song: Samba de Uma Nota Só (One Note Samba)
artists: Caterina Valente & Dean Martin
performance: The Dean Martin Show (Season 2, 1966-67)
writers: Music by Antônio Carlos Jobim / Letras de Newton Mendonça (1960)

acoustic guitar: Caterina Valente
vocals: Caterina Valente & Dean Martin

This is a transcription of the wonderful performance of Jobim's Bossa nova-standard "One Note Samba" by Caterina Valente and Dean Martin on The Dean Martin Show. TV appearances like this one, and the great crooners like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, greatly helped exposing the music genre to the broader North American audience. I personally love the playfulness of this performance that makes this quite complex music appear to seamless to play. For guitarists, this is a great introduction to Bossa nova guitar playing: to the standard picking rhythm and to typical chord voicings in the genre.
The Portuguese lyrics are packed with wordplay that comments on the melody’s musical structure. There are two puns just in the title, "Samba de uma Nota Só". This literally translates to "samba of one note only", referring to the melody note sung throughout the first 8 bars of the verses (in this scale of A♭ Major, it is the 5th note/step, E♭.) And, in the common solfége / solfejo system, the 5th step also happens to be called sol, almost só, which is an almost inaudible difference once the music is flowing. I encourage you to try to spot the rest of the puns!