In the history of the visual image it registered as barely a blink. Coming into its own around 1960, the vinyl album cover had virtually vanished by 1990. Yet from Blue Note’s gloriously atmospheric bebop imagery to the inscrutably enigmatic artwork created for Pink Floyd, these artefacts had an impact on the way we think and feel about music out of all proportion to their practical function.
And to such great examples must now be added a whole little-known genre of album cover art: the classic Bossa Nova LP of the early Sixties – a form celebrated in a beautiful new book Bossa Nova and the Rise of Brazilian Music in the 1960s. Bossa Nova was a musical world unto itself, an aspect of a cultural movement that reflected Brazil’s emergence into the wider world. Now Brazil is again promoting itself as the country of the future, it is a good time to look back on a moment that created some of the most resonant music – and stylish visual imagery – of the 20th century.
In the late Fifties, as the recently elected democratic government of Juscelino Kubitschek introduced a programme of massive industrialisation to drag Brazil into the First World, a parallel cultural revolution was under way. In Rio de Janeiro’s affluent Zona Sul (southern district), the middle-class young created their own more informal response to their country’s new direction.
Bossa Nova slowed down the booming samba marching rhythms of the city’s working-class poor, making the bellowed vocals cool and conversational. The new music was at once faux innocent and sophisticated, outward-looking and self-consciously Brazilian, nostalgic and hedonistic – with its cool-eyed beach girls and bare feet on moonlit sand.
Like all great pop it needed an iconic accompanying visual style and it found one in the designs of Cesar G Villela, forged in partnership with photographer Francisco Pereira. Villela’s designs drew on the distinctively Brazilian concept of “cultural cannibalism”. Among the visual inspirations Villela soaked up were the fragmentary figuration of Hollywood designer Saul Bass and Mondrian’s primary coloured minimalism.
Influenced by the then-voguish cultural theoretician Marshall MacLuhan, he aimed to cut out “visual noise” – superfluous detail – while Pereira’s high-contrast photography lent a sense of documentary immediacy redolent of contemporary French New Wave film. The result was a timeless Modernist aesthetic that was in stark contrast to Brazil’s exotic image. Endlessly imitated, it still looks fresh today.
- Bossa Nova — Original Cover Art: The Rise of Brazilian Music in the 1960s (Soul Jazz); souljazzrecords.co.uk
