The architect of one of the smoothest genres in music hated the piano as a kid and wanted to play soccer instead. This episode follows Antonio Carlos Jobim, known as Tom, from the Tijuca district of Rio de Janeiro, where he was born in 1927, through the 1935 death of his diplomat father, the family's move to a then-quiet Ipanema, and the stepfather who persistently coaxed him onto the bench. Jobim later theorized that creating music requires an intense deficit, and he named the void left by his father as the engine that made him escape into songwriting.

We look at his unusual education: atonal composition with a German emigre teacher, the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, and the samba and choro playing outside his door, which he fused by slowing the samba pulse to a whisper and painting unresolved major seventh chords over it, with the n ...