Very few people up here know her, but Rosa Passos is I think the finest bossa nova singer I have ever heard. She’s not as musically radical as Joao Gilberto (who invented the genre by reducing sambas to their barest elements–he’d play one song for weeks on end, hour after hour, stoned out of his mind, camped out on various couches till the owners couldn’t take it anymore and sent him packing) but just listen to Rosa’s take. She is just so in the groove here, everything light and precise and shimmering like water, the syncopation hinted at, the raw strident samba down deep in there, shadows of a shadow. Dig the crazy bass lines, almost cuica like, dragging, no one ever walked a bass line in Brazil. Indeed, try walking to her guitar chords and you’d be staggering like a drunk man. We walk with a back beat, but this is propelled by a surdo–that big deep drum beat of the samba, boom, boom, boom–but a surdo reduced to a silent presence by Joao Gilberto. It’s there but you can’t hear it, yet you can’t possibly move along to this stuff without the surdo, every step you’d make is around the surdo, you step around it, bounce off it, shimmy, everything but set a firm footed pace. Walk a straight line to this and you fall right over. There is nothing in our musical culture anything like this, our musics come from different parts of Africa, different parts of Europe. We rock, they sway. We’re on the beat, they’re loosely all around it. We get where we are going faster, they get there eventually. Indeed, Rosa fades off at the end of this cut without having got anywhere at all, just stays lost in the melody as it shifts about, driven by the afternoon breeze. I hit replay and the chords begin again as if they had never stopped at all.