by Castro, Ruy
“Ninguém me ama” did a lot for a number of people. It launched Antônio Maria as a composer. For Nora Ney, who sang the song, it started her career. Recently departed from the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club, Nora had done very well in heeding Dick Farney’s advice to change her name (Iracema Ferreira) to something more artistic. It gave young evening piano players, like Tom (Antonio Carlos) Jobim and Newton Mendonça, a path to follow when they became composers. And for an even younger generation—that of Carlinhos Lyra, Roberto Menescal, and other fifteen-year-olds in 1952—it was also important for providing contrast. For them, “Ninguém me ama” was what they didn’t want to do.
Although the song’s success kept him in whiskey for several years, even Antônio Maria got fed up with it, because he could no longer go into nightclubs without the resident crooners starting to sing it, in an effort to ingratiate themselves with him. At one of these clubs, The Michel, when the pianist, on catching sight of him, started playing the opening bars, Maria jumped in ahead of the singer and parodied his own lyrics, singing: “Nobody loves me / Nobody cares / Nobody calls me / Baudelaire.”
The omnipresent quality of Antônio Maria’s music gave one the impression that he composed a great deal. In fact, he produced very little: around sixty songs, even if you count the frevos, dobrados, and maxixes that his friends charitably raved about. But when Maria got it right, he did it in style, which is what almost always happened in his partnerships with Ismael Netto, the leader of Os Cariocas. Maria and Ismael made ten songs together, of which “Canção da volta” (Returning Song) and “Valsa de uma cidade” (City Waltz) were more than enough to carve their names in bronze. In the latter, reporter-turned-lyricist Antônio Maria used a documentary style, which would later be adopted in bossa nova by his future nemesis Ronaldo Bôscoli.
By a cruel twist of fate, these and other songs were dubbed, for posterity, “the music of Antônio Maria,” when they were clearly written by Ismael Netto, with Maria providing the lyrics. The importance of Ismael’s contribution to Brazilian popular music as a harmonizer has yet to be recognized, but in his time he was a prodigy. In 1948, when Os Cariocas exploded with the constellation of voices in “Adeus, América” (Goodbye, America) and left other vocal ensembles open-mouthed with astonishment, Ismael was twenty-three years old. No one believed that he hadn’t received any formal music training. But he hadn’t, and from that point on, he certainly didn’t need it. Nor would he have time for it, because he died in 1956 at the age of thirty-one.
He soon became a legend at Rádio Nacional when it was realized that he could re-create with his voice, for conductor Radamés Gnatalli, the instrumental breaks that the orchestra played to accompany Os Cariocas on one of the programs for Um milhão de melodies: “The trombones go like this, the string section like that.” No one doubted that Ismael was capable of this, but what was unheard of was the amount of trust Radamés put in the young man. Another of his practices, which completely astonished Nacional’s composers, was the ease with which he could dissect a complicated vocal arrangement of some popular American group, like the Pied Pipers, and distribute the voices of Os Cariocas to reproduce exactly the same sound—merely to show that if he wanted to, he could do it.
Os Cariocas owed a large part of the quality of their music to the musical discipline of the group, which was enforced by Ismael, although he could have been a poster boy for the undisciplined. He liked to hit the bottle in a big way, and it was often a miracle that Ismael and his English metallic-blue Jaguar made it in one piece to Avenida Prado Júnior, where he lived.
His sheer size, which reminded one of the old cartoon character Alley Oop, might have explained his resistance, but it wouldn’t allow him to live forever. At the end of 1955, he had barely recovered from hepatitis when he went straight to Zica’s Bar and sank several beers with gin chasers, apparently indifferent to the fact that his liver was sending him a letter of resignation. To everyone’s surprise, it wasn’t liver failure that killed him. The following year, he caught pneumonia and fell into a coma in the hospital, dying within half an hour. Ismael had been unaware that he was diabetic.
The great specter in Antonio Carlos Jobim’s life, after the payment of his rent, was his fear of contracting tuberculosis. According to his family, all musicians ended up like that, especially late evening pianists. There could have been many causes for this, but the main ones must have been the continual opening and closing of nightclub doors, the starch from dress shirts in contact with one’s chest, the content of the glasses on top of the piano, the packs of cigarettes smoked while playing “Tea for Two,” the chatter of people who frequented those places, the completely miserable pay that one received for one’s work, and the fact that the schedule completely threw off one’s body clock, preventing one from going to the beach and from arranging to have lunch and dinner with people who worked from nine to six.
There was a great deal of myth surrounding TB among pianists, but in actuality, people only remembered the singer Vassourinha and the composers Noel Rosa, Jorge Faraj, and Newton Bastos as victims of the nocturnal plague—and none of them played the piano. Be that as it may, it was not for the purpose of taking such risks that Jobim had invested the cream of his youth hunched over Villa-Lobos, Debussy, Ravel, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, and Custódio Mesquita. And besides, he was already becoming tired of staring at his plate of steak and eggs at the Far West Bar, in Posto 6, where he would see the sun rise daily, after finishing work at the club.
All nightclub pianists would suffer more or less the same torment, but Tom (as everybody called him) felt especially close to one colleague: his childhood friend Newton Mendonça. The two had known each other since Tom’s family had moved from Tijuca to Ipanema in 1927, before he had even blown out the candle on his first birthday cake. When Tom arrived in Ipanema, Newton was already there. He was born in Rua Nascimento Silva, exactly seventeen days after Tom. Since they had become friends, wearing the same little sailor outfits and catching measles at the same time, the two had lived almost parallel lives. Together with a few other friends, they even formed a harmonica group.
Being neighbors, they were the beach bums of Rua Joana Angélica and fishing partners at the Rodrigo de Freitas lake, hanging out catching birds on Cantagalo hill. Both studied piano as children. And both had absent fathers: Tom’s father, a poet and employee of the Palácio do Itamaraty (the Brazilian Foreign Affairs Ministry), left home shortly after his birth and died when Tom was eight years old; Newton’s father, an Army captain and a French and English teacher, conspired against the dictator Getúlio Vargas and was imprisoned by the police. (Newton studied at the Military College and received his high school diploma in 1945 as the “orphan of a living father,” which is what they called the children of imprisoned military personnel who had been incarcerated for political reasons.) When Getúlio was deposed that year, Newton’s father was freed and then died shortly after of a heart attack, and his family lost what they had.
Like Tom, who dropped out of his architecture course before it even began, Newton abandoned his studies and went to work. His sister became a manicurist. Newton started as an interpreter in Galeão airport (he spoke French and a little English). Afterward, following in Tom’s footsteps, he became an evening pianist. Between all the bars, nightclubs, and slightly disguised whorehouses, they played at practically every address in the Zona Sul in the early fifties: Mocambo, Tudo Azul, Clube da Chave, Acapulco, Farolito, Mandarim, La Bohème, Dominó, Vogue, Michel, French Can-Can, Posto 5, Ma Griffe, and Caroussel. The two of them hadn’t played every single one of these clubs, but at many of them Newton would go in Tom’s place, or Tom would go in Newton’s. The symmetry by which they had lived their lives was broken during one of these rotations. In 1952, Tom decided he needed to switch from working nights to working days—that is, to find a job that still allowed him to continue working with music, but in some sort of downtown office, for which he would have to carry a briefcase and put in a standard commercial work day.
Preferably, he wanted a job where he wouldn’t have to accompany crooners who were incapable of singing a single note that wasn’t off-key. It was because of this that Tom would sometimes grab the nightclub microphone and sing out of tune himself. But mainly, he wanted a job where he wouldn’t be obliged to continually please singers.
“Ivon, do you think I’m good?,” he asked the then-famous singer Ivon Curi at the Michel nightclub, where he played.
“But of course, Tom. You’re great,” Ivon replied.
“But do you really think so?”
“Sure—what’s the problem?”
“Then tell that to Madame Fifi, to see if she’ll give me a raise.” Madame Fifi was the owner of the Michel, the nightclub on Rua Fernando Mendes.
Tom became the arranger for the recording company Continental and only sporadically returned to working at night, and only when the landlord was snapping at his heels, demanding an increase in his rent. At Continental, copying onto score sheets the samba music that the primitive sambistas composed on matchboxes, he decided to try his hand at composing, too. And he kept constant company with the man that every musician wanted to have at their side for at least five minutes: Radamés Gnatalli, who was also a conductor at Continental. (What was impressive was not the number of jobs that Radamés had, but the fact that he really worked at each and every one.)
That same year, 1952, his friend Newton Mendonça also decided he needed to change his life. And he did, but not significantly. He passed an exam and became an employee of the Civil Servants’ Hospital (by chance, in the Finance Department), where he only ever turned up to collect his paycheck, and he continued to play the piano at night. The theory is worthy of discussion, but this break in the symmetry between Tom and Newton might perhaps explain why, between those two boys of similar talents, Tom Jobim became Tom Jobim—and why Newton Mendonça did not become Tom Jobim.
Although the future would take them down very different roads, it’s likely that, had it been possible, either one of them would have traded places at the time with a man who was doing everything they loved with the piano: Johnny Alf.
Alf was the pianist at the Hotel Plaza nightclub, in Avenida Princesa Isabel, in Copacabana. He played his own compositions, like “Rapaz de bem” (Nice Guy), “Céu e mar” (Sky and Sea), “O que é amar” (What It Is to Love), “Estamos sós” (We’re Alone), and “É só olhar” (Just look), which he had written some time before and which would be the precursors to bossa nova. Alf also played all sorts of jazz themes stamped with the imprimatur of George Shearing or Lennie Tristano; and occasional songs by other singers and musicians who would make pilgrimages to hear him play: Tom Jobim, João Donato, João Gilberto, Lúcio Alves, Dick Farney, Dolores Duran, Ed Lincoln, Paulo Moura, Baden Powell, and a group of young people who were barely old enough to frequent clubs, like Luizinho Eça, Carlinhos Lyra, Sylvinha Telles, Candinho, Durval Ferreira, and Maurício Einhorn.
Does that mean then that Johnny Alf was a success? No. The Plaza had the reputation of being bad luck and hardly anyone went there. But, for the modern musicians of 1954, it was the place because the lack of customers meant that they could play whatever they wanted. Almost all the regulars had been followers of Alf’s career since he made his first professional appearance in 1952 at César de Alencar’s recently inaugurated Cantina do César (Caesar’s Canteen). Alencar needed a pianist to aid the digestion of the guests who ate at his restaurant, and young Johnny Alf was recommended to him by Dick Farney and Nora Ney, his friends from the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club. César de Alencar had such protruding ears that his nickname in some circles was “Dumbo,” but it appeared he also used them to listen. When the Cantina food proved indigestible, he converted the restaurant into an inferninho (little hell) and permitted Alf to play whatever he wanted.
The first to go and see him at the Cantina were João Donato and Dolores Duran, his neighbors in Tijuca, and they took others with them. Dolores, during her breaks from the Clube da Chave, would sometimes grant the favor of an impromptu performance, accompanied by a young pianist named Ribamar; or sometimes Alf himself would accompany João Gilberto, who would restrict himself to singing, without his guitar, in the darkest corner of the nightclub. The repertoire was always the same: lúcios and dicks by the dozen, that is, samba-canções and some foxtrots. People felt as if they were on New York’s 52nd Street when Alf and Donato revealed their knowledge of jazz; and Alf, as a singer, could almost be mistaken for Sarah Vaughan, even singing in Portuguese.
A Sinter producer, Ramalho Neto, convinced his recording company to make a 78 r.p.m. with Alf, even if it was just an instrumental. Alf sat down at the piano and formed a Nat “King” Cole–style trio with Garoto on guitar and Vidal on double bass. They recorded “Falseta” (Deceit) by Alf and “De cigarro em cigarro” (From Cigarette to Cigarette) by Luiz Bonfá. Nobody expected the record to top the charts or to be danced to, but it received such an indifferent response that Paulo Serrano did not want to persist with Alf, the opposite of what he would do almost immediately with Donato. In the sixties, those two tracks (which few people heard) would be readily described as “already being bossa nova.” This is an exaggeration. In fact, they’re samba-canções with jazz improvisations (Alf inserted a small interval from “Jeepers Creepers” into “Falseta” [Deceit]), and an extreme richness of harmony, but there was nothing new in the rhythm. Alone and more independent, he would be much better, which would explain why those boys followed him like rats followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
During the next two years, the group tried to follow Johnny Alf as he moved from nightclub to nightclub, but sometimes he was hired to play at places that were a little too expensive for the gang’s pockets, like the Monte Carlo in Gávea, or the Clube da Chave itself. Then Alf returned to Leme, starting at the Mandarim, in Rua Gustavo Sampaio; then the Drink, in Avenida Princesa Isabel; and finally he crossed the street and established himself at the Plaza in 1954. With so much young talent gathered together, almost all the bold rhythms and harmonics that gave rise to bossa nova were developed in the early hours when the nightclub was empty. Drummer Milton Banana, who played dance music at the Drink with organist Djalma Ferreira, on the other side of the street, would take advantage of his breaks and go and participate in the jams.
One memorable moment, according to Carlinhos Lyra, was when an impromptu vocal quartet composed of Carlinhos himself, Alf, Donato, and João Gilberto—who, according to Carlinhos, was nicknamed Zé Maconha (“Reefer Joe”)—was formed under the light of the street lamp in the Plaza doorway. Carlinhos also described João’s appearance as invariable—a blue square jacket, a white shirt, and high-water trousers—and he doesn’t remember hearing him play guitar at that time.
Not all of Johnny’s fans crossed paths at the Plaza. Tom Jobim and Carlinhos Lyra, for example, would often go and never saw each other there. But for more than a year, until the middle of 1955, experiences were being cooked up that would soon result in something. And just as the dish was about to be served, Johnny Alf accepted an offer from a show-business agent from São Paulo named Heraldo Funaro, and moved there to inaugurate a place called Baiúca.
His young Rio disciples suddenly felt like orphans because São Paulo, at that time, seemed further away than the Belgian Congo. But people were already earning higher salaries in São Paulo than in Rio. Certain that Alf would not return, the boys had to make their own musical revolution.
In Billy Blanco’s version of events, “Sinfonia do Rio de Janeiro” (Rio de Janeiro Symphony) was conceived on board a bus in the summer of 1954, when he was going from Praça Mauá to his home in Ipanema. The bus took a turn onto Avenida Princesa Isabel, and when it reached gorgeous Avenida Atlàntica, the mountain, sun, and sea of Copacabana would suddenly open up in the distance, in cinemascope. As if Billy had not passed this area every day for years, the panorama he viewed from the window struck him as a divine revelation, and a musical phrase, complete with lyrics, filled his head:
“Rio de Janeiro, that I shall always love / Rio de Janeiro, the mountain, sun and sea.”
Billy went into ecstasy, and then immediately panicked. It was too good an idea to lose, and he was concerned that he would forget a melodic line he had just composed before he reached home. He sang over and over to himself:
“Rio de Janeiro, that I have always loved / Rio de Janeiro, the mountain, sun and sea.”
He couldn’t stand it any longer, and in the middle of the journey indicated that he wished to get off the bus. The bus stopped and he jumped off, running in search of a phone. There were no public telephones in 1954, and if you wanted to make a call from the street, you had to call from a bar. He went into the first one he came across, in Rua República do Peru, and told the Portuguese cashier that it was an emergency. (And in a way, it was.) The cashier reluctantly agreed, and Billy called Tom Jobim:
“Tom, listen to this: ‘Rio de Janeiro, that I have always loved / Rio de Janeiro, the mountain, sun and sea.’”
But telephone connections then were much worse than today, and the bar was crammed with its regular vagrants in Bermuda shorts and thong sandals, discussing soccer. And there was the noise from the hellish traffic. Billy had to repeat the musical phrase several times, shouting at the top of his lungs, causing every pair of ears and eyes in the bar to flash in his direction like arrows:
