Bossa Novas and Latin Style Rhythms

Bossa Novas are a subject that gets talked about a lot and everyone has a different opinion on how to play them, I'm going to tell you mine:

Firstly the reason I think this is the correct way is that if you talk to anyone who grew up with this style of music, like a native Brazilian they will simply tell you to "just feel it." Rather then give you a specific way to count the rhythm. However, those of us who grew up with Western style music find it impossible to not think in numbers and counting, therefore we're going to train ourselves to count differently. Here's a Bossa rhythm, there are a number of variations of it, but this seems to feel like the base:



Now most of us would count this 1 (2) + (3) (4) + | (1) 2 3 (4). And to begin you should do that, spend about a week counting and clapping the hell out of that rhythm, know it inside and out. Once you can do that we want to change the counting for it, simply count 1 2 3, 1 2. This will completely change the pulse of the music.

Why this is significant

With the new way of counting try playing straight triplets:



This is a drastic change from the conventional western way of thinking of rhythms.

The bass line:

The conventional thing for the bass player to do is to just play beats 1 and 3 (with western counting) in straight half notes, I tend to prefer my bass players to play the and of 2 and the and of 4 as well, adds a bit more Latin feel to it.