Bossa Nova
Bossa nova is a soft, relaxed style from Rio de Janeiro that blends samba rhythms with jazz harmony, sung quietly over nylon-string guitar.
The guitar plays a gentle syncopated pattern drawn from samba while the singer stays close to speaking volume, often with light percussion. It emerged in the late 1950s among young musicians in Rio's beachside neighborhoods and became a worldwide craze in the early 1960s. It is calmer and more harmonically complex than samba; the name means 'new trend' or 'new wave' in Portuguese.
Artists it is known for: João Gilberto, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Astrud Gilberto.
- Family
- Brazilian
- On Spotify
- A current genre
- What it is
- A genre
- From
- Rio de Janeiro, late 1950s
- Also called
- bossa
- Trackify listeners who play it
- 2%
About 1,500 of 83,000 Trackify listeners with public profiles have bossa nova among their top artists of the last four weeks. Rounded; updated 13 November 2026.
Bossa Nova artists
Jorge Ben Jor
Djavan
Stan Getz
Chico Buarque
Tim Maia
Gal Costa
Rita Lee
Antônio Carlos Jobim
Belchior
Elis Regina
The bossa nova artists most Trackify listeners have in their top fifty. Each opens on Spotify.
Sources
The definition is written for this site from open sources, and was checked against them on 13 November 2026.