* We omit melodies from our charts for copyright reasons.
"The Girl from Ipanema" looks easy on the page. Play through the bridge a few times and you'll find some of the most argued-over harmony in the standard repertoire, still discussed on jazz theory forums decades later.
Antônio Carlos Jobim wrote the music in 1962, with Portuguese lyrics by the poet Vinícius de Moraes. It was originally titled "Menina que Passa" ("The Girl Who Passes By") and written for a musical called Dirigível. The story goes that Jobim and de Moraes were watching a teenage neighborhood girl, Heloísa Pinheiro, walk past their regular bar near the beach in Rio's Ipanema district. Norman Gimbel added the English lyrics the following year, once the song started crossing over to American audiences.
Most people mean the 1964 Stan Getz / João Gilberto recording from Getz/Gilberto when they say "Girl from Ipanema," the one with Astrud Gilberto's surprise vocal debut on the English lyric. It became a top-5 pop hit and gets most of the credit for introducing bossa nova to American listeners.
One detail worth knowing before you sit down at the piano: that famous recording is in Db. The key most American musicians learn, thanks to the Real Book, is F. Brazilian players tend to find the F version a little off.
The A section reads like ordinary jazz changes at a glance, but the "V7" isn't a real V. It's a bII chord with a Lydian b7 sound (G7#11 in the key of F), which gives it a Brazilian flavor instead of the pull toward resolution a normal V7 has.
The bridge is the real puzzle. It runs 16 bars instead of the usual 8, and it moves through what sound like three separate key centers, starting with a jump up a half step from F, without ever landing on a clear tonic chord in any of them. Analysts don't fully agree on how to label it. Some hear a string of Lydian modulations, IV chord to bVII chord, that never resolve to a I. Others explain it through subdominant minor function pivoting between keys. Either way, Jobim built a progression that sounds slippery on paper and completely natural under the melody, which is most of the reason this tune keeps showing up as a teaching example.
The chord chart for this one sits right alongside this article. Start with the A sections. Those tritone-sub-flavored ii-V shapes will come back in plenty of other bossa tunes you'll pick up later. When you get to the bridge, don't stress about naming every chord correctly on the first pass. Get the sound and the voice leading under your fingers, and the "why" behind the harmony tends to click once you can hear where each phrase is actually heading.
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