Sérgio Mendes, Grammy-winning Brazilian jazz supremo who gave a fresh slant to bossa nova

He had two hits with Mas Que Nada, collaborated with Black Eyed Peas and ‘Brazilianised’ songs by music stars from the Beatles to Bacharach

Sérgio Mendes, who has died in Los Angeles aged 83, created a string of worldwide hits by combining bossa nova, the jazz-infused samba music of his native Brazil, with funk, hip-hop and other genres; recognition included three Grammy awards and an Oscar nomination for his role as co-writer of the song Real in Rio for the animated film Rio (2012), which traces the culture of his home city.
In a career stretching back more than half a century Mendes opened for Frank Sinatra at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1980, sang for Presidents Nixon and Reagan at the White House, and recorded with the rapper will.i.am from the hip-hop band Black Eyed Peas. 
Paul McCartney, moreover, once wrote a letter saying how much he enjoyed the Brazilian’s uptempo version of the Beatles’ standard The Fool on the Hill.
Mendes’s career included two big hits with the same song, Mas Que Nada, an upbeat cover of a Jorge Ben number: his original version, released in 1966, became the first song sung entirely in Portuguese to reach the Top Five of the US Billboard charts; the 2006 recording was part of his will.i.am collaboration.
It mattered little to Mendes if someone else had used a number first, or had even turned it into a hit. With his band Brasil 66 he had the confidence to give a fresh slant to any song, as was shown in the sparkle he brought to Simon and Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair, his Brazilian treatment of Burt Bacharach’s The Look of Love and his lilting version of the Beatles’ With a Little Help From my Friends.
Despite Mendes being the best-known Brazilian musician outside the country, not everyone appreciated his work. Purists accused him of dumbing down the native beat, while others suggested he was producing smoothly reupholstered cruise-liner music. For some Brazilians, he had spent so long out of the country – more than half a century – that he had lost touch with his roots.
“I’ve heard it all – I’m ‘retro’, ‘lounge’, ‘easy listening’, ” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2008. “I think what happened was that the feel-good tunes of bossa nova were used as Muzak in supermarkets and elevators because the melodies were so strong. But that’s a kind of praise for the music to me.”
Sérgio Santos Mendes was born in Niterói, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, on February 11 1941. His father was a doctor who used penicillin to treat his sickly young son for osteomyelitis, thought to be the first time the drug had been used in the country.
Having spent three years incapacitated, the young Sergio was too frail for outdoor sports. Instead, his mother introduced him to classical piano lessons at the local music school. He recalled “a middle-class life… [in] a calm little town where we went to the beach every day and the movies at the weekend”.
Mendes’s fascination with jazz emerged after hearing the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s album Take Five at a friend’s house. Music by Art Tatum, Horace Silver and Oscar Peterson followed. Soon Mendes had formed a group of jazz aficionados. “It sounded so different from anything I had ever heard before,” he told an interviewer.
Within a couple of years he was working with local bands, playing for parties, proms and dances. On one occasion he took a ferry to downtown Rio to step in for a friend at Bottles Bar, a lively nightclub in the rough Copacabana area, an experience that opened his ears to the musical possibilities of bossa nova.
He formed the Bossa Rio Sextet with two trombones, tenor saxophone, bass and himself on piano. Their first album, in 1962, was Você Ainda Não ouviu Nada! (You Haven’t Heard Anything Yet!), which became a major landmark in Brazilian instrumental music. They gave performances across Brazil and were hired by the country’s biggest textile company to be the opening act for its fashion tours, a gig that took them to Europe, the Middle East and Japan, where their brand of music was known as “Latin Rock”.
In 1962 Mendes performed with his compatriot and mentor Antonio Carlos Jobim in a bossa nova festival at Carnegie Hall, New York. At the Birdland Jazz Club the following day he met the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, who not only invited him on stage but also announced that he wanted to collaborate on an album together. The result was Cannonball’s Bossa Nova (1963). The following year Mendes recorded The Swinger from Rio under his own name for Atlantic Records, though it was not released until 1966.
Meanwhile, a coup in his homeland in 1964 coincided with the day that his son was born. His cryptically worded telegram to a friend about beers and children’s nappies was intercepted by the military who, suspecting a coded message, detained him for several hours. “How crazy is that?” Mendes recalled. “Brazil was in dark times. I packed my bags and I was gone.”
Settling in California, he built a new career and a new band, Brasil 64, which became Brasil 65 the following year. “I got there without knowing anyone, auditioned for jazz clubs in Los Angeles and just kept going,” he said. Before long he was listening to the Beatles and Bacharach. “They had such beautiful melodies that I thought, ‘If I can Brazilianise them it will sound totally different’,” he told the music critic Will Hodgkinson.
In the early days his music was instrumental, but in 1966 he invited the singers Lani Hall and Karen Philipp to join the band, which now became Brasil 66, its best-known incarnation. In November that year they appeared on BBC Two on the same edition of The Danny Kaye Show as Ella Fitzgerald, who herself had once covered Mas Que Nada.
Mendes, in those days a quietly spoken, handsome and bearded figure, signed to Herb Alpert’s A&M Records (Alpert later married Lani Hall). The result was the plainly titled Herb Alpert Presents Sergio Mendes & Brazil 66 (1966) and Look Around (1968), a pair of sunny, carefree albums offering no hint of what their creator had been through, although the ensuing entanglement with his former label Atlantic Records took some unravelling.
Mendes’s career hit something of a lull in the 1970s (with Brasil 77, for example, barely registering), he bounced back in 1983 with a cover of Dionne Warwick’s hit Never Gonna Let You Go that helped to propel his self-titled album to chart success. 
In 1993 he won a Grammy award for Brasileiro, a lively exploration of the percussion-driven music of his homeland. His second, a Latin Grammy, was a lifetime achievement award and in 2010 he picked up another Latin Grammy for Bom Tempo, another slice of rhythmically fresh inspiration.
Early in the new century Mendes was contacted by will.i.am, frontman of the Black Eyed Peas, who as a teenager had listened to the Brazilian’s vinyl albums. The resulting album Timeless (2006) featured an array of world and hip-hop stars lending their skills to some of Mendes’s most popular songs.
The 50th anniversary of Brasil 66 in 2016 was marked with a worldwide tour. That same year Mendes celebrated the Rio Olympics by collaborating with the Brazilian singers Baby do Brasil and Rogério Flausino on the song Se Ligaê; in 2019 he made an eagerly anticipated appearance at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, having taken to the West Holts “outernational” stage at the Glastonbury Festival six years earlier; and in 2020 he was the subject of a documentary, Sergio Mendes: In the Key of Joy.
Mendes is survived by his wife, the singer Gracinha Leporace, with whom he had performed since the 1970s; she can be heard on Timeless doing a jaunty duet with Stevie Wonder on the bossa nova number Berimbau. He is also survived by their two children and by three children from a previous marriage.
Sérgio Mendes, born February 11 1941, died September 5 2024