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

by Castro, Ruy

  Tito was one of the first people to get to know the new João Gilberto and to fall in love with his way of singing and playing guitar. He not only showered him with affection, of which he seemed to have an endless supply, but he also tried to get him gigs at the most popular Leme and Copacabana nightclubs: the Little Club, the Texas Bar, the Cangaceiro, and the Jirau. The owners of those clubs were grateful to Tito, because he had sealed their reputations by singing in them for the last two years. He had enormous influence, and any singer he recommended was automatically hired—even a complete unknown like João Gilberto. But the latter had a valid reason for not being interested in these propositions: “They talk too much,” he said, referring to the customers that frequented these places, who didn’t feel it was fair to have to pay the extortionary cover charge at a nightclub just to keep quiet and listen to a samba concert.

  João Gilberto did not go into those nightclubs to sing and, strangely, didn’t seem interested in going in to listen, either, even when the singer was a friend like Tito. As he had done in the past, he preferred to stay outside in the street, waiting for Tito to come out during the interval, so that they could talk. On one of those nights, in the doorway of the Jirau, João asked to see his friend’s guitar.

  “This guitar has something really special, Tito,” said João thoughtfully, as he ran his hand over the top of the guitar, strummed the strings and tightened the tuning pegs. Madi should have deeply considered the implications of this comment because, when he woke up, João Gilberto had vanished. He had simply disappeared with the guitar. Tito ran up and down the sidewalk looking for him, but in vain. He couldn’t understand it—perhaps João had suddenly remembered an appointment—and resigned himself to going back into the club and finishing the show with his spare guitar. Two days later, João reappeared at the Jirau to return it. His only explanation was that the guitar “had something special about it,” and he wasn’t referring to the face of the guitar, to the strings, or to the tuning pegs, but neither did he say exactly what it was. Tito thought it very amusing. His friend, singer Luís Cláudio, told him afterward that João had already done the same thing to him.

  There was no sign of the guitar he had been given in Porto Alegre two years before. By all accounts, he must have pawned it, because he always seemed to be in need of one. He telephoned his former colleague, Jonas Silva, the man he had replaced in Os Garotos da Lua in 1950. They hadn’t seen each other for two years, since João had evaporated from the Murray and from Rio. “Jonas, do you have a guitar?” he asked.

  “No, João. You know I don’t play the guitar,” Jonas replied.

  “Oh, buy one. Then I can come to your house and play,” he suggested. On the very same day, Jonas bought a guitar. Or rather, he asked a mutual friend of theirs, Walter Santos—Waltinho, Joãozinho’s old friend in Juazeiro—to buy it for him. Walter, a great expert, tried out several guitars and chose one, which Jonas paid for. João Gilberto turned up at Jonas’s apartment in Bairro de Fátima a few days later. He played the song “Rosinha,” which Jonas himself had written, and said he had to leave. It was both the debut and the grand finale of that guitar in João Gilberto’s hands.

  Jonas was not the only (in his case, former) Garoto da Lua that João sought out. Vocalist Acyr, with whom he had had the quarrel that led to his dismissal from the group, was surprised when João telephoned him, wanting to visit. They had not spoken since the quid pro quo at the Murray in 1952. João gave Acyr the full treatment: he played “Bim-bom” and “Hô-ba-la-lá” and, to the amazement of the other, who had never heard him sing or play like that, he explained in detail how he had come develop his style in Diamantina. He repeated the performance for his best friend in Os Garotos da Lua, the tambourine player Toninho Botelho, whom he also approached once again.

  Why was João Gilberto doing all this? Not because he wanted to get back in the group, which was doing very well without him and which had just finished recording “Senhorita” (Little Miss) with the much fought-over Tito Madi. He continued to love vocal ensembles, but professionally they were merely a bridge that he had left behind and burned. He probably just wanted the approval of his ex-colleagues. Toninho and Acyr were very enthusiastic at what they had heard, but even if João had wanted to return, Os Garotos da Lua had no vacancies. And after all, damn it, if they had fired Jonas because he sang too softly, why would they hire João Gilberto again, now that he also sang softly?

  João Gilberto may have burned the nightclub and vocal ensemble bridges, but he had to return via the ashen path when his apparent ineptitude started to get on the nerves of the last person to lose his patience with him: his protector, Luís Telles.

  João had been living in Telles’s apartment for almost six months now and had not worked for a single minute nor earned one penny. Telles gladly gave him money for his day-to-day expenses, but he wanted to see results. He could not conceive how a genius like João Gilberto could continue to behave like a zombie in the twilight zone. He gave up on him achieving success, but he expected him to get a regular job, like any other genius. The nagging started to get to João, and he resolved to adopt some practical attitudes to placate the man. The guitarist Roberto Paciência was trying to regroup the Anjos do Inferno, which were then on hiatus, and had an offer for a run at a new nightclub in São Paulo, in the Largo do Arouche, which would be called, in their honor, O Inferno dos Anjos (The Angels’ Hell). Paciência convinced João Gilberto to join the group, and he went off to São Paulo. And just like that, he returned within a few days, leaving the others in São Paulo without a crooner. His tour with the Anjos do Inferno was so lightning quick that it wouldn’t even have been worth putting on his résumé.

  In Rio, the unicorn remained in João’s garden, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it. He needed to do something to earn some money. So he accepted a job accompanying Sylvinha Telles at the Texas Bar.

  There was something deliciously cruel about this. When they were dating, Sylvinha was a mere slip of a girl and João was a professional, a Rádio Tupi artist. Now she was a recording artist, a radio and television star, and he was a nobody. Two years before, in 1955, Sylvinha had sung at the Automóvel Clube (Automobile Club) in Rua do Passeio, accompanied by Garoto on guitar. Singing with Garoto was the most that anyone could ever want. Since then, she had accepted nothing less. When a guitarist auditioned to accompany her, he had to take a test on which the decisive vote, without the musician being aware, lay with her brother Mário. Roberto Nascimento, Carlinhos Lyra, and a young man named Baden Powell had been candidates that Mário had approved.

  João Gilberto did not need to take any tests to accompany Sylvinha, as long as he stayed well away from her. Mário was still not entirely sure that the two of them hadn’t rekindled their old flame, and remained vigilant. In fact, his fears were groundless, because João couldn’t stand the clamor of the nightclub, the waiters’ lack of manners, and the rattle of the cocktail shakers, and gave his notice shortly afterward. Once again he was out of work. And to make matters worse, he had a huge problem: Luís Telles had decided that enough was enough and told him to look for somewhere else to live. He basically threw João out onto the street.

  For all the love he had shown João Gilberto, it must have been the hardest thing that Luís had ever had to do. But it was perhaps the only thing that could shake up the man’s astonishing incapacity to support himself. He hoped that Joãozinho, faced with no roof over his head other than a canopy of stars, would have to do something. But Telles was mistaken. He had not counted on his protégé’s infinite resources to captivate strangers, make them succumb to his charm, and awaken in them an irresistible urge to protect him. When Luís Telles’s door was shut in his face, for example, João Gilberto barely spent three minutes in the open air. He merely crossed the square, went to the home of Maria Luísa, Bororó’s girlfriend, and convinced one of the regular visitors there, an Argentine painter named Alfonso Lafita, to put him up.

  Lafita had just arrived in Bra
zil and still hadn’t mastered Portuguese. Even though he lived alone, the studio apartment he was renting in Rua Júlio de Castilhos, in Copacabana, was too small to accommodate the canvases and easels with which he intended to pursue, in Rio, his burgeoning artistic career. But he had met João at Maria Luísa’s house, and liked him. He allowed him to stay at his apartment for the few days that João needed to find a new place. And they would have lived happily ever after, had those few days not turned into months and begun to seem as if they really would last forever.

  The Argentine began to get irritated when he realized that he was the one who did the cooking, set the table, washed the glasses and dishes, mopped the floor, and dusted the furniture, as well as washed, ironed, and darned João Gilberto’s clothes—while the latter, once again in possession of a guitar, would spend hours trying to master a single chord. Lafita also discovered how difficult it was to concentrate on his oils and watercolors when João never seemed to tire of playing and only interrupted his music to continually ask Lafita’s opinion on what he had just created. Not to mention the fact that the guest turned the host’s schedule upside-down, and Lafita now found himself waking up at three in the afternoon and eating lunch at ten at night, like João did. Despite living together in such close quarters, the Argentine did not get to know João Gilberto very well. Among other things, it was years later before he found out that João was from Bahia and not from Diamantina, in Minas Gerais, as he had told him.

  Lafita could not have known it, but João Gilberto was on the verge of radically changing his life. João met up with his friend Edinho, from the group Trio Irakitan, and Edinho recommended he try and find a young man named Menescal, who ran a guitar “academy” and was putting together a group. João Gilberto knocked on Menescal’s door (“Do you have a guitar here? Maybe we could play something.”), went out into the night with him, and was introduced to a gang of talented and intelligent young people. One of them was Carlinhos Lyra, whom he had met years ago, beneath the streetlamp on the sidewalk outside the Plaza nightclub, when they had gone to hear Johnny Alf. Those guys wrote their own music, they were well brought up, and they styled their hair with Gumex. It was going to be great hanging out with them.

  One of the guys João knew was the Odeon photographer Chico Pereira. With the number of hobbies that Chico pursued with complete dedication—sound, jazz, aviation, harpoon fishing—it was difficult to imagine how he had the time to take a single snapshot for the record covers. Even so, Pereira managed to account for the photos taken for all the record sleeves put out by Odeon. Menescal was his fishing companion, and the two of them were also Dave Brubeck fans. When João Gilberto, brought over by Menescal, sang for the first time at his apartment in Rua Fernando Mendes, Chico experienced the same feeling he got when he first saw the bottom of the sea, with the added advantage that João Gilberto’s voice and guitar could be captured on tape. He wasted no time and set up a microphone, put a blank reel in his Grundig recorder, and let it roll. It was the first of several recorded sessions that he would make at his home with João Gilberto.

  But for Chico, what João had to make, as soon as possible, was a record—and the quickest way to do this was to seek out one of the Odeon conductors, Antonio Carlos Jobim.

  It wasn’t easy, but the push that Chico Pereira gave him armed João Gilberto with the courage he needed to ring that doorbell in Rua Nascimento Silva in Ipanema. João and Tom had never been bosom buddies in the distant past, but they knew each other from late nights at the Plaza, the Tudo Azul, and the Far West. At the time, João considered Tom a good evening pianist, like others did, although he thought that (Newton) Mendonça was better. Later he learned to admire him from afar, while Tom’s reputation as an outstanding composer grew. Jobim made himself known (with “Solidão,” “Foi a noite,” and “Se todos fossem iguais a você” [Someone to Light up My Life]) in just the two years that João spent in exile in Porto Alegre, Diamantina, Juazeiro, and Salvador. But he had grown far beyond that. He was no longer an evening pianist who would eventually write with his collaborator, Mendonça. He had become a great professional composer, arranger, conductor, and influential person with record labels. He probably had his tuxedos made to order. It was only natural that João, dressed in clothes from Ducal, the Brazilian equivalent of Sears, felt some apprehension on ringing that doorbell.

  Tom Jobim was not surprised to see João Gilberto again. He knew he had returned to Rio, after a stay in Bahia, during which he had been under the care of the “men in white coats,” as he put it. Compared with the last time he had seen him—three years ago, in the doorway of the Tudo Azul, with his hair brushing his shoulders and the appearance of someone who was thinking about migrating to the fourth dimension—he thought he was great. But Tom got the surprise of his life when João Gilberto picked up his guitar and performed “Bim-bom” and “Hô-ba-la-lá.”

  Tom was not impressed by the contrast between the João he knew and the one that was standing right there in front him. Without a doubt, there was something different about the way he sang—he was no longer an Orlando Silva disciple with touches of Lúcio Alves, as he remembered hearing. He now sang more softly, hitting exact notes, without vibrato, like Chet Baker, who was all the rage at the time. But what really impressed him was his guitar playing. To begin with, he didn’t associate João with the instrument. He had never in his life heard him play, much less like that. That beat was something new. It produced a kind of rhythm that was flexible enough to take all kinds of liberties. It was possible to write for that kind of beat, which meant goodbye to the dictates of conventional samba, from which the only divergence up until then had been the samba-canção, which was already inducing narcolepsy in most people, both those who played it as well as those who listened to it.

  From the very beginning, Tom could foresee the possibilities of this beat, which simplified the samba rhythm and left a lot of room for the ultramodern harmonies that he himself was composing. But it would be necessary to do some work within that rhythm, to test new songs and others he had already written, to see how they came out. He opened a drawer and took out several music scores that were still only half-finished or in the final stages of completion. One of them, which was already finished, had been sitting in that pile for more than a year: “Chega de saudade” (No More Blues).

  Jobim had written it with Vinícius de Moraes shortly after Orfeu da Conceição finished its one-month run at the Teatro República. If they had written the song earlier, it would have somehow been incorporated into the play. But it was too late and they decided to keep hold of it. There was no indication that “Chega de saudade” would have a brilliant future—or any kind of future. In fact, Jobim had written it almost on a whim—a short time before, at the home of Dona Nilza, his mother, he watched the maid sweeping the living room and softly singing a chorinho. He was impressed with the way the girl managed to sing such a complicated song, in three parts, when the large part of what one heard on the radio fit into a single musical phrase. He decided then and there that he would also write a chorinho like that.

  Weeks later, at his family’s country place in Poço Fundo, near Petrópolis, he got the idea for “Chega de saudade,” and when he reviewed what he had written, he realized he had created a kind of samba-canção in three parts, but with a chorinho flavor. On his return to Rio, he showed the song to Vinícius. The poet had his cases packed and ready to resume his diplomatic post in Paris, but he was gently persuaded to stay a few more days to write lyrics to it.

  The two of them liked the end result. But not everyone who heard the newborn “Chega de saudade” liked Vinícius’s lyrics. For example, his wife, Lila, did not. She cited the verse “Well, there are fewer little fishes swimming in the sea / Than the little kisses I will place upon your lips.” “How stupid, rhyming ‘little fishes’ [peixinhos] with ‘little kisses’ [beijinhos],” Lila remarked.

  But Vinícius obviously wasn’t in the mood to debate the issue and retorted, “Oh, don’t be
so sophisticated.”

  Years later, Vinícius said that one of the most difficult set of lyrics he had written had been those of “Chega de saudade,” due to the arduousness of trying to fit the words into a melodic structure with so many comings and goings. This all contributed to the uncertainty of the song’s future—until João Gilberto’s reappearance, more than a year later, made Jobim remember it and “Chega de saudade” emerged from the drawer to be made into a record with Elizeth Cardoso, entitled Canção do amor demais (Song for an Excessive Love).

  André Midani, whom everyone thought was French, but was in fact a Syrian from Damascus, was the first to arrive at Chico Pereira’s apartment for the meeting called by the latter. He was wearing the clothes he usually wore in conservative Copacabana in 1957, and which made everyone stare at him: dirty jeans, a red shirt, and wooden clogs. Looking like that, there wasn’t anyone who’d bet that he had a job, but Midani, after only two years in Brazil, was the head of Odeon’s international repertoire department. Within a short time he was also made responsible for the record sleeves, and eventually, the entire record label’s promotion and publicity.

  Chico took two bottles of Grant’s whiskey that a friend of his, a Panair Airlines captain, had smuggled back from New York, out of the cupboard, together with the latest records by the Modern Jazz Quartet. He prepared ice, glasses, and his Grundig recorder. He was going to introduce Midani to some people he knew and admired: Ronaldo Bôscoli, Roberto Menescal, Nara Leão, Carlinhos Lyra, and a kid of fourteen, Eumir Deodato. They would play their stuff, Midani would listen, and everything would be recorded.