One of the most relaxing records ever made was cut by musicians who could barely tolerate each other. This episode digs into the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto, starting with American jazz losing ground to rock and roll while João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim stripped samba down to a whispered guitar style in 1958. We follow the records that traveled to New York in a bassist's suitcase, Stan Getz's million-selling Jazz Samba, and the rhythmic errors American players introduced by forcing swing onto straight-eighth bossa nova.

We then enter the March 1963 A&R Studios sessions: producer Creed Taylor's plan to document the authentic sound, the erasure of bassist Sebastião Neto from the credits, the clash between Getz playing ahead of the beat and Gilberto singing behind it, the insult Jobim diplomatically mistranslated, and Astrud Gilberto' ...