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Carlos Lyra, a Brazilian composer, singer and guitarist whose cool, meticulous melodies helped give construction and energy to bossa nova, the samba-inflected jazz fashion that turned a worldwide phenomenon within the early Nineteen Sixties, died on Dec. 16 in Rio de Janeiro. He was 90.
His daughter, the singer Kay Lyra, stated the reason for his demise, in a hospital, was sepsis.
Alongside Antônio Carlos Jobim, Mr. Lyra was extensively thought-about among the many biggest composers of bossa nova. Mr. Jobim as soon as known as him “an incredible melodist, harmonist, king of rhythm, of syncopation, of swing” and “singular, the ultimate.”
Mr. Lyra was a part of a free circle of musicians who within the Fifties started searching for methods to mix the normal samba sounds of Brazil with American jazz and European classical influences. They usually gathered on the Plaza Resort in Rio, not removed from the Copacabana seaside, to debate music and hash out concepts.
A type of musicians, the singer and guitarist João Gilberto, included three of Mr. Lyra’s compositions — “Maria Ninguém” (“Maria No one”), “Lobo Bobo” (“Silly Wolf”) and “Saudade Fêz um Samba” (“Saudade Made a Samba”) — on his “Chega de Saudade” (1959), which has usually been known as the primary bossa nova album. Mr. Lyra launched his personal first album a 12 months later, titled merely “Carlos Lyra: Bossa Nova.”
Impressed by the West Coast jazz of Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and others, Mr. Lyra introduced a relaxed sophistication to his work, in addition to an exacting customary for musical precision.
“He threw a whole lot of songs away,” his daughter stated. “He solely saved the nice ones, he informed me.”
He ceaselessly wrote with a lyricist — initially Ronaldo Bôscoli after which, starting within the early Nineteen Sixties, Vinícius de Moraes, who wrote the unique Portuguese lyrics to “The Woman From Ipanema,” maybe probably the most well-known bossa nova track.
Mr. Lyra joined Mr. Gilberto, Mr. Jobim, Sérgio Mendes and different Brazilian artists within the famed 1962 efficiency at Carnegie Corridor in New York that helped introduce bossa nova to American audiences. Jazz artists like Miles Davis and Erroll Garner sat within the viewers, as did document executives, and several other of the performers (although not Mr. Lyra) later signed contracts with U.S. labels.
A lot of bossa nova’s main lights had been both simply writers or simply performers; Mr. Lyra was among the many few who had been each. Glowingly charismatic onstage, with a wealthy baritone voice, he captured audiences round Brazil and, within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, america, when he spent two years touring with the saxophonist Stan Getz, the main American exponent of bossa nova.
Mr. Lyra additionally differed from his fellow bossa nova musicians in his politics. Most had been apolitical or leaned to the correct; Mr. Lyra was an outspoken leftist who joined the Communist Social gathering and helped discovered the Folks’s Middle for Tradition, a gathering place in Rio de Janeiro for progressive college students and artists.
He wrote songs (typically along with his personal lyrics, typically in collaboration with Mr. de Moraes) that had a social and political inflection, though his messages had been more and more coded after Brazil’s authorities was overthrown in 1964 throughout a army coup. His politics nonetheless drove him to decide on exile, twice.
“I think about myself politically proletariat,” he informed The New York Occasions in 2015. “I think about myself economically bourgeois. And artistically I think about myself an aristocrat.”
Carlos Eduardo Lyra Barbosa was born on Might 11, 1933, in Rio de Janeiro. His father, José Domingos Barbosa, was an officer within the Brazilian Navy. His mom, Helena (Lyra) Barbosa, was a homemaker.
Carlinhos (folks known as him by that identify, the diminutive type of Carlos, all through his life) was a musically precocious little one. His household was replete with beginner artists and musicians, together with his mom, who performed the music of Debussy and different impressionist composers on the piano.
He studied classical guitar with Moacir Santos, an influential composer and music trainer, and commenced writing songs in his teenagers. In 1955, the singer Sylvia Telles recorded his “Menina.”
That early success introduced him into contact with different younger artists, like Mr. Gilberto, Mr. Jobim, the singer Nara Leão and the composer Roberto Menescal, all of whom performed a central function within the formation of bossa nova.
Mr. Lyra left Brazil after the coup in 1964. When he got here off the highway after his lengthy tour with Mr. Getz, he settled in Mexico Metropolis, the place he joined many different self-exiled Brazilian artists.
There he met and married Katherine Riddell, an actress identified in Brazil below the stage identify Kate Lyra. They later divorced.
Alongside along with his daughter, Mr. Lyra is survived by his second spouse, Magda Pereira Botafogo; his sister, Maria Helena Lyra Fialho; and his brother, Sérgio.
Mr. Lyra returned to Brazil within the early Seventies. However, discovering the right-wing dictatorship nonetheless unpalatable, he went into exile once more in 1974, this time to Los Angeles. There he underwent primal-scream remedy below Arthur Janov, befriending one other well-known participant, John Lennon.
Two years later he got here again to Brazil for good, settling in Rio de Janeiro. By then the world had moved on, and most of the bossa nova musicians who remained within the nation had reached an lodging with the army authorities, which in flip promoted their careers — a sport that Mr. Lyra declined to play.
However ultimately he, too, gained acclaim as a nationwide treasure. Among the many many celebrations round his ninetieth birthday was the discharge of the album “Afeto: Homenagem Carlos Lyra (90 Anos),” or “Affection: Homage to Carlos Lyra (90 Years),” that includes his songs carried out by a few of Brazil’s main musicians, together with Gilberto Gil, Joyce Moreno and Mônica Salmaso.
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