Buddy Deppenschmidt, who helped spur bossa nova boom

Buddy Deppenschmidt, a jazz drummer who learned the rhythms of Brazilian music on a State Department tour, then appeared on a best-selling 1962 album, “Jazz Samba,” which helped launch a worldwide bossa nova boom, died March 20 at a nursing facility in Doylestown, Pa. He was 85.

His daughter Allyson Cover confirmed the death but the family did not provide a cause.

For many years, Deppenschmidt was considered a musical footnote, a sideman who played on one of the most popular jazz recordings of all time but then disappeared from the limelight. “Jazz Samba,” which featured saxophone great Stan Getz and guitarist Charlie Byrd, was the first bossa nova recording by American musicians to become a major hit and remains the only jazz instrumental album to reach No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart.

Getz won a Grammy Award and became a jazz superstar, and Byrd was acclaimed throughout the world. Both were given credit for popularizing the bossa nova, especially after Getz’s 1963 hit song “The Girl From Ipanema.”

Byrd told DownBeat magazine in 1963 that “Buddy Deppenschmidt deserves an awful lot of credit for his part in the album,” but the full extent of his contribution to “Jazz Samba” was largely overlooked for years.

Music historian David Adler first highlighted Deppenschmidt’s role in a 2004 article in Jazz Times. Members of Byrd’s family disagreed with the assessment, but others, including Keter Betts, who was Byrd’s bass player at the time, corroborated Deppenschmidt’s recollection of the events.

In 1961, Deppenschmidt was a 25-year-old drummer working in Washington with Byrd, who was known for interspersing classical guitar pieces with jazz. That year, Byrd’s trio embarked on a three-month tour of 18 Central and South American countries as part of a cultural exchange program sponsored by the State Department.

“Everyone agrees about one thing,” Adler wrote in Jazz Times. “The seed for ‘Jazz Samba’ was planted during the Charlie Byrd Trio’s 1961 State Department tour.”

Deppenschmidt’s favorite stop on the tour was Brazil, where the new bossa nova music was taking shape. Bossa nova, which means roughly “new trend,” was based on Brazil’s traditional samba music, but with a slower, more gentle rhythm and delicate, sinuous melodies. Some of its earliest proponents included singer-guitarist João Gilberto and composers Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfa.

Brazilian nights

Several bossa nova recordings had been released in the United States, but it had yet to catch on as a major trend. During his time in Brazil, Deppenschmidt was transfixed by the music. After their concerts, he and Betts often went out to listen to Brazilian musicians in clubs, bars and people’s homes.

“There were nights we stayed up all night,” Deppenschmidt said in a 2013 interview with music writer Chris McGowan for the Brazilian Sound blog. “I’m glad I didn’t just go to embassy cocktail parties. I reserved most of my off time to hang out with local people and most of the time they were musicians.”

At a judge’s house in Bahia, the trio listened to bossa nova records, then played music together afterward.

“They passed the guitar and everyone played guitar,” Deppenschmidt said. “And his wife played the guitar; his son played piano and drums. That was the first time we ever heard Gilberto and Jobim. Keter and I went out the very next day and bought (Gilberto’s) records. And we started rehearsing in our hotel rooms. Just he and I.”

In another city, a musician spent hours teaching Deppenschmidt the subtle, syncopated two-beat rhythm of the bossa nova, in which the drummer typically uses a brush in one hand, a stick in the other.

As he and Betts began to practice the music together, Deppenschmidt later recalled, “I said, ‘We’ve got to do an album of this stuff.’”

Byrd was skeptical at first, thinking his fans at Washington’s Showboat Lounge would not go for the new music. Deppenschmidt and Betts finally prevailed on Byrd’s wife, Ginny, to give Brazilian music a try. Late in 1961, the trio began to work some bossa nova tunes into their repertoire, and the audiences immediately responded.

When Byrd’s record label showed no interest in a bossa nova, he went to Verve, Getz’s label. (Deppenschmidt said he first suggested to Byrd that Getz’s approach would be a good fit for the music.)

Byrd reserved Pierce Hall at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington for a recording session scheduled to begin at noon on Feb. 13, 1962. Getz and his producer, Creed Taylor, flew down from New York that morning.

“I was so up, it could have been a cloudy day and I would have thought it was sunny,” Deppenschmidt told The Washington Post in 2012. “I was just so happy we were finally doing this thing.”

Besides Getz, Byrd, Betts and Deppenschmidt, the musicians included Byrd’s brother Joe (then known as Gene Byrd) on rhythm guitar and sometimes bass, and Bill Reichenbach on percussion instruments. They recorded seven tunes in two hours. Getz and Taylor were back in New York in time for dinner.