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

by Castro, Ruy

  And, unbeknownst to all, bossa nova was already being dreamed up.

  For many members, even those who later became celebrities, having belonged to the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club was one of the greatest achievements of their lives. Just ask the saxophonist Paulo Moura. He was seventeen, a tailor’s apprentice, and for a while was refused membership. On arriving at the club and asking for an application to join, he learned that his admission hinged on what he knew how to play on the clarinet he carried under his arm. (All members had to be able to dance, sing, or play an instrument, even if they did it badly—but not too badly.) The boy played a few scales and his judges, their ears finely tuned to what they had heard Benny Goodman do with the same instrument, were not overly impressed. Moura got in by the skin of his teeth, and only because the club needed a clarinetist. Two years later, Paulo Moura would face a tougher jury, that of the long-haired National School of Music, and would play those same scales so well that they not only admitted him, they made him skip ahead to the fifth year. Those girls were a little too strict.

  Johnny Alf, then twenty years old, needed a piano. Compared to the other members, the young Alf (whose real name was Alfredo José da Silva) was considered poor. His father was an army corporal who had been drafted to fight in the Brazilian civil war of 1932, and died in combat in the valley of Paraíba when Alfredo was only three years old. His mother, a maid, had gone to work in the home of a family in Tijuca and took Alfredo with her. His mother’s boss liked music, and the boy. She enrolled him in IBEU (Instituto Brasil–Estados Unidos—Brazilian-American Institute), where they gave him his nickname and made him study classical piano with the instructor, Geni Bálsamo. But, because he had to share the instrument with other family members, Alf spent more time listening to records by the “King” Cole Trio or the English pianist George Shearing than actually practicing. When he found out that the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club had a piano that was silent most of the time, he overcame his extreme shyness and joined. He was easily accepted: all Alf had to do was to open the piano and run his fingers over the keys for fifteen seconds.

  The Sinatra-Farney Fan Club piano was an old brown upright Playel, the heroic ex-accompaniment to silent films, with keys so decayed that it appeared to have been a reject from the cinema for the deaf. It had been donated by a member named Carlos Manga, whose mother had wanted to get rid of it and had thought about selling it to the rag-and-bone man. It was out-of-tune down to the very last note, and following its donation, the club evicted a family of cockroaches that were nesting in it, turned it over to a piano tuner, and had it revarnished. Alf had permission to spend weekday afternoons—outside the club’s normal opening hours—practicing and trying out songs like “I’m in the Mood for Love” and “How High the Moon,” as long as he didn’t make too much noise.

  Noise was the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club’s main problem. Despite the tolerant attitude of the owners of the house, Dr. José Queiroz and Dona Jandira, Joca’s parents, and Dona Zeca, Didi and Teresa’s mother, the girls were only given permission to turn the basement into a club provided that they didn’t bother the neighbors. This limited the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club’s activities to Saturday afternoons and evenings, so in the beginning a good part of the music that was played there came from an ancient Victrola set up by the father of a member named Oswaldo Carneiro. It had only one speaker, a laryngitic amplifier, and a turntable that would only play 78 r.p.m. records—whose disposable steel RCA Victor needles were the length and thickness of rose thorns. It was those kind of needles, from the days of Enrico Caruso, that dragged doggedly over the ultramodern arrangements by Pete Rugolo for Stan Kenton’s orchestra on purple label Capitol records—which had not yet been released in Brazil, but that Luís Serrano provided with great pleasure. The fan club might have been dedicated to Sinatra and Farney, but the enthusiasm of its members for Stan Kenton was quite overwhelming. People would all but fall to their knees when listening to his recording of “Artistry in Rhythm.”

  The 78s comprised the club’s primary raw material, but they were high-risk objects: they had to be carried around the city and they broke easily. Only one member, an Englishman living in Rio named Derek, had a car; jitney vehicles were rare, Rio had barely toyed with the idea of a subway system, and the main form of transportation was the streetcar. It was a miracle that so many stacks of records arrived at the club in one piece, with all that to-ing and fro-ing. The previous year, 1948, the American Columbia label had released the first 33 r.p.m. long-plays, and there were already some in Brazil, but few people there had the equipment to play them on. The sleeves of the new LPs proudly announced that they had “unbreakable microgrooves”—and more than one dedicated IBEU student became tongue-tied trying to pronounce that.

  The news that Sinatra was releasing a new record always stirred up a frenzy of excitement, although it wasn’t anything particularly unusual. Stars like him released a record every fortnight in the United States, given that the 78s only yielded two sides. This record would finally make it to Brazil, following some delay, and bring together everyone in the club to gather around the sacred object. The records were fantastically resilient to normal use, but in the case of those that were played most often (such as “That Old Feeling,” side A, and “Poinciana,” side B, sung by Sinatra, a Columbia blue label recording), the wax quickly deteriorated from jet black to milky gray after weeks of being subjected to punishment by the needles.

  The adulation for Sinatra was so intense that if Farney had not returned to Brazil and appeared at the club in person, his fans would have been perfectly content with Frank. As the latter was an untouchable deity, they required nothing from him, save that he continue to record two hits every fortnight. As if that weren’t enough, the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club felt as if its admiration were returned in kind, for when they wrote a letter to Frank, he wrote back! Through the American Columbia, Luís Serrano managed to get hold of Sinatra’s “address” (actually that of his main fan club in the United States) and as a result, the mail would periodically deliver to Dr. Moura Brito street, lovingly “autographed” photos, “unreleased” records, and abundant material on Sinatra.

  Together with Serrano, the other main supplier of memorabilia for the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club was Dick Farney. Upon his return from the States, he was delighted to learn that a Brazilian fan club had been established in his honor—and, even better, a fan club that suited his low-key character, without the hysterical foolishness typically lavished on other singers. The young men and women of Tijuca were serious, and in their company, he was able to forget that he was “the romantic Brazilian troubadour,” as he was dubbed in America. With them, he was able to talk about modern jazz, discuss piano styles, and even debate the latest stylistic innovations of Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, and Lennie Tristano, which were emerging on the West Coast.

  The kids in the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club were also the kind he could invite to his home (actually that of his parents, with whom he lived) on Rua Dr. Júlio Ottoni in the fashionable, upper-class district of Santa Teresa. They became such good friends that Dick would sometimes even go to Tijuca himself to pick some of them up in his Cadillac convertible, which was black with a white top, and which he had purchased from Carmen Miranda and brought back from the United States. The gatherings at his home involved long conversations, in which Dick would describe his encounters with their heroes—Nat “King” Cole, Mel Tormé, Woody Herman, Anita O’Day, and, the greatest honor of all, Frank—to whom he would refer, perfectly naturally, by their first names. “Well, then I said to Frank …” All of those conversations were highlighted with records that only he could have, like an acetate disc with Frank singing and President Truman playing the piano. Or Dick would sit down at the piano and, accompanied by his brother Cyleno on drums, demonstrate what it was he was trying to say. Almost all of his gatherings turned into live performances.

  It had never occurred to any member of the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club that Dick might be exaggerating the details of his
intimacy with the American idols (after all, what about those photos in which he appeared with them?), and everyone’s heartbeats quickened when one of those idols came to tour Brazil and Dick invited them to his home—in the presence of his Tijuca fans. That’s what happened when they heard that Billy Eckstine was coming to sing in the Golden Room of the Copacabana Palace. The boys prepared a vocal arrangement of “I Apologize” to greet him at the airport, but at the last minute Eckstine failed to appear, and the disappointment was overwhelming. But Stan Kenton—Stan Kenton!—traveled to Brazil from Argentina on vacation and went to visit Dick. He didn’t come to perform, but one of the musicians who was traveling with him played one or two intimate numbers with one of the more liberal female members of the club.

  However, nothing surpassed the night on which Sinatra-Farney Fan Club members rubbed elbows with the singer Frankie Laine at Dick’s house. As is almost inevitable among singers, Laine would sometimes decide to clarify a certain piece of information by singing, and suddenly, the boys were right there listening to one of their heroes do live what he did on his records: sing “Jezebel.” And the entire club felt as if they had played a small part when, years later, Frankie Laine recorded—in Portuguese—Dorival Caymmi and Carlinhos Guinle’s “Não tem solução” (There’s No Solution), which Dick had taught him at his home.

  By the summer of 1950, the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club had fifty paying members; they were a select few. Non-members could only attend gatherings if they were invited by a member, whether they were the millionaire jazz enthusiast Jorginho Guinle, who was invited by Dick, or the teenage Ivan Lessa, a future writer and an unrestrained fan of Billy Eckstine. What limited the number of members was the condition that everyone had to know how to do something—a requirement that many, out of shyness, did not try to fulfill. But once admitted, all new members felt suffused with the delightful certainty of artistic vocation, even though they didn’t always possess the corresponding talent.

  Some considered themselves dancers, others played an instrument (those who were already professional musicians, like the violinist Fafá Lemos, had a definite advantage). Everyone, without exception, sang or, at the very least, were pros at lip-synching to famous recordings. The majority wanted to believe that, as happened in musicals with Gene Kelly, Sinatra, and Ann Miller (“On the Town” was the hit of the year), music would suddenly burst from the clouds—played by an invisible MGM orchestra led by Lennie Hayton—and that it was only a matter of going out and tap-dancing on the sidewalks, without a single passerby regarding you strangely.

  The Sinatra-Farney Fan Club gave them a chance to do just that, or at least something like it. In the beginning, the shows took place in the basement of Rua Dr. Moura Brito. Their forte was mock jam sessions, with the defenseless “The More I See You” subjected to the whims of Johnny Alf or Raul Mascarenhas on the piano, or the boldness of the very young João Donato on the accordion. They also put on comical sketches, in which two members would ridicule their favorite villains, Bing Crosby and Al Jolson, lip-synching to a recording of their duet in “The Spaniard That Blighted My Life.” (Farney’s great singing rival, Lúcio Alves, was deliberately ignored.) They would also entertain themselves with dance numbers, and games of “guess who’s singing?,” testing their knowledge of the most unguessable American music trivia. But the highlight was, naturally, special appearances by Dick himself, who would often go to the club and create a traffic jam in Tijuca when he parked his Caddy in Rua Dr. Moura Brito.

  Much of what was sung or played there was recorded on an antedeluvian American Revere tape machine, which was the size of a suitcase. (Unfortunately, the Revere’s case was a suitcase and, despite its weight, also traveled through the city by streetcar, from members’ homes to the club and vice-versa.) Blank tapes were hard to come by, forcing them to record over things that had already been recorded, which broke their hearts. Thus, treasures such as the first notes of Donato’s accordion in “I Wish I Knew” and Alf on the piano in “Stella by Starlight” were lost forever.

  The sounds that came out of the basement rarely pleased the neighbors. For this reason, promptly at 10:00 P.M., the two policemen who made the rounds of the neighborhood would knock on the door of the club to remind them of the silence curfew. They did so very much against their own personal wishes, because when they arrived a little early, the young policemen would forget about their beat and sit down on the sidewalk, enjoying the music. It was then that the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club realized that it was growing too big to limit its activities to the basement. If they could not have Radio City Music Hall in New York at their disposal, the only thing left to do was to take over Rio de Janeiro.

  The first activities transferred out of the basement were the jam sessions. At first, they took place on Saturday nights at dance halls like Avenida and Brazil, on Avenida Rio Branco, and then they moved to the Chez Penny nightclub in Copacabana. They were often visited by musicians who had already turned professional, such as the pianist Jacques Klein and the tenor saxophonist Cipó, who adored playing with them. Or by the veteran American soprano saxophonist Booker Pittman, who had lived in Brazil for years, but whose heart would never leave the brothels of Storyville, in New Orleans. (Booker was well received, despite the fact that everyone hated his instrument. The worldwide craze for soprano sax had not yet begun and the only well-known players on the surface of the planet, besides Booker, were Sidney Bechet and the Brazilian hillbilly artist Ratinho, Jararaca’s associate.)

  But the jams were small in order to accommodate all of the club’s talent, and they began to offer complete entertainment packages for anyone who wanted to hire them to liven up their parties. (Well, not exactly “hire”—not only were the boys not paid, they didn’t even receive a stipend for the streetcar or for a snack during their performances. Their “payment” was the possibility of being invited to other parties to show off their talents.) Thus, the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club managed to get into the Tijuca Tennis Club, the smart Fluminense club, and the Athletic Association of the Bank of Brazil; performed musical and comical sets at a benefits show held at the Rio Teatro Municipal; and even traveled to perform in Curitiba, in the remote state of Parana.

  The artistic director and founding member of the club was law student and bank teller Carlos Manga. Among the privileges of his position was being the club’s official Sinatra impersonator—those who were resentful, due to having had their membership applications denied, said that this job should have been Dick’s. As director, the image that Manga had of a modern show consisted of furnishing the setting, such as a bar, with American-style décor and arranging for the couple Tecla and Natanael to burst through a screen onto the stage and dance the jitterbug (a type of St. Vitus’ dance with a boogie-woogie rhythm). Today, this might seem outdated, but in those days it so impressed the filmmaker Milton Rodrigues that he invited Manga to be his assistant on a melodrama that he was directing, “O Pecado de Nina” (Nina’s Sin), with Fada Santoro. Manga accepted and took along Dick’s brother, Cyleno, who became the romantic leading man, rechristened Cyl Farney. From 1951 on, the two worked together as director and star in the bigger movies from the Atlântida studio—which were detested, naturally, by their ex-companions of the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club, who had little respect even for the musicals produced by 20th Century Fox.

  However, despite its expansion and domination of new areas, the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club continued to depend on the basement in Moura Brito. It was there that Joca, Didi, and Teresa received members, planned rehearsals, arranged performances, and centered their activities. In July 1950, Dona Zeca, Didi and Teresa’s mother, passed away. The house was sold and the two girls went to live with relatives in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. Joca and her parents moved to an apartment in Urca, which was unsuitable for housing a club. This alone was sufficient to disband the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club, but there were other contributing factors.

  As was inevitable, some of the main stars of the club, like João Donato, Johnny Alf, P
aulo Moura, Raul Mascarenhas, Doris Monteiro, and Nora Ney, began to turn professional. Cyleno Farney and Carlos Manga were now involved in the film industry. Other members married and began to live on parole. Even Dick got married, which meant that he had less time for his fans, and he also moved to Urca. Although he allowed club correspondence to be sent to his new address in Rua Almirante Gomes Pereira, it just wasn’t the same. And to complete the final blow dealt involuntarily to the club by the institution of matrimony, Sinatra married Ava Gardner and entered his infamous celebrity hell. Success appeared to evade him: for the next three years, until 1953, all his recordings flopped, his films were terrible, and no one enjoyed watching him being given the run-around by Ava with a Spaniard named Mario Cabre. How could anyone be a fan of a singer who was being cheated on by his wife with a bullfighter?

  This all happened at the time when an artist by the name of Johnnie Ray was achieving popularity in the United States; he was a supremely romantic ballad singer (who was, curiously, deaf) whose greatest musical idiosyncrasy was to pronounce monosyllabic words like “cry” with three syllables: “ccc-rrr-yyy.” “Cry” was the title of the song that became his greatest hit. The Sinatra-Farney Fan Club crowd did not convert to Johnnie Ray, preferring to remain orphans. But the club had reached the end of the road.

  A limited end, because for a few years, the club continued to exist in spirit. Some jam sessions still took place at Dick’s new house in the name of the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club. At other times, these gatherings took place at Jorginho Guinle’s luxurious apartment in Flamengo and, as they included ex-members of the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club, they allowed those who attended, like poet Vinícius de Moraes, to say that they had belonged to the club.