I took guitar lessons from a flatulent local teen who would go on to the Berklee School of Music in Boston.

It was a race against time I had to progress from rank novice to sultry-voiced master before bossa nova was obliterated by the British Invasion in 1964. The bossa nova craze lasted only six years, but oh what a half-a-dozen it wozen! There were the quiet nights and quiet stars and the quiet chords from my guitar, a rental until I proved to my dad that I was firmly committed to my art and would not lose interest in it, the way I had with the guppies and the rock collection. “It is time that you took the skills I have conveyed to you,” my sister said, “and go ask Margaret Pfeiffer to dance. One look at the picture of the unfortunate heir to the Spanish crown in her ninth grade biology book was enough to warn us off. “You two keep that up,” she said to us sternly when she found us practicing in the front parlor, “you’re going to get underslung jaws like Charles II.”Ĭharles II, or Margaret Pfeiffer? You make the call! I know, this smacks of incest, but we knew “when to say when” when it came to this most ancient and honorable of taboos, having been cautioned by our older sister of the “Hapsburg” lip–the product of inbreeding amoung the royal families of Europe. It was perhaps the Fates who decreed it–they have had nothing to do since the demise of the ancient Greeks! I was prepared as no other boy in my elementary school for the coming of the complex harmonies and soft percussive accents of the sound that evolved from the Brazilian samba and swept through the world like a contagion, for I had learned the cha-cha-cha at numerous country club affairs dancing with my younger sister! No music is better suited to inspire thoughts of love than that associated with the Portugese term translated roughly as “the new thing or trend or fashionable wave or something.”

It is no coincidence that the bossa nova craze coincided with the years in which I achieved my greatest romantic success–first through sixth grades.

Best of bossa nova torrent