R.I.P.: Sérgio Mendes, Helped Popularize Bossa Nova

Sérgio Mendes, the Brazilian bossa nova impresario and pianist who helped popularize the genre in the ‘60s and toured with Herb Alpert and Frank Sinatra, has died.

The recording artist died “peacefully” Thursday in Los Angeles, with his wife Gracinha Leporace Mendes and their children by his side, his family confirmed in a statement shared with The LATimes. He was 83.

The statement did not reveal a cause of death but said the singer’s health “had been challenged by the effects of long term COVID.” Mendes “leaves us with an incredible musical legacy from more than six decades of a unique sound,” the family said.

Mendes found global acclaim as a solo artist, bandmember in groups like Brasil ’66 and as a collaborator across genre.

Born in 1941 in Niterói, near Rio de Janeiro, he became a popular pianist in the nightclubs on Rio’s Beco das Garrafas (Bottles Alley), a cluster of venues where artists performed the emerging genre of bossa nova while neighbors threw bottles at rowdy partygoers. Bossa Nova blended Brazilian samba rhythms with American jazz. Alongside peers like composer Antônio Carlos Jobim, singer-guitarist João Gilberto, lyricist Vinícius de Moraes and guitarist Roberto Menescal, the music captured the city’s sensuous beach culture and its young and hopeful mood in the late 1950’s and early ‘60s, a sound lovingly evoked in the 1959 film “Black Orpheus.”

Mendes cut his first solo album “Dance Moderno” in 1961, a collection of jazz covers by Duke Ellington and Cole Porter alongside Brazilian compositions by Jobim and Gilberto. He quickly began touring in the U.S., and performed at a legendary 1962 concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall that showcased bossa nova to novice American audiences. That show helped make the movement a sensation worldwide, and hits like Gilberto and Stan Getz’s “The Girl From Ipanema” in 1964 would soon become jazz and pop staples.