Jorge Ben Jor

Rio

He was born Jorge Duílio Lima Menezes in Rio de Janeiro on 22 March, and even the year is an argument: a birth certificate found by the writer Kamille Viola says 1939, he said 21 in 1963, and he himself insists on 1945, the year the war ended. He grew up in Rio Comprido. His father played pandeiro in a carnival bloco and wrote carnival marches; the name Ben came, by his own account, from his mother's side of the family. He was given a pandeiro at thirteen, sang in a church choir, spent two years in a seminary learning Latin and Gregorian chant, played in Flamengo's youth team, and at eighteen got a guitar.

By 1961 he was playing pandeiro in the clubs of the Beco das Garrafas, the Copacabana alley where bossa nova was being worked out. In 1963 he sang Mas que Nada at a club with a Philips executive in the audience. A single followed within a week, and the album Samba Esquema Novo, made with the jazz group Meirelles e os Copa Cinco, came out in January. The Guardian later summed it up as bossa nova twisted for the 1960s. Nobody else played guitar like that: a hard, percussive right hand that made the instrument part of the rhythm section.

In and out of fashion

Philips put out four albums in eighteen months and then lost interest. Ben drifted between camps, playing acoustic on Elis Regina's O Fino da Bossa and electric on Roberto Carlos's Jovem Guarda, a crossing of the lines between MPB and rock that the bossa establishment did not forgive. In 1965 he went to the United States, where Sérgio Mendes wanted him in his band, but he disliked California and missed Flamengo and came home. Mendes's Brasil '66 opened their debut with Mas que Nada, and the song went around the world without him.

His 1967 album O Bidú: Silêncio no Brooklin, made in São Paulo with his first electric guitar on record, flopped, though Caetano Veloso later named one of its songs as an early spark for Tropicália. In early 1969 André Midani brought him back to Philips after Gilberto Gil and Caetano promised to help promote him.

The great run, 1969 to 1976

What followed is one of the great runs in Brazilian music. Jorge Ben (1969), cut with the percussion group Trio Mocotó, was a commercial comeback full of songs other singers had already made into hits: Wilson Simonal's País Tropical, Gal Costa's Que Pena. Força Bruta (1970) and Negro É Lindo (1971) followed. Ben (1972) produced Fio Maravilha, which won that year's International Song Festival, and Taj Mahal.

Then the records turned strange. A Tábua de Esmeralda (1974) is a concept album about alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus and the fourteenth-century Paris alchemist Nicolas Flamel, made after Ben and Gil visited Flamel's house in Paris and, Ben says, saw something there. He names it as his own favorite. A jam session with Gil, Gil e Jorge, came the next year. And África Brasil (1976), on which he finally swapped his acoustic guitar for an electric one, is a hard funk record about football, Black Brazilian history and Africa that critics now place among the greatest Brazilian albums. He fell out with Philips over its production and left.

Later years

From 1978 he recorded for Som Livre, TV Globo's label, with the band he still calls A Banda do Zé Pretinho. The same year Rod Stewart's Da Ya Think I'm Sexy? borrowed the melody of Taj Mahal; Ben sued, the case was settled, and Stewart's royalties went to UNICEF. In 1989 he changed his name to Jorge Ben Jor, reportedly because royalties were going astray to George Benson. That year David Byrne opened the Luaka Bop compilation Beleza Tropical with Ponta de Lança Africano (Umbabarauma), and a song that had never been a single in Brazil became his calling card abroad.

W/Brasil (Chama o Síndico) gave him his last big Brazilian hit in the early 1990s. On New Year's Eve 1993 he played to an estimated three million people on Copacabana beach, the first of Rio's giant Réveillon concerts. He won the Latin Grammy for lifetime achievement in 2005, sang País Tropical at the opening of the Rio Olympics in 2016, and has lived for years at the Copacabana Palace hotel.

On stage

His concerts run for hours and are built from medleys, a format he has kept since the 1973 retrospective album 10 Anos Depois: one song slides into the next without a break, so setlist counts undercount everything. Landmark shows include the 1969 International Song Festival, where Charles, Anjo 45 split the Maracanãzinho between cheers and boos; Phono 73 in São Paulo, released decades later; the Olympia in Paris and the Teatro Sistina in Rome in 1975; Montreux in 1980 and 1997; and the 1993 Copacabana show.

Standing

Billboard called him the father of samba rock, a label he dislikes; he prefers to call what he does Som Universal. Caetano Veloso, his most vocal champion, has described him as the first major Brazilian pop composer to put Blackness at the center of his style. His songs have been recorded by Sérgio Mendes, Ella Fitzgerald, Miriam Makeba, Elza Soares, Marisa Monte and the metal band Soulfly, sampled endlessly in acid jazz and hip-hop, and remade with the rapper Mano Brown in 2010. Two books in Portuguese are devoted to single albums of his: Paulo da Costa e Silva's on A Tábua de Esmeralda and Kamille Viola's on África Brasil.

always ready to go further out on a beat than the other samba/bossa geniuses

Robert Christgau, on Ben and Gilberto Gil