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

by Castro, Ruy

  In those days, Salvador had three facilities for treating mental patients. One of them, the Bahia Sanatorium, on the Politeama hillside, was practically an asylum, with wards filled with men whose main insanity was poverty; another, the Santa Mônica hospital, close to the Quinta neighborhood, was a “sophisticated” clinic where the wealthy, or those whose families wanted a break from them for a while, went. Dewilson didn’t think that Joãozinho was a candidate for either of those places. In his opinion, he was merely disoriented by his failure in Rio and was obsessed with that damn music that no one liked. A few conversations with the psychiatrists would do him good. So he took him to the Salvador Clinics hospital, in Rua João das Botas, and filled out the paperwork, putting himself down as responsible for him, both as a relative and a doctor. João Gilberto would be admitted to the care of a respected Bahian doctor, Professor Nelson Pires, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the Federal University of Bahia, and his team.

  He wasn’t exactly admitted, as Professor Pires’s section did not admit patients. And as it turned out, there was no need. João Gilberto went to the walk-in clinic and was submitted to a battery of interviews with psychologists, whom he confused with his ferine and sibylline arguments. Like on the day when, gazing out of the window with a lost look, he commented to one of them: “ Look at the wind tearing out the trees’ hair …”

  “But trees don’t have hair, João,” she made the mistake of saying.

  “And some people have no poetry in their souls,” he countered, curtly.

  If João Gilberto wasn’t already depressed when he went there, he could have become at the sight of the human landscape that surrounded him. His old friend Cravinho went to visit him and found him somewhat melancholy, perhaps sedated by some kind of medication they were giving him. “I didn’t want you to see me like this, Cravinho …” said João.

  “Hey, don’t be silly. There’s nothing wrong with you. I don’t know what you’re doing here.”

  Apparently, the doctors at the Clinics hospital agreed with Cravinho, because João Gilberto was discharged a little over a week later. Dewilson was given permission to take him away and decided to return to Juazeiro with him, in order to pay his respects to Mr. Juveniano and Dona Patu, and to show them the man who had turned over a new leaf. João Gilberto thought it best to go along with the idea. In a few days, he would be out of there, and on the long trip back to Rio—this time, for good. He would stop over in Diamantina, to pay his own respects to Dadainha and consolidate all that he had learned. He did not know what awaited him, but he was certain of one thing: his music would finally make it in Rio.

  8

  The Arrival of the Beat

  At the peak of their partnership: Jobim and VinÌcius at work

  Manchete Press

  In the two years that João Gilberto was away from Rio, getting his head together, the world continued to live life as best it could—winning here, losing there. Witness the case of the great guitarist Garoto. If he had been given a penny every time someone praised him, he would have died a rich man. There wasn’t a single stringed instrument that he wasn’t able to play right off the bat, as Mário Telles discovered when he presented him with a ukelele. It was said that in a single song, Garoto was able to switch between the guitar, banjo, mandolin, and cavaquinho, playing one after the other without missing a beat—and this wasn’t just one of those stories that musicians like to tell, because he would do this in the auditorium at Rádio Nacional.

  Garoto spent his life moving from radio station to radio station, in Rio and São Paulo, and spent some time in the United States with Bando da Lua in the 1940s; but his bank account certainly never inspired envy in anyone. After spending his life half-broke, he finally began to earn a living as a composer in 1954, winning a contest sponsored by São Paulo city hall, who wanted music for the city’s fourth centennial. The music was the stunted dobrado “São Paulo Quatrocentão” (São Paulo Four Hundredth), written by him and Chiquinho do Acordeon. The record sold hundreds of thousands of copies (an estimated 700,000), but as instrumentalist, Garoto only received remuneration for the recording, and no royalties.

  The worst thing was, he hated “São Paulo Quatrocentão.” He continually complained down at the Murray that, when he died, he was afraid of being remembered for that dobrado. Garoto must have been guessing his fate, because he died of a heart attack in May 1955, at forty years of age, and the song that the radio stations played most often in tribute to him was, unfairly, “São Paulo Quatrocentão”—and not “Duas Contas” (Two Beads), “Gente Humilde” (Humble People), or “Sorriu para mim” (Smiled to Me).

  Carlinhos Lyra, his student, remembered that day well. He telephoned Garoto to schedule a time for their class and was told by Dona Iracy, the musician’s wife, in tears, “There’s no class today, Carlinhos. Garoto died this morning.” Crying, Carlinhos made his way to the apartment in Rua Constante Ramos, where Garoto lived, and viewed him in his coffin, a handkerchief tied around his lower jaw. That wasn’t the way he wanted to remember one of his two idols (the other at the time was Johnny Alf).

  Ismael Netto also died, in 1956, and people thought that his vocal ensemble, Os Cariocas, would now break up. But his kid brother Severino took over leadership of the group, putting himself in charge of the arrangements; and to replace Ismael’s falsetto, he brought on their sister, Hortênsia. In 1957, still with Continental, they recorded Carlinhos Lyra’s second song, “Criticando” (Criticizing), which denounced the infiltration of boleros and pop ballads into Brazilian music. Os Cariocas would pay for this in subsequent years, because their new recording label, Columbia, would force them to record the ballads by American pop vocal ensembles that were all the rage in the charts, with arrangements that were literally copied from the original songs—and in English, to boot! They also gave them the unbelievable bolero “Quem é / Que lhe cobre de beijos / Satisfaz seus desejos / E que muito lhe quer?” (Who is it / Who covers you with kisses / Satisfies your desires / And loves you very much?) by Oldemar Magalhães and Osmar Navarro, which they somehow managed to record without succumbing to fits of laughter. But Os Cariocas survived “Quem é” and the horrendous repertoire that they were forced by Columbia to perform. When bossa nova came about, with their kind of songs, they were prepared to once again be the greatest Brazilian vocal ensemble.

  Paradoxically, another death would play a significant role in the future of popular music: that of Carmen Miranda, in Beverly Hills, in August 1955. Not because of Carmen Miranda herself, who had been indifferent to the music scene in Brazil for many years, but because her former collaborator Aloysio de Oliveira was forced to face the hard truth: without her, Americans had little connection to what he had to offer; and Bando da Lua, which accompanied her, was only known in the United States as the star’s back-up band—they weren’t even as important as her tutti-frutti hat. In his unexpected state of grief, Aloysio decided to disband the group, pack his bags, and return to Rio.

  He arrived at the beginning of 1956, still a slave to Carmen’s memory and completely out of touch with his country. Which was only natural; he had been away for sixteen years. But it didn’t take him long to realize that the new generation of Brazilians probably thought “Chica chica boom chic” was a new brand of ice cream, and not the immortal hit by the “Brazilian bombshell.” His first effort at work was producing a show at Rádio Mayrink Veiga, Se a lua contasse (If the Moon Were to Tell), starring Aurora Miranda, Carmen’s sister. But on the eve of the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, no one was interested in what the Moon had to say, and the radio show didn’t make it.

  His next step was to do voice-overs for commercials, using the voice that would become famous as the Brazilian narrator for Walt Disney documentaries. In his first assignment, his mission was to convince the public that nine out of ten movie stars used Lux soap. Nothing could have been easier, given that everyone already believed this, but for some reason, Aloysio was unable to reproduce for the commercial the
intonation he used in the films. Or at least, according to him, the client didn’t think he sounded like the impression that the extremely popular comedian José Vasconcellos did of him. So Aloysio imitated José Vasconcellos imitating him, and the client approved the commercial. He was already starting to think that that wasn’t a very dignified way to earn a living when the English executives at Odeon in Rio offered him the job of top A&R man for the recording company.

  At the time, Odeon had not just one man doing the job, but several. Each of its conductors was an A&R man and was responsible for production in one sector. Antonio Carlos Jobim was one of them, together with Léo Peracchi, Lindolfo Gaya, and others. Aloysio was going to be the general director, with the power to decide who should record with those conductors—and why and how. Eventually he would become the biggest record producer in Brazilian history, almost a giant among pygmies. But who knew that in order to get there Aloysio had to break down his wall of preconceptions of all that was new? When he set foot again in Brazil at the ripe age of forty-one, he was a man of the old guard and was unable to do anything about it. For example, he refused to admit singers who “didn’t sing well,” along with those who “had no voice.”

  His idea of “great Brazilian popular music” was fixed somewhere in the early 1940s, which is when he left to go to Hollywood with Carmen Miranda. The two greatest songwriters, therefore, were Ary Barroso and Dorival Caymmi. On one of the first LPs he produced at Odeon, he managed to reunite the two of them: Caymmi sang Ary’s songs, and Ary (luckily for Caymmi) merely played Caymmi’s songs on the piano—without either one collaborating on each other’s tracks. It would have been much more fun to put them together, as the Americans would have done, but one of the two (almost certainly Barroso, who didn’t want to provide mere accompaniment to his rival) must have declined the invitation. The result was that not even the most ardent of Ary or Caymmi’s fans felt they had to own the record. (Nine years later, when he had his own recording company, Elenco, Aloysio had the same idea for the record Caymmi visita Tom [Caymmi Visits Jobim], but this time, he made sure that the two recorded several tracks together.)

  On another of those first records at Odeon, Aloysio formed a phantom vocal ensemble in the studio, called them Bando da Lua (why not? the name belonged to him) and put them to work singing parodies of old American songs, in Portuguese with a samba rhythm. The lyrics punned those of the classics, so that “In the Mood” became “Edmundo,” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street” became “O sobrinho da Judite” (Judite’s Nephew). The title of the LP itself was enough to make one cry: Samba These Days, a pun on “Some of These Days.” (Aloysio, who was never one to throw an idea away, also remade this record, with a bossa nova flavor, in 1968 with the female vocal ensemble Quarteto em Cy, known in the United States as The Girls from Bahia. It came out much better.)

  Aloysio could not yet have known what would become of him at Odeon, but he soon discerned the enormous potential of one of its directors: Antonio Carlos Jobim. At twenty-nine years old in 1956, as yet unable to completely free himself from the drudgery of evening piano playing, Jobim was already hating every minute he spent at the recording company, which certainly weren’t few and far between—he had to go to meetings at nine in the morning, calculate sales balance sheets, and discuss the dismissal of artists. And in his function as an A&R man, it wouldn’t have been a good move to put his own songs on the records he produced. So he was limited to writing arrangements for the Tyrolese boleros of Dalva de Oliveira or the melancholy Orlando Silva, whose voice and star status were a shadow of their former glory.

  For Jobim, Aloysio’s arrival meant the slashing of a few zeros from his earnings, but it also lifted a burden from his shoulders that he was able to compensate for by doing what he wanted and knew best: composing, arranging, and—in this particular case—producing records with singers that he liked, and including his own songs. Mr. Morris, the president of Odeon, was not surprised by his sense of relief: “A leopard cannot change its spots,” he remarked to Jobim, meaning that he had been the right man, but in the wrong place.

  Jobim and Aloysio were introduced at the Odeon headquarters, at a cocktail party for the press at which the appointment of the new director was to be announced. When he first saw Aloysio—thin, with a mustache, and wearing a jacket with thin vertical stripes—he didn’t think much of the older man. As for Aloysio, who was afraid of Jobim’s reaction, he was relieved to discover that he was delighted at being demoted. But the two of them rapidly came to an agreement, primarily when Aloysio heard “Sinfonia do Rio de Janeiro” (Rio de Janeiro Symphony) for the first time and became convinced that he was in the company of the “Brazilian Gershwin.”

  Aloysio arrived at Odeon in June 1956, when an important record was already in production: Sylvinha Telles’ 78 r.p.m. with “Foi a noite” (It Was the Night) by Jobim and Newton Mendonça, with arrangements by Jobim, and conducted by Léo Peracchi. Upon entering the studio, unfamiliar with either the song, the vocalist, or the arrangement, he was shocked at how modern it was. It was a difficult record to classify. It wasn’t like a samba, but it wasn’t a samba-canção either, and it obviously wasn’t a bolero. What should be written on the record label, as was imperative at the time? In doubt, he preferred to put nothing, and “Foi a noite” (with “Menina” [Girl] by Carlinhos Lyra, on the other side) was released without any specification of genre.

  Later, Aloysio would often say that that was his first contact with what was to become bossa nova, and he wasn’t lying. In fact, he had never heard the recording of “Eu quero um samba” (I Want a Samba), with Donato and Os Namorados, on Sinter, and, by all accounts, he had never heard of Johnny Alf. Months after “Foi a noite” was recorded, Aloysio had the opportunity to back another important development: producing an LP with songs from Orfeu da Conceição by Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes. Unfortunately, he did not want to follow the example set by Goddard Lieberson, an American producer at Columbia who recorded dozens of Broadway musical scores with the original casts. In order to do this, all Aloysio had to do was take the cast of Orfeu, which was still playing at the Teatro Municipal, into the studio. But he couldn’t shake the notion of what it was to “sing well” and preferred to have a “real” singer, sambista Roberto Paiva, on seven of the eight tracks. Paiva sang well, but the impression one has today is that, with his traditional singing style, he felt like a fish out of water with those songs.

  Aloysio’s obsession for voices from the past did not prevent him from being very impressed on all accounts with Sylvinha Telles during the recording of “Foi a noite.” What a shame it was that the girl already had a boyfriend—a young actor named Herval Rossano, star of an adventure series on TV Tupi, O Falcão Negro (The Black Falcon).

  Sylvinha Telles’ ex-boyfriend, João Gilberto, was on his way back to Rio. To be exact, he was bringing with him the desire to be a good boy, the belief that he must have an element of goodwill toward his fellow man, and, especially, a more realistic measure of his own worth. He saw no prospect of work on the near horizon, and Rio was hardly declaring a public holiday for his return. It was even possible that no one had even realized he’d been gone for two years. As he didn’t know how former acquaintances would welcome him, and his ego wasn’t exactly bulletproof, he rented a room at a shoddy hotel downtown. He decided to stay around there while he scouted out the market, or until he ran out of money, whichever came first. Guess what: his money ran out before he produced a single cent and once again he was forced to knock on Luís Telles’s door in Praça do Lido. Telles gave him, as always, a welcome that would have inspired envy in the Prodigal Son.

  Nothing about João Gilberto appeared to have changed, except his voice and his guitar, but Rio de Janeiro was unaware that it was dealing with a different man. During 1957, he moved through the city in search of contacts. He wanted to perform, he wanted to show that he had something new, and he particularly wanted to record. One of the first people he sought out was Bororó, the compos
er of a great hot samba from the thirties, “Curare.” Bororó, who was almost sixty years old, had a girlfriend, Maria Luísa, who also lived in Lido. Maria Luísa’s apartment was a meeting point for the most respected members of old guard, among whom were singer Sílvio Caldas and harmonica player Edu da Gaita. An unlikely place to play the unpublished “Bim-bom,” with all those altered harmonies.

  Sílvio Caldas, who refused to accept any musical innovation that had originated after 1930, must have made some unpleasant comment about “Bim-bom,” or João himself, because if João Gilberto was already pouting about Sílvio’s reputation, he soon became unable to stand him. Sílvio was the kind of singer who gave him heartburn, the kind who thought he truly was the god that the bootlickers said he was. But if João wanted to continue hanging out with Bororó, he had to put up with him, because it was Sílvio who had recorded, in 1939, “Da cor do pecado” (The Color of Sin), the only other well-known song by the composer of extremely limited productivity. So João, spurred on by his doubts, decided to look for a gang to hang out with.

  He made peace with Lúcio Alves and with Sylvinha’s brother, Mário Telles, who introduced him to Tito Madi, who had shot to fame with “Chove lá fora” (It’s Raining Outside), and to a young singer from Minas Gerais, Luís Cláudio, who had just burst onto the scene with “Joga a rede no mar” (Throw the Net into the Sea). Madi was the sensation of the moment—every night, he filled the Jirau nightclub, in Rua Rodolfo Dantas in Copacabana, accompanied by pianist Ribamar. All of Rio wanted to hear him sing “Chove lá fora.” At the end of that year, the song received as many gold discs as was possible—one of them from the very hands of President Kubitschek, in person, in the editorial room of Revista do Rádio (Radio Magazine)—and it even survived a recording by the American vocal ensemble The Platters, with all those “doowops.” Madi was modern, competent, and businesslike. He had also come from a small town (Pirajuí, in the state of São Paulo) something like five years before, but had not arrived in Rio all full of himself. Modest as ever, he was still not used to success.