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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 model 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, mentioned the reason for his loss of life, in a hospital, was sepsis.
Alongside Antônio Carlos Jobim, Mr. Lyra was extensively thought-about among the many best composers of bossa nova. Mr. Jobim as soon as known as him “an amazing melodist, harmonist, king of rhythm, of syncopation, of swing” and “singular, the ultimate.”
Mr. Lyra was a part of a unfastened circle of musicians who within the Fifties started searching for methods to mix the standard samba sounds of Brazil with American jazz and European classical influences. They typically gathered on the Plaza Lodge in Rio, not removed from the Copacabana seaside, to debate music and hash out concepts.
A kind 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 typically been known as the primary bossa nova album. Mr. Lyra launched his personal first album a yr 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 normal for musical precision.
“He threw lots of songs away,” his daughter mentioned. “He solely stored the nice ones, he instructed me.”
He continuously 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 essentially the most well-known bossa nova music.
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 report executives, and a number of other of the performers (although not Mr. Lyra) later signed contracts with U.S. labels.
Lots of bossa nova’s main lights had been both simply writers or simply performers; Mr. Lyra was among the many few who was each. Glowingly charismatic onstage, with a wealthy baritone voice, he captured audiences round Brazil and, within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, the USA, 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 appropriate; Mr. Lyra was an outspoken leftist who joined the Communist Get together 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 (generally together with his personal lyrics, generally 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 instructed The New York Instances in 2015. “I think about myself economically bourgeois. And artistically I think about myself an aristocrat.”
Carlos Eduardo Lyra Barbosa was born on Could 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 (individuals 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 instructor, 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 position within the formation of bossa nova.
Mr. Lyra left Brazil after the coup in 1964. When he got here off the street 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 recognized in Brazil below the stage identify Kate Lyra. They later divorced.
Alongside together 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 Nineteen 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 lots 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 finally he, too, received 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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