Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World

by Castro, Ruy

  Other dances would come and go, including that of New Year’s Eve, 1949, and Joãozinho sang at many of them. His voice was powerful enough to be heard throughout the dance hall, and it didn’t matter if the audience joined in. With a good microphone, his every tremolo could be heard—which, together with being perfectly in tune, was one of his specialties. Joãozinho’s voice wouldn’t exactly shatter crystal, but then that of Orlando Silva, the object of his greatest admiration, did not achieve that extreme, either. And Orlando was even sensational in sambas and marchinhas, as he would prove at other Carnivals with his recordings of “Jardineira” (The Gardener), “Jurei, mas fracassei” (I Broke My Promise) and “Meu consolo é você” (You Are My Solace). When they called him “the new Orlando Silva,” Joãozinho swelled with pride, because that’s exactly what he wanted to be.

  He was now living for music to the exclusion of all else. His guitar became almost a part of his body, and one of his pastimes was to sit in the window of his home in Praça da Matriz, singing to girls who walked past in their frilly dresses. Some songs had lyrics that bore an impudent message, such as “Um cantinho e você” (In a Corner with You), a current hit of Dick Farney’s. But the messages, if they were even understood, were received in fun by the girls because Joãozinho, despite being continually surrounded by female friends, had never had a real girlfriend in Juazeiro. If he had been able to, he would have dated Ieda, the prettiest girl in town—a gaúcha whose father, a civil servant, had been transferred there. Ieda had blonde hair and green eyes, and she inflamed the desire of all the boys. She liked Joãozinho to serenade her at her window, but when it came to choosing a boyfriend, she opted for a young man named Charles, over whom the other girls squabbled. The boys of Juazeiro envied Charles and, given that they could not beat him in the game of conquests, spitefully branded him a fool and tried to show him up in the only way they knew how, with their songs and guitar playing.

  The guitar fit Joãozinho’s reserved character like a glove. Not that he was shy; his friends from Juazeiro describe him as anything but. If he had been, he wouldn’t have opened up to the point of sighing and telling the group, “I would like to marry a ballerina …” Nor would he have stood at the microphone of the sound system and dedicated his songs to the girls of the town. On the contrary: he was witty, talkative, and could be delightfully devilish, as when he attributed those dedications to other boys who already had girlfriends, forcing them to explain themselves, and enjoying seeing them get into trouble. However, the arrival of a stranger in the group was enough to make him hide behind his guitar. Without realizing it, he began to turn his instrument into a shield, to prevent the world from getting too close. Luckily, the world rarely went to Juazeiro.

  His father was not at all happy about Joãozinho playing the guitar. His plans for Joãozinho involved him becoming a doctor, engineer, lawyer, or other serious professional. And if he didn’t become any of the latter, then he would inherit the company, together with his brother. Mr. Juveniano had still not realized that Joãozinho was not made for the world of business or academics. And among other idiosyncratic characteristics, Joãozinho was the least religious in a family of pietists and devotees. Not even Dadainha, the eldest sister and the only one with any kind of influence over him, managed to drag him into “The Unfinished Symphony.” (Years later, Joãozinho would embrace his faith to the point of crossing himself before entering an elevator. But in Juazeiro, he seemed very removed from those kind of concerns.) Joãozinho’s absence at church put his father in a very awkward position with the other children, but what truly bothered him was that Joãozinho wanted nothing to do with anything that wasn’t his guitar.

  In an attempt to bring him into line, he stopped giving him the usual small change for the cinema, jujubes, and other children’s treats. This created a problem for Joãozinho, who then had no money to buy cigarettes (having taken up smoking) or even worse, strings for his guitar. Any other child would have conformed under such paternal pressure. But he was saved by the unhesitating solidarity of his friends, who set aside money from their monthly allowances and took up a collection in order to subsidize his guitar string purchases—and thus, the evenings in Juazeiro continued to be lulled by his renditions of “Naná.”

  However, as if the pressure from his father weren’t enough, Juazeiro was beginning to feel too small for Joãozinho. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday in June 1949, he felt ready to leave and move far away with his voice. The first step would be to travel to Salvador, where he would sometimes go, by train, with his cousin Dewilson. The trip took twenty-four hours by train, with an overnight stay in Senhor do Bonfim, and they would take bananas to eat on the journey. During these trips to the capital, he would restrict himself to strolling through the city and coveting the radio station buildings from afar, without having the courage to actually go in and say that he was a singer. After all, he had no idea whom to ask for. But he had several important cousins living in Salvador, like Jovino, Alípio, and Yulo. When he went to live there, they would help him with the only thing he needed: to get into one of those radio stations. His voice would do the rest.

  During the last guitar sessions beneath the tamarind tree, once he had decided to leave Juazeiro, Joãozinho was in a euphoric mood, and throwing his arms wide in anticipation of what awaited him in Salvador, he announced to his friends, “Champagne, women, and music, here I come!”

  And he went.

  But João Gilberto knew from the beginning that he would not stay long in Salvador; he was on his way to Rio de Janeiro.

  Part I

  The Great Dream

  1

  The Sounds That Came out of the Basement

  The little green wallet: the passport to proximity to the inaccessible gods

  In the summer of 1949, the natives were restless in the land of Carnival. The cuícas rumbled in the streets of Rio in February, and the knobs of the Philcos were already catching fire to the sounds of that year’s hits. Every three minutes, National Radio would pound out “Chiquita bacana” by Emilinha Borba and “General da banda” by Blecaute. Not even the deaf were spared the carnage. And this wasn’t even one of the worst Carnivals: some sambas and marchinhas were fun, like the euphoric “Que samba bom!” (What Great Samba!), the risqué “Jacarepaguá,” and the surly “Pedreiro Waldemar” (Waldemar the Stonecutter). There were dozens of other songs, written to last about as long as the effects of an inhaled squirt from a Rodouro ether atomizer at the Hotel Quitandinha dance in Petrópolis, but that, nevertheless, people learned and sang. The samba schools were for the samba dancers, not the tourists, foreign or domestic. And given that television didn’t exist, no one stayed at home like couch potatoes, merely experiencing the bizarre chaos vicar iously. They went out into the streets to have fun; during the first two months of the year, the entire city of Rio de Janeiro was a Carnival with a cast of millions (to be exact, 2,377,451 participants, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics in 1950).

  Put that way, it sounds fantastic, but for those who didn’t like samba and hated Carnival, it could be hell. That summer of 1949, for example, a gang of young men and women from Tijuca, in the Zona Norte (Northern Zone) of Rio, had better things to do than to parade around the Carnival King. They were very busy restoring, painting, and decorating a 1,500-square-foot basement at 74, Rua Dr. Moura Brito. It wasn’t exactly a basement, but the ground floor, with a separate entrance, of a two-story house, the residential part of which was on the second floor. The girls were named Joca, Didi, and Teresa Queiroz, were aged between fifteen and seventeen years old and, like all their friends,wore ponytails, checkered skirts and knee socks, and swooned over Robert Taylor. The three bobby-soxers studied at the Instituto Brasil–Estados Unidos (Brazilian-American Institute), were cousins, and lived in their family’s two-story house.

  They hosted a work party for their neighborhood friends and transformed the basement: they waxed the parquet floor; they lined the ceiling with a gr
een-and white-striped canvas; they created a makeshift minibar with an old Norge refrigerator filled with supplies of Crush, Guará, and Coca-Cola; and—most importantly—they papered the walls with record sleeves, clippings from Life and O Cruzeiro magazines, photos, and anything else connected with their favorite singers, Frank Sinatra and his Brazilian counterpart Dick Farney. (Later, the décor would be further improved with a huge poster of the two idols—together!)

  By the entrance, Joca, Didi, and Teresa hung the framed musical scores of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” and João de Barro and Alberto Ribeiro’s “Copacabana,” cut in two, forming a rectangle. The two songs were symbols of that era. “Night and Day,” first recorded in 1932 by Fred Astaire, would become almost the exclusive property of Sinatra in the forties and, combined with his collection of bow ties, had been one of the main causes of female fainting fits during World War II. (Those who are less than a hundred years old might not believe it, but Frank Sinatra was a sex symbol in those days. He was also so thin that when he walked around on stage with the microphone in his hand—he was one of the first singers to do this—he had to be careful not to disappear behind the cord.) And “Copacabana” was the song that shot Brazilian Dick Farney to fame, proving to nonbelievers that it was possible to be hip, romantic, and sensual in Portuguese, without the operatic raptures of Vicente Celestino.

  There was a reason for the excitement of Joca, Didi, and Teresa and their friends: the basement was being overhauled in order to become the headquarters of a fan club—the first in Brazil.

  If Farnésio Dutra, a Carioca, had kept his original name, he would probably not have gone far. But with such a charming name as Dick Farney, the velvet fingers that played piano in Carlos Machado’s orchestra at the Urca Casino back when gambling was allowed, and his casual, soft singing style, his opportunities increased tenfold. With just one record, he became the national answer to the prayers of a good number of young postwar Brazilians who had fallen in love with the American swing bands, crooners, and vocal ensembles. For these young people—whose reservations about Carmen Miranda derived largely from the fact that she had not become sufficiently Americanized—the world was not a tambourine, but rather Axel Stordahl’s sophisticated harmonies for Sinatra’s records with Columbia. Or, at its most extreme, the sea of guitars, violins, cellos, and oboes led by maestro Radamés Gnatalli, lapping at the sands and mermaids embodied in the music sung by Dick. The suave Farney recorded “Copacabana” with Continental in July 1946, at the age of 25. Then, in an unheard-of move by a Brazilian novice singer, he barely waited for the wax to dry before leaving his fans watching the ships in Praça Mauá, boarding one of them in search of the greatest adventure: trying to build a career in America as an American singer.

  Successfully singing in English in the United States seemed like madness at a time when Brazilian musicians’ only apparent use was to feature as whimsical characters in Walt Disney films set in Bahia. (Or not? After all, his namesake, Dick Haymes, was Argentine—and despite everything, he was Dick Haymes!) It’s true that Farney already had a starting contract for fifty-two weeks with the radio chain NBC—the brainchild of an American conductor named Bill Hitchcock, who had heard him at the Urca. The opportunities in Brazil for singers like him, who needed to be accompanied by a large orchestra, were few and far between. President Eurico Gaspar Dutra had threatened to close the casinos (“You’ll shee: I shall closhe the cashinoshe,” he announced in his peculiar diction), and indeed he did. In doing so, he also shut down the orchestras who played at them, and laid off innumerable crooners.

  So what did Dick have to lose now? Not a lot, and maybe something would pan out. He had a good image, perfect English, the voice of Bing Crosby (with a few Sinatra-like touches) and, most importantly, he had already mastered an enviable jazz piano style. And didn’t everything work out? Within a short time, reports began to arrive that Dick was truly dominating the chic cabarets of New York, recording hits such as “Tenderly” with Majestic Records, and that he had even managed to land two radio programs dedicated exclusively to him, sponsored by Pepsi-Cola and Chesterfields cigarettes. Of course, there were those who sneered quietly to themselves and refused to believe the reports.

  In order to silence the skeptics, live recordings of those programs, brought over on V-discs by Dick’s father, began to make the rounds of the radio stations in Rio, as if providing proof of the crime. (V-discs were sixteen-inch 33 r.p.m. acetate records produced by the Allied forces during World War II in order to bombard the Axis powers with Glenn Miller recordings. They were part of Allied propaganda. With the final victory of “In the Mood” over “Die Fahne Hoch,” those cumbersome objects were used to record everything, but only the radio stations had the equipment needed to play them.) From that point on, no one doubted that Americans were actually paying money to hear a Brazilian named Dick Farney.

  In the two and a half years that followed his departure, his Brazilian recording label, Continental, continued to flood the domestic market with the songs he had recorded, of which he had left behind a large supply before he departed. His renditions of other songs that were even more modern than “Copacabana,” like “Ser ou não ser” (To Be or Not to Be), “Marina,” and “Esquece” (Forget) were launched in dribs and drabs during 1947 and 1948, in the hope of maintaining Farney’s popularity should he return one day.

  Dick return? At that point, no one in Brazil thought that would happen. The more presumptuous believed that, if he continued in the same vein, Dick would soon overshadow Sinatra himself and, following in Carmen Miranda’s footsteps, would only return to Brazil on vacation. After all, his recording of “Tenderly,” a ballad by the pianist Walter Gross—at that time accompanist to the young Mel Tormé—had entered the American charts, or so they believed. Why would Dick want to return to Brazil?

  But in December 1948, he announced his return to Rio de Janeiro—to stay. He would leave behind the success he had managed to build abroad in order to pursue his career in Brazil. No one really understood why, but Brazilians being who they are, many saw this as a patriotic gesture, and his popularity in Brazil exploded. No one questioned his return. If they had, and Dick had replied—like many others before and after him—”The food didn’t agree with me,” “I missed my mother,” or “Folks, there’s no moonlight like this, etc.,” they would have thought it perfectly normal. But Dick didn’t proffer any of those clichés, and, anyway, they didn’t fit to his image as a well-bred, refined, and wordly gentleman.

  The truth was that he returned because his contract with NBC had expired and there weren’t any promising opportunities on the horizon—a common situation for any musician in his own country, but very inconvenient for a foreigner.

  And besides, he did miss his mother.

  A few months before Dick Farney’s return, Praça Mauá would receive another Brazilian who had come from New York: the broadcaster Luís Serrano, who stepped off the boat with a suitcase full of records and two or three ideas in his head. The records were the latest hits released in the United States by Capitol, a recording label founded in 1943 in Los Angeles by the composer Johnny Mercer and others. In just a short time, Capitol would become, both artistically and commercially, the most cutting-edge label in the market. Every label needs at least one star in order to launch itself. Well, Capitol started with the guitarist Les Paul (the very same inventor of the famous guitar), Woody Herman’s and Stan Kenton’s bands, the world-famous “King” Cole Trio, and singers like Mel Tormé, Margaret Whiting, Peggy Lee, Dinah Shore, Rose Murphy, and Nellie Lutcher. How about that? Only, none of them were stars when they were signed by Capitol. But it didn’t take long for them to become stars, and when that happened, Capitol became the hottest record label on the planet. The company even built that revolutionary building, shaped like a stack of records, on Vine Street in Los Angeles.

  In 1948, Capitol identified a market to be conquered in Brazil, and considered installing a representative there. Luís Serrano was the go-
between, and the Brazilian recording label that was awarded its representation rights was Sinter, which had just barely been launched—and, not coincidentally, belonged to Luís’s brother Paulo Serrano. The first records produced by those stars began to come out in Brazil in 1950, which spared jazz fans from coming to blows over them in Rio stores that imported records, such as Lojas Murray and Suebra.

  Luís Serrano had another idea which he didn’t hesitate to carry out: hosting a daily program called Disc-Jockey on Rádio Globo, from 6:00 to 6:30 P.M. The program’s very name was ultra-hip and, among other innovative features, he played records (almost all the music heard on radio then was live), interviewed musicians, and encouraged significant interaction between fans, just as had begun to be done in the United States. And just like in the United States, this exchange of information was much easier and more useful to him if the fans gathered in clubs—fan clubs—whose activities he would promote and which he could furnish with records (with an understandable preference for Capitol’s upcoming international events).

  Serrano inaugurated the program at the end of that year and mentioned the idea of the clubs on the air. Joca, Didi, and Teresa were the first to jump at it. In a few days, they had appropriately outfitted the basement in Tijuca; they informed Serrano that they would be the owners; he alerted Sinatra and Farney fans over the microphone at Rádio Globo; the fans began to appear in Rua Dr. Moura Brito; Dick Farney was returning to Brazil—and, in February of 1949, ignoring the uproar of cuícas and reco-recos coming from the uncivilized outside world, they declared the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club officially open.