The architect of one of the smoothest genres in music hated the piano as a kid and wanted to play soccer instead. This episode follows Antonio Carlos Jobim, known as Tom, from the Tijuca district of Rio de Janeiro, where he was born in 1927, through the 1935 death of his diplomat father, the family’s move to a then-quiet Ipanema, and the stepfather who persistently coaxed him onto the bench. Jobim later theorized that creating music requires an intense deficit, and he named the void left by his father as the engine that made him escape into songwriting.

We look at his unusual education: atonal composition with a German emigre teacher, the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, and the samba and choro playing outside his door, which he fused by slowing the samba pulse to a whisper and painting unresolved major seventh chords over it, with the natural world of Rio as his source code. The hosts recount the long-distance telephone collaboration with Vinicius de Moraes on the Black Orpheus score, Joao Gilberto’s 1958 recordings that gave bossa nova its shape, the 1962 Carnegie Hall concert, the 1964 Getz/Gilberto album and Astrud Gilberto’s untrained delivery of The Girl from Ipanema, the 1965 Grammys where Jobim lost Best New Artist to the Beatles, his 1974 collaboration with Elis Regina on Waters of March, his grandson Daniel playing at the 2016 Rio Olympics opening, and his choice to postpone cancer surgery to finish Antonio Brasileiro before his death in 1994.

• Why Jobim compared his grief to the physical ailments of other creators as a necessary handicap
• How a major seventh chord engineers a feeling of yearning that mirrors childhood loss
• Playing melodies through a phone receiver to a lyricist stationed in Uruguay
• Bossa nova as an acoustic Trojan horse in the loud, electric mid-1960s
• Inspiration as a passing profile on a busy street, and why writing it down freezes the moment