ANTONIO CARLOS JOBIM: “The Composer Of Desafinado Plays” LP

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ANTONIO CARLOS JOBIM: “The Composer Of Desafinado Plays” LP. Released 10th Oct 2025

The Composer of Desafinado, Plays is the first album by Antônio Carlos Jobim. Released in 1963, the album features a dozen instrumentals arranged by Claus Ogerman, whose work would mark the beginning of a lifelong musical relationship with Jobim. Of these twelve songs, nearly all of them are jazz standards. The opening track “The Girl from Ipanema” is believed to be the second most recorded song in history behind The Beatles’ “Yesterday,” and a recording of the song by Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz became a worldwide hit in 1964.

Jobim plays both guitar and piano on the album, the latter of which producers resisted because they wanted to present the image of the Latin man and his guitar, which is evident from the album cover itself. Jobim, in a 1988 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, recalled this struggle with American producers:

…when I got to the stage, they wouldn’t let me play piano here. You know, they said, listen, Antonio, you’ve got to be the Latin lover. You should play the guitar. You know, if you play the piano you destroy the whole image, you know? So I’ve been playing guitar for many, many years, you know, which was let’s say my second instrument. That was an instrument that I used to play by ear, you know?