This book is designed for intermediate and advanced keyboard players who want to improve their ability to play Brazilian music. The original compositions, composed and performed by Alfredo Cardim, are featured in the playalong CD, along with additional exercises I produced. The method starts with a foundation in the basic groove of Brazilian music, and then a rhythmic and harmonic vocabulary is built up through a series of exercises, which can be used to play the original songs (shown in solo, trio, and quartet arrangements), and other Brazilian songs you know or play in the future.
Like many other musicians, my introduction to Brazilian music began with the reverberation in American culture of recordings such as “The Girl From Ipanema,” and from playing the same fourteen or so tunes by Tom Jobim and Luiz Bonfa from The Real Book on countless gigs. Living in Brazil for two years opened a window to the rich musical world behind those beautiful songs. Last year I began an academic research project on Jobim’s music based on a harmonic analysis of the songs in the Cancioneiro Jobim series (The Jobim Songbook), a fantastic five-volume set prepared by Paulo and Tom Jobim, Claus Ogerman, Eumir Deodato, Haroldo Mauro, and others, some of whom I contacted to find out about the process of writing the arrangements, and specifically how chord symbols were decided upon. In the process of doing so, I got the idea of writing a book about Brazilian music, and one of the arrangers, Alfredo Cardim, agreed to help. In the introduction to the Cancioneiro series, Paulo Jobim explained that they decided in their transcriptions from Jobim’s records to concentrate on the melodies, countermelodies, and accompaniment. The rhythm was simplified in order to make the arrangements easier to read, assuming that a pianist would know how to fill out the accompaniment with the appropriate rhythmic support. One of the goals of this book is to show how to do that, when playing Jobim’s music, or other Brazilian songs from lead sheets.
I would have prefered to have been able to use something like “United Statesers” rather than “Americans” in the book, since Brazilians are also residents of the Americas. Portuguese has the word “Norte-americano,” but "North American" in English is awkward. Regrettably “American” is the only choice in English, and will have to do until more people are ready to follow my lead in symbolically reflecting a new era of international awareness by referring to citizens of the United States and their neighbors as “West Americans”, which we would be right in saying, as the United States are as much west of Brazil as we are north of it.
—Robert Willey
[ Brazilian Piano ]