Washington (District of Columbia), USA - Smithsonian Folkways Recordings reissued a key album by bossa nova innovator and jazz guitar great Luiz Bonfa. Solo in Rio 1959 is now available on CD for the first time ever.

Most famous for writing jazz standards "Samba de Orfeu" and "Manha de Carnaval," both of which are featured here, this prolific guitar legend seldom recorded solo. Bonfa once said, "I work strictly on inspiration. I am not one of those who can say, 'Now I will sit down and compose for an hour.'"

Twelve of the songs included are his rarely recorded improvisations or semi-improvisations. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings has added fourteen bonus tracks to the seventeen cuts on the original Cook Records LP, including the poignant
"A Brazilian in New York," in which the guitarist offers an impressionistic take on his 1957 arrival to the United States, and
Bonfa's only released solo guitar version of "Samba de Orfeu."

Along with several other prominent musicians, Luiz Bonfa created a new synthesis of music in the late 1950s: bossa nova. "Brazilian popular music was changing rapidly," writes Anthony Weller in the comprehensive liner notes, "as the old forms acquired a languid, contemporary cool which was eventually labeled bossa nova ('the new knack,' 'the new thing,' 'the new swing'). Bonfa was an architect of this sound, along with Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, Baden Powell, and others. One can debate the relative strength of its different roots - strains of jazz; the rich tradition of Brazilian popular music of earlier eras; elements of a South American classical tradition, particularly as incarnated by Villa-Lobos - but at its heart were a dozen extraordinary young musicians who listened to each other, and together heard life unlike anyone before."

Born in 1922 in Brazil, Bonfa first picked up the guitar at age eleven. By the late 1930s, having studied with his mentor
Isaias Savio, he was playing in Rio de Janeiro's creatively fertile club scene, and he began his recording career in 1945. In 1957, Marcel Camus asked the guitar master to contribute a tune to his film Black Orpheus. "The director originally rejected Manha de Carnaval as the film's main theme, but after coming up with what he felt was an inferior second effort, Bonfa fought for his first tune and got his way, and 'Manha de Carnaval' became a global pop/jazz/folk standard," writes Weller.

At the time of this recording, Bonfa split his time between Rio de Janeiro and New York City, absorbing a wide variety of sounds from each locale.

[Buy Solo in Rio 1959].