Roberto Menescal
Composer and guitarist who grew up in Copacabana and became one of bossa nova's key figures, teaching and collaborating with the movement's founders while developing the guitar vocabulary that defined the genre. When a teenager in Rio heard João Gilberto's first recording hit the airwaves in the late 1950s and got an instant urge to learn guitar, his mother found a relative whose college-age son gave classes—Roberto Menescal. The instructor, who was to become one of the greatest living bossa nova composers, taught the boy who would grow up to be filmmaker Paulo Thiago. In Thiago's documentary "This is Bossa Nova: The History and Stories," Menescal and fellow composer Carlos Lyra tell the stories of the people, places, and performances that put Brazilian music on the international music scene in the early 1960s, culminating in the 1962 Carnegie Hall performance. Wrote 'O Barquinho'—'The Little Boat'—his most famous song, after a boat motor broke down and stranded him and friends at sea. He tried to lighten things up by plucking a perky tune on his guitar, which he always seemed to have handy. As he explains in Thiago's film, bossa nova reacted to the traditionalist theme of "Nobody wants me, nobody loves me" by talking about the beach, the sea, and love.