Walter Wanderley

Brazilian organist/composer Walter Wanderley was celebrated for his sound on the organ, generating a crisp, lightweight, staccato attack that can be mistaken for no one else's. Wanderley started playing the piano at age five, taking a year of theory at 12, and well before he was out of his teens he moved to Sao Paulo and got a recording contract. Juxtaposing American hits and Afro-Cuban dance music, he built a following in Brazil during the 1950s, and by the early '60s, he was immersed in the emerging bossa nova field, recording with João Gilberto in 1961 and on his own. Encouraged by Tony Bennett, Wanderley took off for New York in 1966, where Creed Taylor recorded him for Verve. His first album, Rain Forest, yielded a Top 30 hit single, "Summer Samba," proving that bossa nova was far from a spent force in 1966.