Águas de Março: Brazil's Greatest Song

In 2001 a poll of more than two hundred Brazilian musicians and critics named "Águas de Março" ("Waters of March") the greatest Brazilian song ever written.^[1] The verdict honors a paradox: a lyric that seems to be about nothing in particular turns out to be about everything at once — the endless, self-renewing cycle of life.^[1]

A song born of rain

Antônio Carlos Jobim wrote "Águas de Março" in 1972, and in a sense he wrote it twice: the Portuguese lyric and the English-language "Waters of March" are both his own.^[1] The spark was meteorological. In Rio de Janeiro, March is the month of the rainy season's sudden storms and flooding, and it was while shut indoors on one such stormy day that Jobim began to write.^[1]

A cascade, not a story

The song abandons narrative altogether. In its place comes a collage of small, concrete images — "a stick, a stone, the end of the road" — accumulating line upon line, with most lines opening on "É..." ("It is..."), an anaphora that makes the words themselves stream past like the floodwaters that inspired them and turns a catalogue of ordinary things into a meditation on the flow of existence.^[1] That repeated "É..." is the key for a first hearing: once the pattern registers, the song stops being a list and becomes a current.

The definitive recording

Elis Regina was the first to record the song, in 1972, but the version Brazil keeps closest is the one she made two years later: the 1974 duet with Jobim that opens the masterpiece album Elis & Tom, a performance of such warmth and playfulness that it is routinely called definitive.^[1]

The summit of Brazilian song

The song's standing approaches consensus: the Folha de S.Paulo poll placed it first, and Rolling Stone Brazil ranked it second only to Chico Buarque's "Construção."^[1] Like Garota de Ipanema, it shows Jobim's craft at its most distilled — and it has long since crossed from Brazilian popular music into the international jazz repertoire, where its lead sheet circulates in fake books such as The Real Book alongside bop standards and Duke Ellington masterpieces, one measure of its place among Brazil's most cherished and most covered songs.^[2]