RIO DE JANEIRO: The year was 1956, and two of the founding fathers of bossa nova, Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, had just met at a Rio de Janeiro bar called the Casa Villarino.

The friendship that started that day would change the history of music, as the pianist and the poet helped reinvent Brazilian samba to give the world a silky-smoothe new genre that would come to define modernity and cool.