Antonio Carlos Jobim – Aguas de Março – Tom Jobim Easy Piano Solo arr. sheet music

The Brazilian author proclaims the end of summer without using melancholy but invoking the cathartic shock, the torrent that washes everything away and imposes the forced regeneration. A song that reached universal diffusion in the voice of Elis Regina.

Subdued bossa nova rhythm, sustaining the slender melody, in contrast to the bumpy route proposed by the lyrics of Aguas de março : “It’s the stick, it’s the stone, it’s the end of the road”, begins by saying this song in which Antônio Carlos Jobim portrays the end of summer not so much as an exercise in melancholy, a habitual resource, but as a cathartic jolt, implying that this time of the year is a metaphorical torrent through which everything rolls down the mountain unceremoniously, like a natural force irrepressible and a forced invitation to regeneration.

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March is, in Brazil, the month that marks the sunset of summer, and Jobim took advantage of it to build this theme whose text becomes a collage of images that invoke the sudden change of time.

That time of the year brings with it “the night, death, the lasso, the hook” and “the deep mystery, whether you like it or not,” says the song with a language endowed with a vague mysticism and that alludes to recognizable images in culture. Brazilian: the jug of cane (with which to drink cachaça ), the peroba do campo (native tree) and the matita pereira (bird of bad omen), figures that disappeared in the version of the theme in English that Jobim himself would perform.

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The águas de março point to the untimely passage towards death, at the same time that they open “a precious horizon” (playing with the name of the city Belo Horizonte) and “a promise of life in your heart”.

Jobim, the most transcendental author of bossa nova, had come to an understanding with poets and lyricists such as Vinícius de Moraes in the classic Garota de Ipanema , Corcovado or the baptismal Chega de saudade , but here he signed both the music and the lyrics of the piece.

He wrote it in his new house in Poço Fundo, in a rural environment, several hours from Rio de Janeiro, a place where he wanted to distance himself from the mundane amusements typical of the big city. As if the mansion were predestined, it would end up being leveled by Mother Nature, in a devastating episode of storms in 2011, 17 years after the composer’s death open “a precious horizon” (playing with the name of the city Belo Horizonte) and “a promise of life in your heart”.

Although Jobim soon recorded his own version, in 1972, the take that achieved the greatest repercussion was the one recorded that same year by Elis Regina on the album Elis, which was followed by Tom & Elis (1974), a quote from both talents on MGM Studios in Los Angeles. This version was widely distributed worldwide, and which Frank Sinatra came to describe as “the closest thing to perfection”.

Elis Regina & Tom Jobim – “Aguas de Março” – 1974

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