Viva la Disney

Before Antonio Carlos Jobim, there was Ary Barroso; before Jobim’s classic “Desafinado” and “The Girl from Ipanema,” there were Barroso’s “Brazil” (originally “Aquarela do Brasil”) and “Bahia” (originally “Na Baixa do Sapateiro”). During the war, Barroso’s songs, composed in the late 1930s, launched Brazilian popular music around the world. They were taken up by dozens of jazz and dance bands and pop singers. Yet unlike Jobim’s songs, which took flight after North American jazz musicians discovered them, Barroso’s intricate compositions were imported by an unlikely popularizer, Walt Disney, working at the behest of an even unlikelier master, Nelson Rockefeller — the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs who hoped to weaken the Nazi position in South America with his Good Neighbor policy.