Tom doesn't fit exclusively into the MPB mold. Perhaps the majority of his colleagues in the universe of popular music are those from beyond our borders: figures like Kern, Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers and Arlen, the great songwriters of Hollywood and the Broadway theater. These were the creators of a sophisticated song genre that became established in the first half of this century and whose reign Tom extended for several years more -- something that a lot of people have possibly overlooked. When almost all these composers had already left the scene, and the best Sinatra could come up with was "Something Stupid", suddenly up surges Tom Jobim with 10, 20, 50 and who knows how many more marvellous tunes and -- heavenly gift! -- almost all of them unknown outside Brazil, right there ready to be recorded. It must've been difficult for "The Voice" to believe it was true. . .

And why put Tom in this special category and not the others who emerged from the MPB genre? Among other reasons, because Tom, like most of the great "songwriters":

- Studied classical music and, more than that, he loved classical music, especially Chopin, Débussy and Villa-Lobos. In this respect he was unique among the great Brazilian composers of popular sung music. - He came from a family with a long cultural tradition. - He composed on the piano, a fact which is known to open up possibilities for harmonic complexity and musicality in general - He loved popular music and put all his talents at its service. - He composed songs with intrinsic musical value, which means they survive (and how they survive!) without their lyrics. Think of the number of times they've been recorded by jazz musicians.

It's obvious that Tom cultivated a taste for the music of his American songwriting colleagues, and how could that be otherwise? At the same time, he loved Brazilian music, the samba, the sentimental song styles. His indisputable merit was to blend Brazilian and American music in a highly original but quite natural fashion, sweet and unpretentious. I've always felt Tom concerned himself more with the "bossa" -- the beat -- than with the "nova" -- the new -- in Bossa Nova.

What other composer of MPB had this personal profile and managed to take it so far? Anyone with good sense and a reasonable level of musical and general cultural knowledge will know that it's rare for a Brazilian song to have a formal, melodic or harmonic structure that in any way parallels or comes close to the finesse that one finds in the majority of Tom's works. Those parallels are only to be found, and with frequency, in the works of the great North American songwriters.

And finally, let me return to the "Sinatra period" again to reinforce what I'm trying to convey. Highlighting this period as only one among many moments in Tom's life that show us his position within popular music internationally, I ask myself: what composer -- with his reputation still far from secure and coming from a country with little influence on the worldwide scene -- ever lived through a situation like his, in which he had his tunes recorded on two albums by an artist generally considered to be the veritable symbol of a nation that exports its culture to the rest of the world and is considered the most influential country of its era ?

Tom not only lived that situation, he pulled it off with absolute confidence. The proof is in that famous film clip of him performing "Girl from Ipanema" side by side with Sinatra: Tom is right at home, to the point of sharing the verses with Frank, singing his half in Portuguese and making funny faces just for laughs. Was there ever another composer of Popular Brazilian Music who had the stuff to even dream about accepting an homage like that with so much style ?