Brazil

Coordinates: 10°S 52°W / 10°S 52°W / -10; -52

Brazil (ⁱ/brəˈzɪl/; Portuguese: Brasil [bɾaˈziw] ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: República Federativa do Brasil,  listen  ), is the largest sovereign state in both South America and the Latin American region. It is the world's fifth-largest country, both by geographical area and by population. It is the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world, and the only one in the Americas.

Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean on the east, Brazil has a coastline of 7,491 km (4,655 mi). It borders all other South American countries except Ecuador and Chile and occupies 47.3 percent of the continent of South America. Its Amazon River basin includes a vast tropical forest, home to diverse wildlife, a variety of ecological systems, and extensive natural resources spanning numerous protected habitats. This unique environmental heritage makes Brazil one of 17 megadiverse countries, and is the subject of significant global interest and debate regarding deforestation and environmental protection.

MusicBrainz

MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create an open content music database. Similar to the freedb project, it was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the CDDB. However, MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a compact disc metadata storehouse to become a structured open online database for music.

MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, and the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, and the length of each track. These entries are maintained by volunteer editors who follow community written style guidelines. Recorded works can also store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, cover art, acoustic fingerprint, free-form annotation text and other metadata. As of 25 October 2015, MusicBrainz contained information about roughly one million artists, 1.5 million releases, and 15 million recordings.

End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.

Latin America

Latin America is the group of territories and countries in the Americas where Romance languages are spoken. The term originated in 19th century France to include French-speaking territories in the Americas within the larger group of countries that speak Spanish and Portuguese. It is therefore marginally broader than the term Iberian America or Spanish America, though it excludes French-speaking Quebec. Latin America consists of twenty sovereign states and several territories and dependencies which cover an area that stretches from the southern border of the United States to the southern tip of South America, including the Caribbean. It has an area of approximately 19,197,000 km² (7,412,000 sq mi), almost 13% of the earth's land surface area.

As of 2015, its population was estimated at more than 626 million and in 2014, Latin America had a combined nominal GDP of 5,573,397 million USD and a GDP PPP of 7,531,585 million USD. The term "Latin America" was first used in 1861 in La revue des races Latines, a magazine "dedicated to the cause of Pan-Latinism".

Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro (/ˈriːoʊ di ʒəˈnɛəroʊ, -deɪ ʒə-, -də dʒə-/; Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈʁi.u dʒi ʒɐˈnejɾu];River of January), or simply Rio, is the second-largest city in Brazil, the sixth-largest city in the Americas, and the world's thirty-ninth largest city by population. The metropolis is anchor to the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area, the second most populous metropolitan area in Brazil, the seventh-most populous in the Americas, and the twenty-third largest in the world. Rio de Janeiro is the capital of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's third-most populous state. Part of the city has been designated as a World Heritage Site, named "Rio de Janeiro: Carioca Landscapes between the Mountain and the Sea", by UNESCO on 1 July 2012 as a Cultural Landscape.

Founded in 1565 by the Portuguese, the city was initially the seat of the Captaincy of Rio de Janeiro, a domain of the Portuguese Empire. Later, in 1763, it became the capital of the State of Brazil, a state of the Portuguese Empire. In 1808, when the Portuguese Royal Court transferred itself from Portugal to Brazil, Rio de Janeiro became the chosen seat of the court of Queen Maria I of Portugal, who subsequently, in 1815, under the leadership of her son, the Prince Regent, and future King João VI of Portugal, raised Brazil to the dignity of a kingdom, within the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and Algarves. Rio stayed the capital of the pluricontinental Lusitanian monarchy until 1822, when the War of Brazilian Independence began. This is one of the few instances in history that the capital of a colonising country officially shifted to a city in one of its colonies. Rio de Janeiro subsequently served as the capital of the independent monarchy, the Empire of Brazil, until 1889, and then the capital of a republican Brazil until 1960 when the capital was transferred to Brasília.

João Gilberto

João Gilberto Prado Pereira de Oliveira, known as João Gilberto (Portuguese: [ˈʒwɐ̃w ʒiwˈbɛʁtu]; June 10, 1931), is a Brazilian singer, songwriter, and guitarist. His seminal recordings, including many songs by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, established the new musical genre of Bossa nova in the late 1950s.

Biography

João Gilberto was born in Juazeiro, Bahia, Brazil. From an early age, music was a part of Gilberto's life. His grandfather bought him his first guitar at the age of 14. During high school, Gilberto teamed up with some of his classmates to form a small band. Gilberto, who led the band, was influenced by Brazilian popular songs, American jazz, and even some opera, among other genres. After trying his luck as a radio singer in Salvador, Bahia, the young Gilberto was recruited in 1950 as lead singer of the vocal quintet Garotos da Lua (Moon Boys) and moved to Rio de Janeiro. A year and a half later, he was dismissed from the group for his lack of discipline (he would often show up late to rehearsals or not at all).