To me the point of the bridge is that the first twelve bars "wind up" and the next four "wind down.""Girl From Ipanema" is about longing. This "Girl" in the title is a real person. At the time Jobim encountered her, she was a young teenager. She would periodically come into a cafe/bistro to buy cigarettes for her mother. It was the same cafe where the young Jobim would sit alone for hours composing songs. The delicate but perky "A" section evokes the feeling the young, impressionable and lonely songwriter might have gotten while noticing the beautiful, delicate but perky girl in the middle of her errand.
The "B" section evokes the aftermath of that encounter with a four-bar motif repeated three times. Each four-bar motif is enharmonic to a IV followed by iv in its related key. Together, they evoke a feeling of mounting and unresolvable tension of a man longing to speak to a woman who is unapproachable to him. That is the "wind-up" part.
At the end of the B section, the reverie has passed. One more time we hear the A section that evokes the memory of the delicate and perky young woman, carefree and oblivious to the composer's attention and longing.
| Gbmaj7 | % | B7 | % |
| Gbmaj7 | % | Gb-6 | % |
In bars 5-8 we shift everything up a minor third. E becomes our tonic note. F#-7 is the ii-7 in E, and D7 is the VIIb7 in E. We already established that VIIb7 is enharmonic to iv6. It so happens that ii-7 is enharmonic to IV6. So we can rewrite bars 5-8 as:
| IV6 | % | iv6 | % | (in E)
or
| A6 | % | A-6 | % |
Bars 9-12 shift the same cadence up another semitone. So we have the exact same cadence as before, but in F.
I'm not suggesting that anyone pick up a pen and alter the chart for Girl From Ipanema. That would be a crime! I'm only suggesting a different way to think about the bridge when soloing over it, so you can have a coherent mental framework to work with each four bars of the bridge instead of a sequence of seemingly unrelated chords that appear arbitrary even if they sound good. In summary:
- Bars 1-4: Blow over two bars in Gb major (#4), followed by two bars in Gb melodic ("jazz") minor.
- Bars 5-8: Go up a minor third and blow over two bars of A major (#4) followed by two bars of A melodic minor.
- Bars 9-12: Do it all over again, but a semitone higher, so Bb major (#4) followed by Bb melodic minor.
- Bars 13-16: Bring it home to F again with a standard 3-6-2-5 turnaround.
There you have it! Bars 1-12 of the Ipanema bridge are a series of three of these such cadences, but they never resolve. Instead, they climb, first by a minor third, then by a semitone, before the final turnaround in the last four bars bring us back to the final A section.
That was easy! (Not really, but I hope it helps someone else because it sure helped me.)
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