by Castro, Ruy
João Donato had a different experience. In 1959, he had no audience in Rio because everyone thought he played jazz, so he went to California to play Latin music—which was what in fact he was trying to do in Brazil, only nobody realized it. Upon his arrival there, he was immediately adopted by the cool cats of the genre, like the Latins Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, and Johnny Rodriguez, and the Americans Cal Tjader, Herbie Mann, and Eddie Palmieri. Without knowing it, Donato’s career had been similar to theirs: Santamaria and Tjader were, respectively, the conga and vibraphone players for George Shearing’s Latin super-quintet, whose records he had played nonstop on the Victrola in 1953; and Tito Puente was a kind of Latin Stan Kenton. In turn, Kenton was the major American influence on all Cuban musicians at the time, with his recording of “23°N–83°W,” whose title, by the way, represented Havana’s map coordinates.
Donato felt right at home in the middle of all those congas, timbales, and bongos of Latin jazz, with possibilities for splitting up the wind instruments and creating the craziest piano harmonies. Everything was allowed, given that the rhythm was an enchilada of mambos, rumbas, sambas, and—¿porque nó?—bossa novas. The West Coast, where these musicians were based, was then, even more than New York, the melting pot for Latin music. From 1959 to 1961, he played piano with Mongo Santamaria and participated in the first recording of “Para tí” (For You), played trombone and wrote the arrangements for Tito Puente’s brass instruments, recorded extensively with Cal Tjader, who was already famous, and with Eddie Palmieri, who wasn’t yet. His appearance on the scene was quite simply stunning.
In the years that followed, they all began to use Donato’s songs in their repertoire, such as “A rã” (The frog), “Amazonas” (Amazon), “Cadê Jodel?” (Where Is Jodel?), and they became standards for what was later called funk music. Donato himself soon started putting together his albums at prestigious Pacific Records—and had his songbook recorded by other corn-tortilla-with-chilies-loving jazz musicians, like vibraphonist Dave Pike. Donato had an entry in Leonard Feather’s Encyclopaedia of Jazz in the Sixties, an achievement that he was unable to repeat in the Encyclopaedia of Jazz in the Seventies, also by Feather—because as the Americans also discovered, he was still the little boy in short pants that he had been when he was a member of the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club.
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“Garota de Ipanema” (The Girl from Ipanema)
Sigrid and LetÌcia (above, with Sérgio Mendes, seated) perform the bossa nova “dance” at Bottles Bar
Collection of João Luiz de Albuquerque
According to a widely circulated story, Vinícius de Moraes went into the Arpège nightclub in 1962 to support his friend Tom Jobim who was there at the piano, struggling to make some pocket money, and came out with his future partner: a young man who played electric guitar in the dance band, named Baden Powell. Vinícius, who had never heard Baden play before, was very taken with what he was playing—a broad range of songs that included everything from “My Funny Valentine” to “Stupid Cupid.” He sought him out after the show and asked him outright to be his partner, starting that very night. Baden was astonished—after all, this was Vinícius de Moraes! He nodded in agreement and, to the dismay of the poet, disappeared from sight. Days later, after getting up the courage, Baden went to his house. Then the two of them shut themselves up in Vinícius’s apartment, drank half of Scotland’s production, and only emerged three months later, with twenty-five finished songs.
Nobody knows how this story began, but it’s one of those typical bossa nova legends that make everything seem very unpremeditated in order to depict its protagonists as shy, frightened young men. Only the end of the story about Baden and Vinícius is actually true. In 1962, Jobim was already too famous for playing at the Arpège, a B-class nightclub in the Leme neighborhood. And the identity of Baden Powell, who did in fact play in a dance band, was no secret either. In fact, all singers and musicians in Rio knew him at least by his curious name (that of the founder of the Boy Scouts)—Vinícius included. It’s somewhat of a stretch to think that, for what he had in mind, the poet would invite him to be his partner based purely on what he had heard him play in the nightclub.
The two of them did meet about that time through a mutual friend, the businessman Nilo Queiroz, one of Baden’s guitar students. Nilo got them together at his apartment in Avenida Atlântica, on the corner of Rua Duvivier, with the hope that something would come out of their meeting. After listening to Baden Powell all night long, playing even Villa-Lobos, Vinícius made his offer. And Queiroz had no reason whatsoever to be nervous about the proposal, because he was waiting for it—Baden had already discussed it with him. What he didn’t know was that, on entering Vinícius’s apartment in Parque Guinle, he would spend the next three months locked up in there, enjoying the biggest and best drinking binge of his life, out of which would come twenty-five songs and a new career on the horizon.
That ethylico-musical retreat produced, among other songs, “Consolação” (Consolation), “Samba em prelúdio” (Samba in Prelude), “Só por amor” (Only for Love), “Labareda” (Flame), “O astronauta” (The Astronaut), “Bom dia, amigo” (Good Day, Friend), “Tempo de amor” (Time of Love) (later better known as “Samba do Veloso” in homage to the bar in Rua Montenegro), “Berimbau,” and almost all the afro-sambas, including the “Cantos” (Chants) for Ossanha, Xangô, and Iemanjá. It was an extraordinary production, both for the number of songs and their quality, especially taking into consideration how much they drank during those three months, and the fact that Baden managed to lend such a Bahian flavor to the afro-sambas without ever having been to Bahia.
How much they drank was proudly calculated by Vinícius: twenty cases of Haig’s Scotch whiskey, which worked out to a total of 240 two-liter flagons—or 2.666 ordinary-sized bottles per day. It seems like a lot, but it wouldn’t have been such a ridiculous quantity for two hardened drinkers like Baden and Vinícius if, at the beginning, they hadn’t also been swigging gin, which they didn’t include in the count. And there was no proof that one of their frequent visitors, former president Juscelino Kubitshcek, Vinicius’s friend, then senator for Goiás, contributed much to the depletion of their stock.
As for the Bahian flavor of the music, Baden was given an extensive briefing by Vinícius as he prepared to write that series of songs, and the two of them had an album of Bahian folksongs, which the poet had been given by his friend Carlos Coqueijo, to serve as an aural guide. From this record, they gleaned the recipes for samba-de-roda, pontos de candomblé, and berimbau melodies. Would it be possible to one day forgive Baden and Vinícius for popularizing the berimbau, the most annoying instrument in the world after the bagpipes? (Baden only went to Bahia, by the way, years later in 1968, when he spent six months there and came back with “Lapinha.”) As for Vinícius, he left the apartment after the three-month binge and immediately admitted himself to the São Vicente Clinic, where he and Baden, undaunted, wrote three more great songs: “Amei tanto” (I Loved So Much), “Pra que chorar” (Why Cry?) and “Samba da benção” (Benediction Samba).
Strangely enough, a large part of what they wrote was consigned to a drawer and took a long time to emerge. (The album Os afro-sambas [The Afro-Sambas] was only recorded four years later, in 1966.) But for Baden, his work with Vinícius was a turning point in his personal and professional life. With it, he ceased definitively to be the boy who lived in the Ramos suburb, who from the age of seventeen had commuted by train to and from the nightclubs, at which he played in dance bands, and occasionally was forced to spend twelve hours on a bus in order to accompany singer Ivon Curi somewhere in the interior of the state of Minas Gerais. At nineteen, in 1956, he managed to get a job with Ed Lincoln’s combo at the Plaza nightclub, where he was able at least to play a little jazz, his passion. It would have been great, if there had been anyone in the nightclub to hear him play.
In those days, Baden was so used to playing to invisible audiences that he could practically mana
ge to play his guitar without even taking it out of its canvas case. Badeco, of Os Cariocas, used to go to the Plaza to see his friends, and would hang out with Baden into the early morning. Baden wanted to show Badeco a new technique he had learned on the guitar and just grabbed the strings beneath the canvas and produced the sound he wanted. In the years that followed, Baden made the rounds of the nightclubs, which included the Midnight at the Copacabana Palace, playing with Copinha’s orchestra, and ended up at TV Continental, accompanying singers. But within a short time the singers began to complain: unless the cameras focused only on their faces, viewers wouldn’t take their eyes off Baden’s guitar. Just imagine if he had been good-looking.
As a studio musician, Baden then began to get busier than he really wanted, recording at Philips with practically everyone, from Carlinhos Lyra to a small moldy-fig group called Lyra de Xopotó, without ever getting credit on the album sleeve. Just when he thought he would die undiscovered, Philips let him make his first commissioned album, in 1960, and his second in 1961, but with the kind of repertoire that at the time induced people to spare their needles—”Estrellita” (Little Star), “Ojos verdes” (Green Eyes), “Minha palhoça” (My Straw Hut). And with a name like his, people thought his albums were about scouting. (In fact, Baden Powell de Aquino was never a Boy Scout. But his father had been and, as you can tell, slightly fanatically so.)
Until Vinícius came on the scene, the only people who had shown any interest in writing with Baden had been Billy Blanco, in 1959, with “Samba triste” (Sad Samba) (which Lúcio Alves had been the first to record), and his student and defender Nilo Queiroz. It was unfortunate for the others, because Vinícius snatched Baden up in his prime, and with the decisive collaboration of Professor Clementino Fraga at the São Vicente Clinic, who kept the two of them alive, the three created the best duo the world had ever seen since Haig & Haig.
“Grow, baby!”—wailed Lennie Dale every thirty seconds in the empty Bottles Bar, at four in the afternoon, while rehearsing Wilson Simonal or Leny Andrade.
He didn’t just wail, he also gesticulated, waving his arms like a propeller, and spinning around in the air like an out-of-control helicopter. The Lane had never seen anything like it. Lennie Dale didn’t expect the singers to actually do this, of course (or did he?), but he wanted to give them an idea of how an artist should grow on stage, and be larger than life—although it was risky to try and be bigger than Bottles’s tiny stage, given than the entire nightclub wasn’t much larger than fifteen square meters.
Nobody really knew where the American dancer, whom impresario Carlos Machado had met in Rome—apparently at a party for Elizabeth Taylor in 1960, celebrating the beginning of the filming of Cleopatra, for which he was assistant choreographer—had come from. Lennie Dale had already been in Brazil for two years, and the filming of Cleopatra was still far from being finished, perhaps because he had left the production. Machado brought him in to inject some life into the choreography for his show, Elas atacam pelo telephone (They Attack by Telephone), at Fred’s nightclub, and was impressed at how he rehearsed the dancers almost to death. The dancers survived and Lennie, born Leonardo La Ponzina, decided to stay in Rio.
His arrival in the Lane caused a stir at the time, precisely for the innovative concept he introduced: rehearsal. Up until then, singers, musicians, and producers would only do a quick sweep of the nightclub before a show to try and steal a few drinks in the absence of the owners. Despite their improvisory nature, the shows were miraculously good, but only because Johnny Alf (having returned to Rio in an effort to make up for lost time) or the intrumental bands, like Sérgio Mendes’s sextet, the Tamba Trio, or Bossa Três, were good enough to make up for even those tinny-sounding microphones. Sylvinha Telles would be singing accompanied by a playback on which were recorded the fantastic arrangements that Nelson Riddle had written at Aloysio de Oliveira’s request, when suddenly the playback would fail to come on. It wasn’t terribly professional. But after all, nobody performing in the Lane had aspirations to make it to Broadway.
With Lennie Dale, the Lane almost became Broadway, even though it was a somewhat run-down version. He made the singer and the band rehearse as if they were beginners (which, by the way, they were), repeating each detail dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times until it became second nature to them. And they were complicated details, with sudden breaks and even more unexpected entrances, like a lighting change at the exact moment at which a cymbal was hit, colored spotlights flashing when the drumsticks rolled on the skin of the drums, and so on.
Some people thought the gringo was half-crazy; others attributed his cheerful disposition to his frequent pit-stops in his dressing-room to smoke something; and others couldn’t figure out why Lennie Dale was wasting his time in Brazil when he could have been a top choreographer, the new Jerome Robbins, Michael Kidd, or Bob Fosse, in his own country. “Oh, well,” he used to say modestly.
Some of Lennie Dale’s productions in the Lane required props worthy of Hollywood films, like his own show at Bottles, in which he sang “O pato” (The Duck), and came on stage with a live duck inside a glass. Obviously, the “glass” was a fruit bowl and the duck a duckling. The duck behaved itself and was very quiet, having been trained to exhaustion. But during the length of time that the show ran (largely due to the duck), Lennie was unable to prevent the duck from growing, and it would no longer fit inside the fruit bowl. It made more sense to substitute the duck than to find a bigger fruit bowl, but this meant that the new duck had to be trained to keep quiet. Don’t ask how, but each substitute duck seemed an even better actor than the one before.
The main problem caused by the duck was that Bottles didn’t have a suitable dressing room for it. Because of this, it was entrusted to Lidia Libion, Sacha Gordine’s former representative in Brazil. Lidia’s job was to keep the duck at her house, in Travessa Santa Leocádia, in Copacabana, and bring it to Bottles a few minutes before its entrance on stage. Once the number was over, Lidia would quickly take the duck home because, had the duck remained in that unbreatheable environment for even a few minutes, Lennie would have had to sing “O pato” by himself the following night.
The last duck was a great hit with the audience and critics alike while the show was running, but its subsequent career—prepared by Lidia in tucupi style for her husband Jacques and some friends—merely received mixed reviews.
Not all of Lennie Dale’s ideas were as successful, but his greatest flop was trying to invent a bossa nova dance. At the time, any new musical rhythm was mandatorily associated with a dance, even if the idea had never so much as crossed its creators’ minds—and if there was a rhythm with which to dance to the sound of João Gilberto, of course it had to be samba. But they imposed restrictions even on this, because among bossa nova musicians, almost all of whom had a strictly classical or jazz training, there was no worse indication that a colleague was having difficulties than when he was playing “music to dance to.” Jobim, who had never danced in his life, had just finished writing “Só danço samba” (Jazz ‘n’ Samba) with Vinícius, but it was without much conviction. So much so, in fact, that on hearing “Só danço samba” for the first time, João Gilberto asked him, “What’s this, Tomzinho? A boogie-woogie?”
The dances that were popular among young people were rock ‘n’ roll, the twist, and the hully-gully, which the young Nara Leão had already very properly defined as “stupidity times three.” (There was also la bostella, introduced in Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita, in which people threw themselves to the ground and contorted their bodies epileptically in time to the music. It didn’t last long.) As a form of music that was meant to be exclusively listened to, bossa nova was competing against all of those heavyweights challengers in international music—and was winning. But it might not withstand the siege for very long. The French singer Sacha Distel was already touring Brazil, after having heard in Paris the songs that his namesake Sacha Gordine had bought for an absolute steal in Brazil, and was looking fo
r a way to turn bossa nova into a dance.
Lennie Dale, who was, after all, a choreographer and already considered himself to be part of the bossa nova scene, decided to jump the gun and invent a dance before some other gringo did. And he did in fact create one, but there were several small problems with it: men did not feel comfortable dancing it because it didn’t suit their masculinity terribly well; it suited Lennie Dale, but then he was a dancer. And the only women who were capable of executing such contortions, without ending up at a chiropractor, were Sigrid Hermanny and Letícia Surdi, who were also professional dancers. Lennie Dale’s greatest achievement with his dance was managing to perform it on the tiny stage in Bottles Bar, although this restricted the spins to a vertical plane only. Jumping to the side, one would land on top of millionaire Cesar Thedim’s table, or in the lap of photographer Paulo Garcez, two regular customers. Marly Tavares, another professional dancer, also danced at the Bottles, but reached a point at which she felt that the stage was better suited for just singing.
Without meaning to, Lennie Dale ended up being more influential as a singer than as a dancer. Not that he could really sing, mind you, but in his capacity as an American showman, he had to be able to do everything, including this. And naturally, he sang like the Americans of his generation who aspired to become the new Sinatra: Steve Lawrence, Buddy Greco, Bobby Darin, Frank D’Rone, and Julius La Rosa. It was very funny listening to him sing “The Lady Is a Tramp” in Portuguese, because everyone knew he wasn’t serious, but he ended up passing those vocal arabesques on to Wilson Simonal, Pery Ribeiro and, in the near future, Elis Regina. They all ended up singing like Johnny Alf had ten years before.
