Jobim's living artistry. (Americas !Ojo!).

BRAZIL'S GREATEST composer of popular music passed away eight years ago at the age of sixty-seven, but the body of work Antonio Carlos Jobim spent a lifetime creating lives on, and his influence is as pervasive today as it was at any time dining his five-decade career. Thanks to a growing number of recording, journalistic, and academic projects that have flourished in Brazil since the time of his passing, the breadth of Jobim's artistry is being documented in innovative ways and is being made available to longtime fans and recent devotees alike.

At the center of the recent swirl of Jobim-related activity is the Instituto Antonio Carlos Jobim (www2.uol.com.br/ tomjobim), a project that was created to preserve and make available to the public, particularly music students and scholars, the fruits of the composer's artistry, his music, and lyrics. The institute is also collecting and preserving arrangements, interviews, recordings, photographs, films and videos, and other archival materials that document Jobim's career in music. The ongoing effort will focus on cataloguing, conserving, digitalizing, indexing, and duplicating Jobim's vast output--over 250 compositions. The website already offers a wide variety of information and images, while a future project will transfer much of the information to digital form for distribution to music schools in Brazil and abroad on CD-ROM.

The institute is housed in a suite of offices in the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Jardim Botanico in the shadow of Corcovado, a source of inspiration for one of the maestro's best-loved songs. Overseen by his son Paulo, who worked at his father's side as an arranger and one of his primary artistic collaborators during the last twenty years of his life, the institute is particularly proud of how it has perpetuated one of Jobim's overriding passions, his love of Brazil's natural world.

"He had an intuitive sense of nature," Paulo recalls, "and wrote many songs inspired by water, the sea, and animals. In the mid-1970s, his most intensely oriented nature phase, he release songs like the famous `Waters of March' and two albums named after birds, Matita Pere and Urubu."

The institute chose a unique way to recognize Jobim's love of nature and his environmental concerns. Working with the Roberto Mariho Foundation and Furnas Centrais Eletricas, it created the Tom da Mata (Tom of the Forest) project to disseminate to schools information addressing environmental issues, particularly along Brazil's heavily depleted Atlantic forest. Kits containing recordings of Jobim's environmentally oriented themes and educational materials on the region's ecology have been distributed to over six hundred schools in a seven-state area and have reached an estimated 800,000 students. A partner program, Tom do Pantanal, was developed to bring the same message to students about the expansive region of natural wetlands in Brazil's southwest.

Housed in the same Rio office building, Jobim Music is the family's publishing enterprise. It recently completed a project the composer himself had initiated but was unable to complete--Cancioneiro Jobim (Jobim, Songwriter), a five-volume set of songbooks documenting in elaborate arrangements for piano all of his recorded works. Arranged by Jobim himself and his son, Brazilian pianist Eumir Deodato, and German conductor Claus Ogerman, the music is presented in oversize books and accompanied by extensive text in Portuguese and English, historic photographs, graphics of album covers, with discographical and bibliographical information.

"He always intended to leave a written version of his work," Paulo says, "but the idea of the songbook as a special kind of book was inspired by the famous Rogers and Hart, Cole Porter, and Gershwin songbooks, and was reinforced by the illustrated Beatles songbooks of the late 1960s."

Perhaps it's not surprising that a recent survey found that the catchy "The Girl from Ipanema," one of Jobim's biggest hits, is still widely popular with North American audiences four decades after it was written. Thanks to the work of the Jobim Institute and others in Brazil, the weighty legacy of this singular artist--his numerous contributions to global culture beyond his most recognizable bossa nova hits--will be given the attention it has long deserved.