of the Boston Nova tradition.

[00:00:27]And here's a disclaimer. I never want to simplify a great artist's work into something, you know, super reductive.

[00:00:34]So, um, Joim has an incredibly wide and rich and brilliant uh, output. But there are some stereotypical things that we can do to um, to imitate Joim style. And so I want to focus on this tune, how insensitive.

[00:00:51]For uh us big music nerds, many of us might know that this tune is actually in imitation in response to um taking after a Shopen prelude. And really from what I've read and heard and learned, uh Shopen was kind of Joim's north star in terms of harmony. So even though this tune is the most obvious copy, it's actually very representative of Joim's harmonic landscape.

[00:01:18]And there's two main things that I want you to notice here that are are both very simple um to notice but very profound as we are looking to imitate.

[00:01:30]So the first one um okay well I should play you this tune first so you get it in your ear. It goes like this.

[00:02:18]Beautiful song. I love this song. Um, I just think it's it's gorgeous. All right. So, the two things that I want you to notice here are that the melody and the bass are both absolutely creeping down but at different uh at different speeds at different velocities we could say. What do I mean by that? So, if you look at the white notes, you know, it'll be that simple. In the melody, I'm going to highlight them all in blue.

[00:03:09]You basically have a long note every two measures. And you can see that right. It's just slowly slowly going down the scale. And this is definitely not only in how how insensitive if you look at cavado.

[00:03:48]Do you hear that? It's d it's just slowly creeping down that scale with an ornamented melody. And that's how I would characterize this melody, too. It's this slowm moving line, but it's ornamented mostly by step-wise motion, right? In fact, I don't see um a single leap of more than a third in these first 16 bars. And most of the melodic notes here, almost all of them are stepwise. Okay, very important. And that's very true in cavado, too.

[00:04:29]Here's your little leap.

[00:04:31]And then so that's so offensive. It's such a beautiful song. Um or another great example of this is his portrait in black and white also known as retra and blancoto.

[00:04:58]But the whole first The whole first section is just surrounding the note a just ornamenting it surrounding it done really really in a super interesting way but um relatively simple to describe.

[00:05:16]Okay. So, how insensitive is based on these these long notes slowly slowly creeping down slightly ornament. Now, harmonically, especially at the beginning, and and this this won't last the entire time, but at the beginning, our baseline is also creeping down. And this is very typical of a shopen base.

[00:05:36]Um, that we're moving down by half steps, right? This is the lament base quality.

[00:05:54]Sometimes this is played as E flat over B flat.

[00:06:03]So this descent in the bass, right? This is not the only time it happens. It happens here as well. We have this slowly descending base. Um this is also an important aspect of Jabim's compositional style right this also happens in Cavado there's other things that happen too absolutely we go through the circle of fifth sometimes we do some 251s we do a bunch of other stuff but this half step descent is so important now I did make a point of saying that these happen at different velocities or I want to say different ratios but that's not quite right um at different rates at the very least because it would be actually really boring if they just move totally in parallel. The tension actually in my view comes from the fact that they're not moving in parallel.

[00:06:59]But what's really interesting in fact about that is that melodically the first eight bars and the second eight bars are an exact sequence or at least really close.

[00:07:18]Right? These are these are an exact sequence within the key, but the harmonies are very different. Right? The first eight bars start with a minor chord. The second eight bars start with a major chord.

[00:07:32]The sec the first eight bars go to this really pregnant diminish chord. Second a bars go to a major chord. So listen to the difference versus so even though the melody is repeating.

[00:07:51]Oh no, I totally totally used the wrong view there. Now you can see that the first eight bars, second eight bars, even though the melodies are similar, they have different harmonies, right?

[00:08:00]Compare the harmonies in blue to the harmonies in green. Sorry about that.

[00:08:05]You didn't need to see my face that big.

[00:08:07]Um, okay. So, u there's a melodic sequence, but harmonically we're making a difference. So, let's sketch out a beam style tune here. Um, I don't know that we'll have time. That's the wrong button. This is this is my problem here.

[00:08:23]I don't know that we'll have time to to you know write an entire tune here. But let's at least try to start and let's start this in major instead of minor so that we start separating from um from how insensitive and let's start uh we'll make it in B flat and first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to sketch out the two things that we talked about. I'm going to sketch out a melody uh but just kind of the white notes of the melody and then I'm going to make the chords move at a different time. So here I started with a six. I'm just kind of trying to do something a little different than how insensitive. Um and let's have the chords move a little faster.

[00:09:14]So, uh, and what I'm trying to do, you know, as I'm choosing what kind of chord quality I am, um, you know, just comparing the melody note to the root.

[00:09:35]So, a G against an A root, probably we need a dominant chord.

[00:09:46]And let's go ahead. I'm going to have the melody move here.

[00:09:55]And then we'll keep that G flat.

[00:10:06]This be a G flatter. Probably need to change an F sharp against G major. So let's see. We have and let's do G minor major 7 and then we'll change to an E.

[00:10:33]So, this is what we could describe as an outline or a skeleton of a tune, right?

[00:10:37]This is not yet a song. Um, but this is going to be our basis for a song.

[00:10:57]So now let's try to fill it in a little bit. And we'll fill it kind of similar to to Joim using really small intervals.

[00:11:12]So I'm thinking of this maybe more a little bit more samba than um than bosanova. A little more joyful.

[00:11:21]D.

[00:11:25]So, I'm going to basically just surrounding this G D.

[00:12:07]I don't know if this is interesting to watch. So, let's see. What do we have?

[00:12:23]I'm going to do a very similar kind of figuration. It's funny how this is similar to like the way that Bach would write play preludes. Like he would come up with the chords and he would just have some kind of a pattern, a figuration that he would apply.

[00:12:44]And I try to get here um like to a not totally uh uh not totally random chord within the key cuz I went some really weird places from B flat major but we ended up at least on a G like a 252F.

[00:13:04]So it's not totally random, right?

[00:13:21]Okay. So, this is pretty repetitive. So, I'm going to need to do something somewhat different.

[00:13:38]So, I'm gonna slow down the harmonic rhythm a little bit to kind of allow myself some time and then I'll make a sequence out of this. So, Nope, I'm not doing the right thing. Um, so maybe I'll I'll go up to G minor and I'm trying to get here back to B flat.

[00:14:31]I don't have to. Beam doesn't have that kind of form necessarily all the time, but it's kind of nice. So, okay. So, I'm still doing that this this sense of an outline with slow moving harmony, but now I did a little skip between the first line and the second line. Okay. So now I want to do more of a two bar phrase to contrast with all the really short phrases in the first uh in the first two lines. So just to recap, we've got How about something like that? So, I'm just going to kind of surround it.

[00:15:32]One, two, three. Uh uh. And notice how many offbeats here because it's Brazilian.

[00:15:51]One, two, three.

[00:15:54]Right. So, almost everything I'm adding is going to be on the offbeat.

[00:16:02]So, now I want to do something similar.

[00:16:04]I'm going to make a sequence.

[00:16:43]Okay. I don't know if this is the most brilliant thing that's ever been written. One thing that I want to do is avoid that G before I get there. So it doesn't sound like I've given it away already.

[00:17:05]And I'll do one, two, three up.

[00:17:09]Oh, I'll make that a G flat. It's really the flat nine that's more appropriate in this key. So, let's see. How does this sound? The second the second eight bar phrase.

[00:17:36]Maybe we need a little diminish chord to help us really feel like we're moving towards C minor. And it sounds like we need a pickup into the G.

[00:17:57]One, two, three.

[00:18:13]And then against my better judgment with regards to YouTube videos, I think I'm going to try to finish this song. Um, so what we're going to do is we're going to repeat here. We're going to call this part the first ending and then we'll repeat back to the beginning. So let's listen to what we got so far and then we'll write the second ending. So That's fine.

[00:18:53]D.

[00:19:10]So, let's let's keep going down for the second ending. So, we'll go down to a D sharp and we'll have a B chord.

[00:19:31]D and then that'll become F F dominant.

[00:19:52]Ah, let's make it F minor.

[00:19:56]And then let's sequence that.

[00:19:59]So that's going to be a 25. I'm trying to bring it back into the key from the B major. Right? B major is pretty far from B flat major, but uh D sharp doesn't have to be. That's actually E flat, which is in the key.

[00:20:18]So, I'm going to go to E flat. Now, we're going to make a little sequence out of that.

[00:20:36]And now I'm thinking about the end game because I want to get back to the tonic chord here.

[00:20:41]So we'll do a little 25 to six.

[00:20:47]So the end game is going to be some people um look at this progression and they say, "Oh, that doesn't make any sense. C7 leading to C minor." This is a really common progression in jazz. The five of five going to the five. And when people ask why it works, my response is that two chords are generally just ornamenting dominant chords. So the dominant chords here, C, C, F to B flat, totally makes sense. And the two chords, this G minor and the C minor are just ornamenting that uh so So, I'll go back to the original motif here.

[00:21:50]It's such a nice thing to do at the end of a song.

[00:22:00]I don't know if that's super typical of Joim. That's maybe more Tinpan Alley kind of uh musical theater, great American song book uh Gershwin and Cole Porter and Irving Berlin sort of writing. But hey, good writing is good writing. All right, so I've just now just got to fill in I'm going to keep it really nice and simple. D one and two.

[00:22:37]Again, notice all offbeats.

[00:22:41]Okay, this is probably not a good enough melody. Certainly not good enough to get it into a Jim level category, but hopefully you'll get the hopefully it'll be enough to give you the idea. So, let's see. Now, the second ending sounds like this.

[00:23:13]All right, let's see if I can play this whole tune. It might be a mess, but it might be great.

[00:23:27]Data demon.

[00:23:59]Hey, not a bad tune. Um, thank you for watching. I hope that you enjoyed this.

[00:24:08]If you watched all the way to the end, thank you. It was a long video. Comment with what the name of the tune should be. Try to, you know, maybe put in some reference to Shobim or Brazil in here.

[00:24:19]And I hope that that helped you understand a little bit of Jabim's music and gave you kind of an interesting process to write your own song or composition um in somewhat of a similar style. Thanks for watching everybody.