Luiz Bonfá (1963)

Here’s the great Brazilian master of the nylon string guitar up close and personal with Perry the C. peering at and pointing out the finer points of Bonfa’s particular brand of hand jive.  He was the composer of the soundtrack to the 1959 film “Black Orpheus,” which included future standards “Manha De Carnival” and “Samba de Orfeu,” but then a large swath of you “out there” types out there in cyberrytown going Web-ster crazy from reading all this already knew that. Orfeu Negro became a mega-byg hit film and album, which put Brazilian music on the worldwide map-o-sphere. This unexpected event paved the way for Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto, so that ol’ Joao’s ol’ lady Astrid would Getz the chance to spring this new beatific Bossa Nova beat on an unsuspecting planet with a jest a little bit of help from a little piece of Brazilian beachfront property and a young girl wearing almost no Bikini Atoll while doin’ a perp walk (for the benefit of any and all Portuguese-speaking perverts) tailing her tail down the sandy-dandy shore of Ipanema, B.S.A, while Stan gets to stand around and lay down some seriously sexy pre-marital sax-o- phun “licks.”

This clip is essentially a guitar lesson–you can watch the whole thing go down right in front of your face, then repeat as necessary, until you can do it yourself, assuming you play the guitar and have enough pork chops to do the finger licking that is necessary to pull off the hand he’s dealing you here.

Without even coming anywhere close to the shake, rattle and rolling that was going down back in the U.S.A. in the late 50s, Bonfa was playing bass, rhythm & lead proving himself to be one of the all-time great masters of the solo guitar.  In 1959, the legendary Emory Cook of Cook records waxed his Bonified Brazilian solo guitar-ass onto a very rare slab of vinyl. Look for it in our Perfect Record Award page.