by Castro, Ruy
Midani was twenty-four and had had a little experience with the record business in Paris, which he had fled so he wouldn’t have to fight as a Frenchman in the war in Algeria. His objective was to remove the “conservative smell” from the record label for which he worked and sell records for young people. The problem was that young Brazilians had no music “of their own.” When Chico Pereira mentioned the gang, he became interested in hearing them play. And now, here they were.
Later, Midani would confess that at the beginning he wasn’t particularly impressed. After chatting with them for a few minutes, he found them all boring, except for Bôscoli, who was the oldest. They did not drink (only he and Bôscoli paid their respects to the rare Grant’s), they were far too much the family type, and, by all accounts, they weren’t even sleeping with their girlfriends. This wasn’t the model of youth in the Left Bank, where he had lived side-by-side with existentialists and witnessed Juliette Greco smoking a pipe. With such goody-two-shoes attitudes, it was incroyable that those young people were doing something innovative with their music. But despite his first impression, he decided to hear them. They played a few things. An hour later, Midani was truly amazed: he took a blank piece of paper out of his pocket and made them all sign right there and then. It was a contract with Odeon.
Of course, it wasn’t legally binding, but it was enough of a commitment that, when the time came, it would serve as a valid agreement between the young people and the record label. This was the young music he was looking for.
Just when things were starting to get better for him, João Gilberto found himself on the street again. His host, Lafita the Argentine, told him that the money he was earning for his paintings barely covered the cost of his paints, brushes, and rent, and that he didn’t feel it was fair for João to continue living there for free, without contributing so much as a toothpick to the pantry. It turned his stomach to find himself splattered with paint from his work, even on his forehead, while João left to go out at night all dressed up and sweetly fragrant. Besides, he was fed up with doing all the housework. Another cause for his indignation was that on the few occasions he was able to get some sleep during normal hours, he was awakened at four in the morning by the arrival of João Gilberto and his expansive friend, João Donato.
What made really Lafita rebel was that João Gilberto appeared not to work—that is, at a regular job that would guarantee him earnings to rent a place to stay, or even buy a comb from a street peddler.
In fact, João actually had worked for one month during the five that he was his guest, with the group that accompanied singer Vanja Orico in the Golden Room at the Copacabana Palace. And what a group! Among others, it included the voices of Badeco and Severino, from Os Cariocas; João Gilberto providing voice and guitar; João Donato on the accordion; and Chaim on piano. This group would play great music even in heaven. The problem was the beautiful Vanja’s repertoire: a folk mishmash whose most sophisticated numbers were rustic songs from the Brazilian Northeast, like “Muié rendera.” Despite this fact, the show was a success and none of them, including Donato, missed a single day’s work. One night a week, the show moved to the studios of TV Tupi, in Urca, where it was aired live. (So live, in fact, that one night they broadcast Vanja’s mother’s hand transporting a spoonful of honey to her daughter’s mouth.)
It wasn’t this show that secured João Gilberto’s independence—the salary was so meager that Severino and Badeco merely did the show to supplement their wages at Rádio Nacional. But it was his only source of income at the time, during which he dedicated his greatest efforts to writing lyrics to a samba by Donato, “Minha saudade” (My Saudade). Once the gig with Vanja was over, everyone went back to their regular jobs and João merely continued on as Lafita’s guest.
That is, until the day the latter took him to task and gave him a few days’ grace period to move out. João’s eyes filled with tears, but he said nothing. That same night, he took his guitar and suitcase and went to share a room in a boarding house in Botafogo with his friend Luís Roberto, the new crooner with Os Cariocas, and a friend of his, a native of Minas Gerais named Rômulo Alves. Later, Lafita convinced himself that he had done João Gilberto a great favor by showing him the door.
During the last months of 1957, if anyone had turned João Gilberto upside down, not even so much as a nickel would have fallen out of his pockets. At the same time, however, he was becoming a minor celebrity in Copacabana and Ipanema, if that were indeed possible. Because of João Gilberto, the Plaza nightclub had gone back to being the place where musicians hung out after hours, as it had been three years before, when Johnny Alf played there. The trio that had replaced Alf, with Ed Lincoln on double bass, Luizinho Eça on the piano, and Paulo Ney on guitar, underwent major changes, with Ney’s departure and the arrival of João Donato on accordion and Milton Banana on drums. They even hired a lady crooner: the very, very young Claudette Soares, who did absolutely everything that her five-foot-nothing frame allowed to rid herself of the nickname she earned at Rádio Tupi, “the little princess of the baião.”
It wasn’t as if at the Plaza one didn’t also play baião. However, with Donato on accordion, it was transformed in such a way that not even Luís Gonzaga, whose music epitomized baião, would recognize it as such. In the small confines of the Plaza, they played everything, and did so the way the musicians wanted to, because its limited clientele were other musicians or young people who liked jazz and everything that was modern. It was in this way, for example, that Cravinho, in faraway Salvador, received news of his friend João Gilberto. The last time he had seen him was dressed in pajamas, at the clinic in Rua João das Botas.
The messenger was the movie star Cyl Farney, Dick Farney’s kid brother, who was passing through Salvador. To a group of friends that included Cravinho, he had mentioned an amazing Bahian who performed at impromptu jam sessions at the Plaza almost every night, singing with a different harmony and playing the meanest guitar. When Cyl told him the name of the Bahian—João Gilberto—Cravinho had the surprise of his life. It was obvious that he believed in his friend’s potential, but he had no idea that things could happen so quickly. Cyl even told him about a song he played that was different from anything he had ever heard—”Bim-bom.” (Despite the semi-clandestine aura surrounding the song, so many people had heard “Bim-bom” that by the time João Gilberto finally recorded it in July of the following year, the record sounded like a revival.)
João Gilberto wasn’t the only artist to play bold new music at the Plaza. The drummer Milton Banana obtained permission to accompany him, as long as he played very softly. Little by little, restricting himself to using a small brush on the cymbal and a drumstick against the rim of the drum, Banana managed to emulate the beat of the guitar on his set of cheap Pingüim drums. He succeeded in playing so quietly that at times he was almost inaudible, which also didn’t make much difference because, due to the lack of customers at four in the morning, the owner, José Augusto, would close the nightclub and let the musicians continue playing for their own entertainment. And they could hear Banana.
Another person who heard him was Tom Jobim. Because of João Gilberto, he had started going to the Plaza again and discovered, in that basic rhythm, the ideal soil for planting an orchard of new chords around his melodies. He still didn’t have an exact idea of how it would turn out, but Vinícius de Moraes was on his way back from Paris and had told him he was anxious to start writing. The two of them, Jobim and Vinícius, spent the rest of 1957 in labor pains, but for many, the real baby had already finished gestating, and had in fact already been born.
9
One Minute and Fifty-Nine Seconds That Changed Everything
Arpoador, 1959: João Gilberto with his guitar and his future wife, Astrud
Manchete Press
Canção do amor demais (Song for an Excessive Love) is the famous album that Elizeth Cardoso recorded in April 1958 for a noncommercial recording label named Festa. It would later be hailed as t
he album that inaugurated the bossa nova sound, because it was entirely dedicated to songs by a new duo, Jobim and Vinícius—and, primarily, because João Gilberto accompanied Elizeth on guitar on two of the tracks (“Chega de saudade” [No More Blues] and “Outra Vez” [One More Time]), playing for the very first time what would become known as the “bossa nova beat.” Legend has it that João Gilberto’s playing during those few seconds in “Chega de saudade” inspired such amazement that Elizeth’s record had barely hit the stores when he was offered a record contract of his own. In fact, less than three months later, in July, João Gilberto recorded his historic 78 r.p.m. with Odeon, with “Chega de saudade” on one side and “Bim-bom” on the other. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Sure. Except it didn’t exactly turn out that way.
Contrary to popular belief, Canção do amor demais was not a hit when it was released in May 1958. It wasn’t even a minor success, nor was it ever destined to be. Elizeth was well respected in the music industry as a great lady of the samba, but she wasn’t exactly someone who brought the house down. To tell the truth, she hadn’t had a hit for years. Festa, in turn, was not much of a recording company, but a featherweight label crowded into a single-room office in downtown Avenida Franklin Roosevelt that depended on established recording companies to cut and distribute its records. Its promotional power was zero. Its owner, the journalist Irineu Garcia, was a pleasant man with good friends in the Ministry of Education. Garcia organized his business activities around the three things he liked most: foreign travel, keeping company with famous writers, and, most preferably, keeping company with famous writers overseas. Fortunately, Irineu was on good terms with a government branch that facilitated this endeavor: the Itamaraty (the Brazilian Foreign Affairs Ministry).
Or to be precise, the Department of Cultural Diffusion, run by his drinking buddy at the Villarino saloon, Mário Dias Costa. Festa allowed Garcia to mix business with pleasure: promoting the best Brazilian poets and columnists, who also just happened to be his friends, by producing low-cost ten-inch EPs, on which they would read their works. And if some of the writers just happened to be diplomats too, like Augusto Frederico Schmidt, João Cabral de Melo Neto, or Vinícius de Moraes, well, so much the better —the swans who floated on the lake of the beautiful Itamaraty palace would be proud, and a record by Vinícius would be right up their street. But what if that record, instead of containing his sober poems, was made up of songs that the poet and vice-consul Vinícius was writing with young Jobim? And why not record those songs performed by a singer like Dolores Duran, a fun-loving fellow night owl? (Good idea, although Vinícius preferred his songs to be performed by Elizeth, who was more of a singer.)
Because it was a popular music record, Canção do amor demais had greater sales potential for Festa than its poetry albums. Despite this fact, Garcia felt it wise to cut a mere two thousand copies, which would be more than sufficient to smooth over his relations with the Itamaraty and not suffer any negative consequences. After all, even after Orfeu and everything else, Jobim and Vinícius still hadn’t achieved fame as composers and no one knew those new songs. Dolores demanded a high fee to make the recording, and Garcia had to give her up. So he hired the much less expensive Elizeth and, incidentally, made Vinícius happy, because she was his choice in the first place. And that was how, “bronzed by the patina of life,” the Divine One (as Elizeth used to be called) “rose like the moon for a night of serenading,” according to the flowery text written by the poet on the record sleeve, and entered bossa nova history books like Pontius Pilate entered the Creed.
Despite the “casual” manner in which Vinícius’s text appears on the original record sleeve (written by hand, complete with mistakes and “corrections,” rather than typed), it’s obvious that it was very deliberately composed. Vinícius reviewed it carefully before delivering it to the graphic artists. Reading it today, his preoccupation with not offending the Itamaraty, through whose monocle a samba record might be seen as an offensive commercial undertaking, practically leaps off the paper. Selecting every word with the utmost care, Vinícius made it abundantly clear that those songs were the “freely given and unrecompensed” product of “utmost diversion” of—”with no intent whatsoever to profit” from—his friendship with the composer and singer. He did everything he could to point out that it was nothing more than an amateur production. In order to erase the possibility of any doubt to this effect, the words “friendship” and “friend” appear on the sleeve no less than six times. Had it been a record of poetry, none of these precautions would have been necessary.
This was one of the two reasons for which, on both the record sleeve and the record itself, the songs were attributed as follows: “Music: Antonio Carlos Jobim. Poetry: Vinícius de Moraes.” The other was that Vinícius was insisting to his literary peers (for whom in 1958 it was inconceivable that a poet should meddle with popular music) that his lyrics indeed were “poetry.” After all, if he, a poet, said they were, who could argue otherwise?
So many political and poetic precautions taken by Vinícius in writing the text for the record sleeve, and he forgot to mention the one thing that posterity would come to consider the most important feature of Canção do amor demais: João Gilberto’s guitar playing on those two tracks. There is no reference in Vinícius’s text to that amazing guitar rhythm or what it represented. João Gilberto’s name is simply not mentioned; nor are those of other great musicians who feature prominently in accompanying Elizeth in “Chega de saudade”: the flutist Copinha, trombonist Edmundo Maciel, violinist Irani, drummer Juquinha—they all remained anonymous. They were all studio musicians, the veterans of thousands of recordings for which they had never received the slightest bit of credit. The omission of João Gilberto is inexplicable, because Elizeth’s record was released a few weeks after he had, literally, obtained the power to paralyze Odeon’s recording studio with his demands while recording his own single featuring “Chega de saudade”.
For João Gilberto, that was the problem with Canção do amor demais: the record was Elizeth’s, not his. Jobim’s arrangements were initially composed for him to play the guitar on five of the tracks: “Chega de saudade,” “Outra vez,” “Eu não existo sem você” (I Don’t Exist Without You), “Caminho de pedra” (Stone Road), and “Luciana.” But he was only given the chance to collaborate on the first two, besides providing backing vocals (along with his friend Walter Santos, whom he had chosen, and Jobim himself) on “Chega de saudade.” On the other three tracks, he was little more than an extra, and they didn’t need him for the eight tracks that remained.
Despite this fact, when Jobim and Vinícius met with Elizeth in Rua Nascimento Silva to teach her the songs, he made a point of showing up. He didn’t care for the reverence with which the Divine One treated the musical scores, as if they were parts of some sacred repertoire—perhaps because the lyrics were written by an important poet such as Vinícius. João wanted Elizeth to sing in a more lively way, especially in the sambas, and sometimes dared to proffer a suggestion or two. He showed her what he could do with “Chega de saudade,” slowing down and speeding up the rhythm in accordance with what he felt the lyrics needed, and tried to encourage her to do something similar. But Elizeth was not particularly interested in his advice, and clearly insisted that she did not need his suggestions.
João retreated into silence and began to participate less during rehearsals. Besides, Vinícius’s lyrics to “Serenata de adeus” (Goodbye Serenade) turned his stomach: “Ah, woman, resplendently shining star / Go, but before you leave / Tear out my heart / Drive your talons into my aching breast / And let all love and disillusion bleed to death.” He felt that music lyrics shouldn’t talk of blood, death, or daggers, and it nauseated him to imagine those fingernails clawing at chests and tearing out pulsing hearts. His records would have none of that.
Despite the good intentions of Jobim, who was trying to arrange a session for him at Odeon, there was no prospect of a record on the horizon; and at t
hat time, João found himself once again with the same old problem: the landlady of the boarding house in Botafogo where he was staying had kicked him out and told him not to come back to fetch his suitcase until he had the money to pay her the rent he owed. His two roommates were unable to help him: Luís Roberto, of Os Cariocas, lived on credit, and Rômulo hadn’t yet become the wealthy coffee grower that he would be in later years in Minas Gerais—or he wouldn’t have been sharing a room in that cheap boarding house.
João Gilberto explained the situation to Tito Madi, whose heart was as soft as the grape leaves that his mother, who was of Lebanese extraction, used in her recipes. Tito lent him the money to pay his debt at the boarding house and recover his suitcase, and invited him to live with him in his apartment on Avenida Atlântica, at the intersection of Rua Miguel Lemos. The singer Luís Cláudio, a friend of Tito’s and now of João’s, lived nearby, on Rua Rainha Elizabeth. The three of them became like family, and were joined every now and again by a young man from Belo Horizonte who often came to Rio: Pacífico Mascarenhas, the student whom João had met in Diamantina at Dadainha’s house.
In Belo Horizonte, Pacífico headed a group of young men who were crazy about Dick Farney and who tried to produce a mixture of samba and jazz. The group called themselves Samba-Cana. Pacífico played a little piano and guitar, and had no money worries. At night, he and his friends kept Belo Horizonte awake, especially the smart neighborhoods, with fabulous serenades, which even included a piano mounted on a truck. The piano traveled in the truck with them, and needed to be retuned after each nightly performance. One of Pacífico’s friends, a student named Roberto Guimarães, had written a song called “Amor certinho” (Sure-Fire Love), which was the top hit in all their serenades.
