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

by Castro, Ruy

  On the night of the formal presentation, João Gilberto thanked everyone profusely, strummed a few chords and—oh!—decided he didn’t like the guitar. “I don’t know, there’s something about it …,” he tried to explain.

  The Clube da Chave patron did not take offense. The following day, they returned to the store and exchanged it for another, which João himself picked out. With the new guitar, he began a veritable marathon of performances at the homes of local society families and at the Bar do Treviso in the public market square. Telles also took him on Adroaldo Guerra’s show on Rádio Gaúcha and promoted a concert of his at the Clube do Comércio. This all inspired João to perform at a dance at the Bento Gonçalves club, singing with a local group. He was introduced as “an artist from Rádio Tupi, in Rio,” but that only yielded polite applause. It would have been a different matter had he been with Rádio Nacional.

  A few months before, in Rio, if he had been contracted for what he believed he was worth and sold at market price, the purchaser would have suffered an enormous loss. In the meantime, however, his value had started to appreciate. Luís Telles introduced him to the old pianist and professor Armando de Albuquerque, one of the jewels of gaucho music, a serious man who was friends with Radamés Gnatalli. Albuquerque, who wasn’t someone who usually sang people’s praises, listened to the young man and was enraptured. He perceived that he was distressed, in search of something modern that he himself was unable to define. João Gilberto would visit him at his home in Rua Lobo Gonçalves, and the two of them would play for hours, each discovering with his own instrument the delicate beauties of Lamartine Babo and Francisco Matoso’s waltz, “Eu sonhei que estavas tão linda” (I Dreamed You Were So Beautiful). Or João Gilberto would ask Albuquerque to play, innumerable times, “Canção da Índia” (Song of India). He was astonished to learn that it was a composition by the Russian Rimsky-Korsakov. He had always thought that it had been written by Tommy Dorsey.

  For Joãozinho, there didn’t seem to be anything else to do in Porto Alegre, other than be the beneficiary of local affection. However, even there, stories were beginning to circulate that would haunt him forever. It was said, for example, that the chambermaid who cleaned his room at the Majestic Hotel was constantly finding tangerine peel under his bed. No matter how often she threw them away, they would reappear the next day. Joãozinho explained to her that he had been putting them there in order to attract ants “to keep him company.” When other stories of the same kind began to circulate, part of the fascination he inspired started to become folklore. Luís Telles realized it was time to take him away from Porto Alegre.

  Telles had to go back to Rio to try and reorganize the Quitandinha Serenaders, and he couldn’t leave Joãozinho in Porto Alegre. At the same time, he didn’t want him back in Rio again, exposed to the same old temptations and liable to sink back into the depression that had poisoned him. He knew that Joãozinho had an older sister—Dadainha—living in a city called Diamantina, in Minas Gerais. Dadainha’s husband, Péricles, was a highway engineer and had been transferred there to work on the construction of a highway. From what Joãozinho had told him, Dadainha was the only relative he had whom he could actually listen to. She would be the ideal person to put him up for a while, with the added advantage that, as she lived in Minas Gerais, his family in Bahia would not pester him.

  Diamantina, in the west-central part of Minas Gerais, had been in the headlines recently as the hometown of the Social Democratic Party candidate for the Presidency of the Republic, Juscelino Kubitschek. Kubitschek had everything he needed to win. His primary adversary, General Juarez Távora, of the National Democratic Union, lost votes every time he made a speech. It would be a fun place to spend some time. Now all Telles had to do was to convince Joãozinho.

  To his surprise, Joãozinho liked the idea. They would go to Rio and, as soon as he felt up to the journey, he would leave for Diamantina. When he left Porto Alegre, Joãozinho also left some broken hearts behind—among them, at least one married one.

  Luís Telles took João Gilberto back to Rio and set him up in his apartment in Lido. On the ground floor of the building there was a popular bar, O Ponto Elegante (The Chic Meeting Place), but João Gilberto was not one of its regular customers. One month was enough for his happiness in Porto Alegre to go up in smoke, and he returned to awakening compassion in whoever saw him. And, inevitably, he went back to making purchases in Lapa. In order to prevent the situation from continuing in perpetuity, Telles was emphatic in telling him that he should go and stay with Dadainha, in Diamantina, as soon as possible. Joãozinho got the message.

  Telles gave him some money, and he went to the old bus station in Praça Mauá, bought a ticket, and got on a bus—which ended up going to the wrong city. The ticket he had bought was for Lavras, also in Minas Gerais, and he only realized his mistake when he arrived in that city, more than two hundred and fifty miles from where he wanted to be, and found out that no one knew his relatives Péricles and Dadainha. He had also forgotten to bring his sister’s address.

  But he didn’t give up, and arrived in Diamantina in September. Dadainha was more surprised to see him than if Juscelino Kubitschek himself had knocked on her door. Joãozinho had neglected to write to her to inform her of his arrival. Dadainha had just had a baby, daughter Marta Maria, which usually requires one’s exclusive attention. But the fragmented state of her brother’s emotional health was so apparent that she took him in with all the affection she could muster. She didn’t know what to do to relieve his depression, and Joãozinho was unable to adequately translate his distress into words. But she gave him what she had to give: a home, food, love, and what would afterward prove to be essential, peace and seclusion. It was what he needed to get his head together.

  João Gilberto spent eight months in mountainous Diamantina, until May 1956. No one ever saw him on the street, but the city was not unaware of his presence. Gossipmongers commented that there was a “weird guy” at Péricles and Dadainha’s house, who spent the entire day in his pajamas, playing the guitar, and didn’t even venture out onto the sidewalk. Juscelino won the election, there had been a fabulous street party in Diamantina, and the “weird guy” hadn’t even gone outside to take a look at what was going on. Joãozinho didn’t just stay in the house, he locked himself in his bedroom with his guitar and only emerged to go to the bathroom, where he would also closet himself for hours—with his guitar. His sister took his meals up to wherever he was. In the early morning, he would be seen tiptoeing down the corridor in his socks, on the way to Marta Maria’s bedroom, to sing and play his guitar softly next to the child’s crib.

  During that whole time, only one person in Diamantina decided to go looking for him, and it wasn’t exactly a local: a young student from Belo Horizonte, very tall and thin, named Pacífico Mascarenhas. His parents were the owners of a powerful textile industry in the region and he was there on vacation, sorely missing performing with his musical group in Belo Horizonte. When he heard about the “guy who plays guitar,” Pacífico thought he might have found a soul mate and went to Dadainha’s house. She called Joãozinho in his room, and to her surprise, he came into the living room to meet the young man. They talked for a while, and João Gilberto played a few things, but did not sing. The exchange yielded nothing. Pacífico left, promising to come back, and never did. (Two years later, he met João Gilberto again in Rio, but he encountered a completely different person.)

  A maelstrom of thoughts buzzed around in João Gilberto’s head during his exile in the mountains. His life started to pass before his very eyes, like a movie, with a soundtrack that had been written by the best and most ambitious musicians of his generation. He spent the first weeks in silence, rehashing old memories that hurt at the slightest touch of his mind. It was apparent by the anguish etched in his face, which he could not hide from those who saw him. But something ignited a spark in him because suddenly he started playing his guitar day and night, shut up in his room, as if seized by some
kind of obsession. At first, nothing he played made much sense, he would repeat the same chord a zillion times, each one almost perfectly identical to the next, except when he added his voice.

  He discovered that the acoustics in the bathroom were ideal for listening to both himself and the guitar. All those floor and wall tiles, infused for years with steam and humidity, created a kind of echo chamber—the chords reverberated and he could measure their intensity. If he sang more softly, without vibrato, he could speed up or slow down at will, creating his own tempo. To do this, he needed to change the way he projected, using his nose more than his mouth. His mind was like a radio whose dial was spinning apparently at random, tuning in to everything he heard and loved. The natural enunciation of Orlando Silva and Sinatra. Dick Farney’s velvet tone and style of breathing. The timbre of trombonist Frank Rosolino with Kenton’s orchestra. The soft enunciation of the Page Cavanaugh trio, Joe Mooney, and Jonas Silva. The colorful harmonies of the vocal ensembles—how was it possible to use one’s voice to alter or complete the guitar’s harmony? Lúcio Alves’s phrasing—only Lúcio would phrase backward, delaying himself. It was possible to speed up and slow down in relation to the rhythm, as long as the beat remained constant. Johnny Alf’s syncopated beat on the piano and, particularly, João Donato’s on the accordion—how would that sound on the guitar? The new João Gilberto was being reborn from those experiences.

  They gave him courage to reflect on the events of the past with less self-pity. What had happened to him since he had left Salvador six years earlier? The nights of “champagne, women, and music” that he had promised himself and that he imagined were waiting for him in Rio had failed to materialize. Champagne didn’t flow from the faucets, and he could not buy it. But after innumerable binges with Mário Telles and others in the Lapa bars, he discovered that he didn’t really like to drink. Women, well, he had had some—Sylvinha and Mariza, but they were two young girls. Where were the mature women he saw in films, who were talked about in songs? None of them were interested in him. But his main source of disappointment was his career.

  No one was aware of his talent more than he, and that was the problem: he knew he was good, but that wasn’t getting him anywhere. Contrary to the illusions he had packed in his suitcase on leaving Juazeiro, success didn’t happen overnight, money was short, and he had been compelled to sing things he hated. With Os Garotos da Lua, he had even sung Carnival music. Rio de Janeiro was not Juazeiro, and doors which were open to him as a matter of course in his home town appeared difficult to force open in the big city. He was beginning to admit that he did not have enough self-discipline—that is, professionalism—to succeed in the aggressive and mercenary Rio market. If he really wanted to succeed, he would have to make concessions and do what everyone else did, subject himself to keeping schedules, putting out his hand, asking to be hired, accepting criticism, and swallowing rejection. He would have to bury his pride and allow virtues that, up until then, were not a part of his character, to flower, such as patience, modesty, and tolerance. He would have to become a new João Gilberto.

  He developed a sudden aversion to marijuana. In Rio, when the world had seemed cruel and unfair to young unemployed artists like him, it helped temporarily lift his spirits and made everything seem rosier. It was a worthless illusion. Perhaps the drug mixed well with success, but not with failure. In Porto Alegre, where it was difficult to find, and in Diamantina, where he couldn’t motivate himself to look for it, he was obliged to go through life without it—and had discovered that he could survive. If he was ever going to get to where he wanted to be, he was going to have to give the stuff up. Years later, he said that convinced himself to quit when he sang to little Marta Maria.

  All of these concerns boiled in his brain, and became the foundation of the man who, barely two years later, would revolutionize popular music with “Chega de saudade” (No More Blues). Obviously, Péricles and Dadainha weren’t being forced to see the bats that were living in his particular belfry and, for them, João Gilberto’s appearance was that of someone who appeared to have more problems than could be resolved by an entire medical council. Despite that fact, he was not introspective all the time. Sometimes he would burst into the living room with explosions of enthusiasm, to show off a sound he had coaxed from his guitar—something which would later become known as the “bossa nova beat”—and this made them even more concerned.

  And why shouldn’t it? Picture yourself in tiny Diamantina in 1956, and see if it’s so hard to understand why someone would have such violent mood swings. Joãozinho could go from being entrenched in the deepest depression to a state of euphoria like a lighted lamp—with the ability to regress, in a matter of seconds, as if a cloud were raining right over him, just because he couldn’t get a chord to sound the way he wanted. Who could understand Joãozinho?

  Péricles and Dadainha began to think that the best place for him was with their parents, Dona Patu and Mr. Juveniano, in Juazeiro, and began a discreet campaign to take him back there. When they spoke to him about it, he reacted very negatively. The idea of going back to his hometown and his parents’ house, taking with him his sense of defeat, was the ultimate humiliation. But it was a humiliation that he perhaps considered inevitable while chewing over his own failure. Besides, he had no choice. Péricles and Dadainha were going to Juazeiro anyway, to introduce Marta Maria to her grandparents, and they didn’t want to leave him alone in Diamantina.

  Joãozinho still didn’t feel ready to go back to Rio, and even if he had, he didn’t have a penny. He resigned himself and went with them, like a child led by the hand.

  His calloused soul hurt more than ever in Juazeiro. The city didn’t exactly welcome him with fireworks, and his father took it upon himself to make his two-month stay there even more oppressive. All of Mr. Juveniano’s tedious urgings—that Joãozinho should become a great doctor, engineer, lawyer, or even an important businessman in Bahia—were rejected with utter vehemence, and he had only his disappointing music career to counteract the argument. The difference was that he was no longer a young man of eighteen with a great deal of promise. He was now a man of twenty-five with a mustache and already nostalgic for the sweet bird of his youth.

  He decided, at the very least, to be practical. He would not fight with the old man, and now that he was based in Juazeiro, he would continue his search for that new combination of guitar and voice on which he would bet all his cards when he returned to Rio.

  Only Juazeiro didn’t provide him with space to practice. He tried locking himself in his room as he had done in Diamantina, but the sounds he produced filtered down to the living room and his father, a bel canto expert, was the first person to denounce the future bossa nova with the description: “That’s not music. It’s nyah nyah nyah-nyah nyah.”

  Mr. Juveniano was now interfering not just with Joãozinho’s choice of profession, but with his actual choice of style. Others in the city echoed Mr. Juveniano’s disapproval. For those who remembered how the adolescent Joãozinho projected his voice like a song-thrush and imitated Orlando Silva perfectly, that new way of singing—as if each syllable were being delicately slipped out of an envelope—did not seem, at the very least, terribly manly by Juazeiro standards.

  Joãozinho had no peace and quiet at home to work, nor did the street offer much refuge. Going to play beneath the tamarind tree was out of the question—the only time he tried it, he felt the contempt of people who heard him. It was the same at the small beach on the bank of the São Francisco river. No one would understand “Bim-bom,” which he had just written, trying to reproduce the rhythm of the washerwomen’s hips when they passed by carrying bundles of laundry on their heads. It was as if, in Juazeiro, João Gilberto were being kept prisoner inside a bottle—in solitary confinement, but in full view of everyone, exposed to public scrutiny. He had to escape from there, to anywhere, even to Salvador—if he couldn’t go straight back to Rio.

  Again, for whoever saw him from the outside, his state m
ust have been intriguing. How could they have known that the oyster was making a pearl? “Joãozinho is going crazy,” was what his father started saying. With such a source of authority, the rumor turned into a general consensus of simplemindedness among those who knew him. Joãozinho was not right in the head and needed to be treated. But where, how, with whom? Forget about Juazeiro. It would not do for someone in Mr. Juveniano’s social position to let the city know that his son was in such a state. And he couldn’t lock him in the broom closet. Dewilson, Joãozinho’s older cousin, himself a psychotherapist in Juazeiro, had the solution: he would take him to Salvador for treatment, where there were more resources and no one would recognize him. And there he would have the support of Dona Patu’s relatives.

  Thus, Joãozinho and Dewilson once again took the train to Salvador, as they had done when they were kids. This time, however, the mission was serious. Dewilson was going to hand his cousin over to someone who understood what was going on with him, with the latter’s consent and cooperation, of course. On the train, João Gilberto seemed strangely calm about the prospect of being examined by doctors who threatened to peep into his mind and soul. Perhaps he was curious to know what was “going on” with himself, but all he really knew was that he was getting out of Juazeiro. Nothing serious was going to happen to him, and he now had a weapon that no one could take away from him: that guitar rhythm, which totally simplified the samba beat—as if he were reducing the whole rhythmic army of a samba school to just the tamborins—but that was flexible enough to accompany any type of music, as well as being something new, which is what he wanted.