Luiz Bonfá
Luiz Floriano Bonfá ( born October 17, 1922 in Rio de Janeiro, † January 12, 2001 ) was a Brazilian composer, singer and guitarist and important representative of the bossa nova, a popular Brazilian music. Due to a printing error in the Real Book, a very widespread jazz music collection, the name often appears in the spelling of Luis Bonfi.
Life
Luiz Bonfá grew up in Rio de Janeiro and learned self-taught guitar playing. At the age of twelve, he studied classical Isaías Sávio guitar lessons. These weekly lessons were associated with a long and time-consuming round trip, as the childhood home of Bonfá was on the western outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and Sávio lived in the hills of Santa Teresa. Given the great efforts and the extraordinary talent of his pupil renounced Sávio often on a remuneration of its services.
A wider audience was Bonfá in Brazil for the first time known as one in 1947 introduced him to Rádio Nacional in in a program for young talents. He was also a member of the vocal group Quitandinha Serenaders in the late 1940s. In the 1950s, some of his compositions have been interpreted and recorded by Brazilian singer Dick Farney. Farney made Bonfá also known by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes, the leading songwriting team behind the worldwide success of the Brazilian bossa nova in the late 1950s and 1960s.
Bonfá worked in 1956 with these and with other prominent Brazilian musicians and artists in production Orfeu da Conceição by Vinicius de Moraes, who served a few years later Marcel Camus as a template for his legendary film Orfeu Negro ( Black Orpheus ). In the 1959 released movie Bonfá Jobim and provided the soundtrack. The contained therein Manhã de Carnaval, which had Bonfá composed, became a jazz classic. Another well known piece from the soundtrack Samba de Orfeu was.
In the 1960s, the bossa nova became known internationally. This was especially the Bossa Nova Festival of 1962 at Carnegie Hall in New York, became the Bonfá along with a number of other Brazilian artists, including João Gilberto, Oscar Castro- Neves and Sergio Mendes invited. Bonfá played in 1963 with the album Stan Getz Jazz Samba Encore, one of the highlights of the Bossa Nova. The mid-1960s left Bonfá like many other musicians Brazil and went to the United States because of the military coup of 1964 had completely changed the socio-political climate in Brazil.
Bonfá remained in the States until 1975, and worked with U.S. artists such as Paul Winter, Quincy Jones, George Benson, Steve Lawrence and Frank Sinatra. For Elvis Presley, he composed the title Almost In Love. He also took numerous solo albums, including the popular The Brazilian Scene by 1966. Bonfá remained the United States after his return to Brazil connected, but fell in his last decades something into oblivion. His last album, Almost in Love from 1996 was a collaboration with Brazilian singer Ithamara Koorax. Bonfá died in 2001 at the age of 78 years from prostate cancer.