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

by Castro, Ruy

  From the taxi also emerged João Gilberto (wearing a wine-colored Czech overcoat given to him by author Jorge Amado) and radioman Walter Silva, who was going to broadcast the bossa nova show in Brazil, via Rádio Bandeirantes, right from Carnegie Hall. João Gilberto set down his only suitcase in a corner of the hotel lobby, went over to the reception desk, picked up a phone, and dialed a number that he had taken out of his overcoat pocket: “Hello, Percy?” he said in Portuguese. “This is João. I’m at the Diplomat Hotel. Come on over.”

  Twenty minutes later, an extremely elegant black man arrived at the hotel, exquisitely dressed from head to toe, with a goatee, looking like a Zulu diplomat. It was Percy Heath, the double bassist with the Modern Jazz Quartet. The two had met a few months earlier in Rio, when the MJQ played at the Teatro Municipal and Heath had made a point of being introduced to João Gilberto. They went over to a sofa in the lobby of the Diplomat Hotel and spent a good long while chatting in the language of musicians—because João spoke no English, nor Heath any Portuguese.

  The bossa nova gang, with the exception of Jobim, was arriving that morning for the concert that had been scheduled, as the result of an unusual collaborative effort between an American record company, Audio-Fidelity, and a branch of the Brazilian government, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to take place a few hours thence at Carnegie Hall. (Jobim was boarding a plane in Rio at that very moment, and only arrived in New York right before the show.) Theoretically, it was going to be a bossa nova show, although some of the featured artists whose appearances, were being advertised on the billboards outside the theater were guitarist Bola Sete, singer Carmen Costa, percussionist José Paulo, and the Argentine pianist Lalo Schifrin. The four of them had about as much to do with bossa nova as John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, and Dag Hammarskjöld.

  The other names listed on the Carnegie Hall billboards were legitimately representative: Luiz Bonfá, Oscar Castro-Neves’s ensemble, Agostinho dos Santos, Carlinhos Lyra, the Sérgio Mendes Sextet, Roberto Menescal, Chico Feitosa, Normando Santos, Milton Banana, Sérgio Ricardo, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and João Gilberto. Although their names weren’t listed on the billboards, the audience would also be getting other bossa nova comparative unknowns like Caetano Zama, Ana Lúcia, and Claudio Miranda—which made the absence of artists like Sylvinha Telles, Johnny Alf, João Donato, the Tamba Trio, Baden Powell, Maurício Einhorn, Alayde Costa, Bossa Três, and Os Cariocas, with their vast stage experience, even more incomprehensible.

  That’s right. Why some and not others?

  Anyone who had been privy to the pandemonium in Rio that preceded bossa nova’s pilgrimage to Carnegie Hall would have had the feeling that not even the choice of sailors to join the caravels led by Pedro Álvares Cabral to “discover” Brazil in 1500 had caused such a commotion. It all started in September, when Sidney Frey, president of Audio-Fidelity, arrived in Rio to invite some Brazilian artists to perform in the United States. Who did he want? Just Jobim and João Gilberto (together with double bass and drums), for either one would make for a first-rate show. Frey, in the meantime, wasn’t merely focusing on sales from tickets to the show, or from the show’s recording. This was all peanuts compared to the real big fish, the release of the songs from the show in the United States through his two publishing companies, Matador and Eleventh Avenue.

  Aloysio de Oliveira, the man who was certain to be enlisted for this task, thought it was perfect: Jobim and João Gilberto were going to perform in America in person. But there was an obstacle for Frey: all of Jobim’s vast former production was the property of Henrique Lebendiger, who had already edited the songs in Brazil through Fermata. And without Jobim, who had already achieved success in the United States as “the composer of ‘Desafinado,’” the show wouldn’t make sense.

  But Frey wasn’t a stereotypical American; he wasn’t even an insensitive know-it-all. Among other things, he wasn’t totally ignorant about Brazil and Brazilians, as was widely thought. The first time he had set foot on Brazilian soil was as a sailor during World War II, and he knew well the goings-on of Praça Mauá. He was a huge fan of Brazilian folk culture, and his home in New York boasted an impressive collection of tambourines, cuícas, and reco-recos—more than two hundred fascinating Brazilian noisemakers. He was very aware of the difference between samba, old samba, and bossa nova, and how they could be combined to soothe the American palate.

  That September, in Rio, he came and heard the cream of the crop. He managed to catch, for example, the end of the show with Jobim, Vinícius, and João Gilberto at the Bon Gourmet and, like everyone else, was slayed by “Garota de Ipanema.” He frequently went to the Lane, where Sérgio Mendes was performing with his fabulous sextet, with Paulo Moura on alto sax, Pedro Paulo on trumpet, Mendes himself on piano, Durval Ferreira on guitar, Otávio Bailly on double bass, and Dom Um on drums. He also heard all the new songs by young composers like Lyra, Menescal, Feitosa, Durval Ferreira, and Oscar Castro-Neves, played by Castro-Neves’s ensemble. It was first-rate material for release in the United States—and there must be more where that came from. Well, if he couldn’t spear the best of Jobim, he would just have to go trawling for other fish.

  Frey was objective: he invited the press to a lavishly catered function in the Green Room of the Copacabana Palace, at which he announced that, following a suggestion by American photographer David Drew Zingg to the Brazilian vice-consul in New York, Dona Dora Vasconcellos, he was booking Carnegie Hall for a night of bossa nova on November 21, and was still trying to decide whom to invite to participate. In the days that followed, every inch of local newspapers and magazines was devoted to this bombshell news, and candidates for Carnegie Hall descended on his suite at the Copacabana Palace in hordes. It was like a cattle stampede. Anyone who had ever strummed a guitar at some amateur show considered himself qualified to take to the stage that had hosted not only classical music, but also Benny Goodman in 1938. It was as if nobody was bothering to take a good, long, hard look in the mirror. Carnegie Hall might have been liberal, but it still wasn’t a free-for-all. Besides, this was supposed to be a concert of bossa nova, not just any old Brazilian music.

  The only trouble was suddenly everyone in Brazil started calling themselves “bossa nova”: serenaders, troubadours, lundu bands, harpists, and even well-intentioned jazz musicians—the conversions took place en masse at the very last minute. Sidney Frey might have been a fan of Brazilian music, but he wasn’t familiar with all its subtle forms, and risked buying a pig in a poke. Despite this fact, Frey had already begun drawing up contracts with musicians, in which the latter signed away the overseas marketing rights to this or that song. But as he had not yet begun to disseminate them, at least, according to him, he was not obliged to pay anyone for them. In view of the uncertainty surrounding the issue, people were already threatening to slap him around a little if he showed his face in the Lane again.

  All of this, combined with the possibility of a disorderly performance at Carnegie Hall, could have negative consequences for Brazilian music abroad. This thought occurred to someone who was linked to bossa nova for several different reasons: the ambassador Mário Dias Costa, head of the Cultural Division at the Itamaraty.

  One of Vinícius’s former drinking buddies at the Villarino, Dias Costa lived in Rua Viveiros de Castro in Copacabana, a few steps from the Lane, of whose nightclubs he was a devoted patron. As he was an ardent bossa nova fan, he offered Frey his services to participate in the selection of musicians. As the Itamaraty kept a small fund for these kinds of emergencies, he undertook to pay for a few fares and accompany the delegation to New York to make sure that, at the hotel, nobody would eat with their fingers or scratch their balls in front of the ladies. Frey was very grateful for his support, particularly for his payment of the airfares (Varig Airlines provided others), and felt he had been freed to address his own problems—especially because he now had a major one.

  Aloysio de Oliveira was trying to sabotage the concert with the arg
ument (which was, by the way, quite valid) that it was getting completely out of hand and could be disastrous for the artists’ future careers in the United States. By artists, he meant the two that really mattered to him: Jobim and João Gilberto. His hope was that if the big names boycotted the show, Frey would cancel the concert, and it could be rescheduled for another time and organized properly—that is, with just Jobim and João. Aloysio seemed to be convinced that the two of them had understood and were planning to follow suit, because he started issuing instructions to those closest to him: “Look,” he told Carlinhos Lyra, “Jobim and João aren’t going. So the deal is, nobody goes.”

  Lyra and Menescal had both already swallowed the bait when Vinícius got wind of the conspiracy and told his parceirinho, Lyra, “Look, Tomzinho and João are going. So you’re going too.”

  “Oh!,” exclaimed Lyra. “But we’ve just come from a meeting at Tom’s house where we all agreed to spare ourselves the embarrassment and not go.”

  “That may be,” Vinícius went on. “But the two of them are going and you are, too.”

  Carlinhos then realized that the boycott of Carnegie Hall was a ploy to oust those who were being labeled mediocrities (all of them, except for Jobim and João) and told Menescal. When Menescal announced that if that was the case then he also planned to go, the ploy broke down, and whoever wanted to go to Carnegie Hall went.

  Not all of them wanted to go. Singers Sylvinha Telles and Nara Leão preferred not to open themselves up to possible embarrassment. Harmonica player Maurício Einhorn announced he was getting married. Johnny Alf, invited by Chico Feitosa, vanished from the Top Club, where he was playing, and no one really bothered to look for him. João Donato, living in California, conveyed his thanks for the invitation, but sent word saying he didn’t need the gig. The Tamba Trio, who had just returned from New York, weren’t interested. And Ronaldo Bôscoli, who, although he didn’t sing or play an instrument was an obvious invitee, refused on the grounds that he didn’t attend bossa nova concerts with samba dancers and folk percussionists.

  Not all of them were sponsored by the Itamaraty. Those who came from São Paulo had their own sponsors. Agostinho dos Santos’s fare was paid by his recording company, RGE; Di Giorgio Guitars paid Caetano Zama’s way; Diários Associados, a TV, radio, and press chain, paid for singer Ana Lúcia to go. Songwriter-turned-movie director Sérgio Ricardo, who was in Los Angeles promoting his film O menino da calça branca (The Boy in White Pants), asked to take part.

  At the meeting between the musicians and Sidney Frey, shortly before the show, Sérgio Mendes had announced, “I get to either open or close the show. And I’m not accompanying anyone.”

  For someone who had spent the entire flight clutching a string of rosary beads, feeling that New York was a vast distance away compared to Niterói (across the bay), Sérgio Mendes’s business acumen was in overdrive. Sidney Frey felt it most appropriate for him to open the show. The grande finale–style closing would be down to—surprise, surprise!—João Gilberto. After all, it was to hear him that the audience boasted such illustrous names as those of Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Erroll Garner, and Herbie Mann.

  They were among three thousand people who, according to calculations, packed Carnegie Hall. Another estimated thousand were forced to stay outside on that exceptionally rainy night in New York, November 21, 1962. Estimates vary as to the percentage of Brazilians in the audience. To Tom Jobim, who was on stage with hundreds of spotlights shining in his eyes, everyone looked Brazilian. To the O Globo journalist Sylvio Tullio Cardoso, who was also there, there were perhaps five hundred Brazilians at the very most. But what difference does it make anyway, when most of the audience, Brazilian or otherwise, were unable to hear a large part of what was played that night? This was despite the presence of a veritable “forest of microphones”: there were five for Audio-Fidelity alone, as well as those of CBS, Voz da América (Voice of America), the US Information Agency, the BBC, Rádio Europa-Livre (Free Europe Radio) (transmitting to Moscow), and even Rádio Bandeirantes, the only Brazilian broadcasting station present. All of the microphones worked well except for the internal sound microphones of the theater itself. Frey’s team, overly preoccupied with recording a disc of the show, had paid little attention to this particular detail.

  The balcony audience (U.S. $2.80 per seat) heard the show better than those in the front stalls (U.S. $4.80 per seat) because they weren’t competing with the noise from the five thousand cups of coffee being served by IBC (Brazilian Institute of Coffee) in the vestibule, from which the clatter of saucers and spoons occasionally echoed throughout the show. All of the mishaps with the sound were almost opportune, serving to disguise to a certain extent the innumerable slipups and mistakes that the artists and technicians made during the show—that afterward would be expanded upon at length with sadistic satisfaction by the Brazilian press when referring to the “bossa nova disaster” at Carnegie Hall.

  Today, some of those slipups and mistakes are hilarious. Almost all the singers tried to speak English with the audience, giving New York a very poor impression of the standard of education at Brazilian colleges. Normando Santos started singing “Amor no samba” (Love in Samba) into a disconnected microphone. When it was signaled to him that he could not be heard, he stopped, and right when the microphone came on, he could be heard asking, “No hear? No hear?” Caetano Zama, not satisfied with merely executing a few dance steps, sang something called “Bossa Nova in New York,” in a language that was very similar to English, but that only the Brazilians in the audience managed to understand—especially when he referred to a country named “Brey-zil.” And Roberto Menescal flubbed the Portuguese lyrics to “The Little Boat” so badly that he never sang anymore, not even in the shower—a wise decision, considering that, prior to the Carnegie Hall concert, the only place he had ventured to sing a little was in Nara Leão’s apartment.

  Tom Jobim was perhaps the most concerned of them all. After Luiz Bonfá, he was the oldest performer on stage—he would be thirty-six in two months. Until then, he had never been out of Brazil, but had spent his life dreaming of the night that he would finally perform on stage in New York. He was also the one who stood to lose the most from failure (either his own or that of the show), because his songs were already circulating widely in America through the voices of several of his old idols. And to his complete despair, the night was already turning out exactly as he had feared: a group of talented but amateur kids, risking the reputation of a great musical genre as a result of their inexperience.

  And that was without counting the nonsense that had already taken place. Bola Sete, Carmen Costa, and José Paulo performed “In the Mood,” with Bola Sete playing the guitar on his shoulders—what on earth did that have to do with bossa nova? A band of percussionists did a juggling act with tambourines during Bonfá’s set. All that was missing was a Bahian woman dressed in carnival costume throwing candy to the audience. And just a few minutes before, an American security guard the size of a closet had almost come to blows with Carlinhos Lyra in the wings, on catching him red-handed, smoking beneath a “No Smoking” sign. And had Carlinhos considered starting a fight, he could even had ended up in the electric chair, Jobim imagined.

  That was the basis of his reluctance to board the plan in Rio that morning. His wife Teresa didn’t want him to go either. His friend, the columnist Fernando Sabino, frog-marched him onto the plane practically by force, and once he was airborne Sabino had to promise him that the plane would not crash. Jobim’s fear now was not that the plane would come crashing down, but that his career would. Sabino understood: “You’re going to succeed, Tom. Starting tonight, the entire world is going to hear you.” Well, a good part of the world was already hearing him, because “Desafinado” had already been recorded eleven times in the United States that year alone—and one of those recordings, the one with Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, had sold one million copies. But Sabino’s natural instinc
ts shone like a lamp when he referred to that night. The following morning would see a new Antonio Carlos Jobim.

  However, when his time on stage at Carnegie Hall came, Jobim found he was all thumbs at the piano. He walked on to a resounding welcome, but Agostinho dos Santos, who had sung Jobim’s own composition, “A felicidade” (Happiness) shortly before, was a hard act to follow. Tom sat down at the piano, brushed back the lock of hair that was falling over his right eye (and that immediately fell back over the same eye), and began to sing “One Note Samba” and—even worse than Menescal with “The Little Boat”—totally messed up the lyrics. The words simply wouldn’t come to him, as if he had forgotten them back at the Veloso. He only managed to get back on track with the line “E quem quer todas as notas / Ré, mi, fá, sol, lá, si, dó” (And whoever wants all the notes / Re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do) and from that point on managed to sing the lyrics to the end, including in English. Delirious applause.

  Jobim started the second song, “Corcovado” (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars) even worse, getting the key wrong. But it was then that Antonio Carlos Jobim truly began to come into his own. He stopped the music, made a gesture to Menescal and Milton Banana, who were accompanying him, that indicated “hold on a second,” and with great aplomb, started again—and played and sang it all the way through, without making a single mistake, in both English and Portuguese. He just about brought Carnegie Hall to its knees. Jobim got up from the piano, tripped over a microphone as if he did that sort of thing every day, bowed, and tried to exit the stage, but was called back by the thunderous applause. He then said, in the best English of the night, with the exception of that of the Master of Ceremonies, the critic Leonard Feather: “It’s my first time in New York and I’m very, very, very glad to be here. I’m loving the people, the town, everything. I’m very happy to be with you.”