NEW YORK, NY.- Carlos Lyra, a Brazilian composer, singer and guitarist whose cool, meticulous melodies helped give structure and power to bossa nova, the samba-inflected jazz style that became a worldwide phenomenon in the early 1960s, died Dec. 16 in Rio de Janeiro. He was 90.

His daughter, singer Kay Lyra, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was sepsis.

Alongside Antônio Carlos Jobim, Carlos Lyra was widely considered among the greatest composers of bossa nova. Jobim once called him “a great melodist, harmonist, king of rhythm, of syncopation, of swing” and “singular, without equal.”

Lyra was part of a loose circle of musicians who in the 1950s began looking for ways to blend the traditional samba sounds of Brazil with American jazz and European classical influences. They often gathered at the Plaza Hotel in Rio, not far from the Copacabana beach, to discuss music and hash out ideas.

One of those performers, singer and guitarist João Gilberto, included three of Lyra’s compositions — “Maria Ninguém” (“Maria Nobody”), “Lobo Bobo” (“Foolish Wolf”) and “Saudade Fêz um Samba” (“Saudade Made a Samba”) — on his “Chega de Saudade” (1959), which has often been called the first bossa nova album. Lyra released his first album a year later, titled simply “Carlos Lyra: Bossa Nova.”

Inspired by the West Coast jazz of Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and others, Lyra brought a relaxed sophistication to his work, as well as an exacting standard for musical precision.

“He threw a lot of songs away,” his daughter said. “He only kept the good ones, he told me.”

He frequently wrote with a lyricist — originally Ronaldo Bôscoli and then, beginning in the early 1960s, Vinícius de Moraes, who wrote the original Portuguese lyrics to “The Girl From Ipanema,” perhaps the most famous bossa nova song.

Lyra joined Gilberto, Jobim, Sérgio Mendes and other Brazilian artists in the famed 1962 performance at Carnegie Hall in New York that helped introduce bossa nova to American audiences. Jazz artists such as Miles Davis and Erroll Garner sat in the audience, as did record executives, and several of the performers (though not Lyra) later signed contracts with American labels.

Many of bossa nova’s leading lights were either just writers or just performers; Lyra was among the few who was both. Glowingly charismatic onstage, with a rich baritone voice, he captured audiences around Brazil and, in the mid-1960s, the United States, where he spent two years touring with saxophonist Stan Getz, the leading American exponent of bossa nova.

Lyra also differed from his fellow bossa nova musicians in his politics. Most were apolitical or leaned to the right; Lyra was an outspoken leftist who joined the Communist Party and helped found the People’s Center for Culture, a gathering place in Rio de Janeiro for progressive students and artists.




He wrote songs (sometimes with his own lyrics, sometimes in collaboration with de Moraes) that had a social and political inflection, although his messages were increasingly coded after Brazil’s government was overthrown in 1964 during a military coup. His politics nevertheless drove him to choose exile, twice.

“I consider myself politically proletariat,” he told The New York Times in 2015. “I consider myself economically bourgeois. And artistically I consider myself an aristocrat.”

Carlos Eduardo Lyra Barbosa was born May 11, 1933, in Rio de Janeiro. His father, José Domingos Barbosa, was an officer in the Brazilian navy. His mother, Helena (Lyra) Barbosa, was a homemaker.

Carlinhos (people called him by that name, the diminutive form of Carlos, throughout his life) was a musically precocious child. His family was replete with amateur artists and musicians, including his mother, who played the music of Claude Debussy and other impressionist composers on the piano.

He studied classical guitar with Moacir Santos, an influential composer and music teacher, and began writing songs in his teens. In 1955, singer Sylvia Telles recorded his “Menina.”

That early success brought him into contact with other young artists, including Gilberto, Jobim, singer Nara Leão and composer Roberto Menescal, all of whom played a central role in the formation of bossa nova.

Lyra left Brazil after the coup in 1964. When he came off the road after his long tour with Getz, he settled in Mexico City, where he joined many other self-exiled Brazilian artists.

There, he met and married Katherine Riddell, an actress known in Brazil under the stage name Kate Lyra. They later divorced.

Along with his daughter, Lyra is survived by his second wife, Magda Pereira Botafogo; his sister, Maria Helena Lyra Fialho; and his brother, Sérgio.

Lyra returned to Brazil in the early 1970s. But, finding the right-wing dictatorship still unpalatable, he went into exile again in 1974, this time to Los Angeles. There he underwent primal-scream therapy under Arthur Janov, befriending another famous participant, John Lennon.

Two years later, he came back to Brazil for good, settling in Rio de Janeiro. By then, the world had moved on, and many of the bossa nova musicians who remained in the country had reached an accommodation with the military government, which, in turn, promoted their careers — a game that Lyra declined to play.

But eventually, he, too, won acclaim as a national treasure. Among the many celebrations around his 90th birthday was the release of the album “Afeto: Homenagem Carlos Lyra (90 Anos),” or “Affection: Homage to Carlos Lyra (90 Years),” featuring his songs performed by some of Brazil’s leading musicians, including Gilberto Gil, Joyce Moreno and Mônica Salmaso.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.