by Castro, Ruy
Getz/Gilberto lingered in Creed Taylor’s drawer for months while he made up his mind what to do with it. It wasn’t the first record he had made that brought Stan Getz together with Brazilian musicians. In February, he had recorded Jazz Samba Encore!, uniting Stan and Luiz Bonfá, with Jobim on piano, and, on six of the tracks, Portuguese vocals provided by Maria Helena Toledo, Bonfá’s wife. It was an excellent album, much better than the one Getz had recorded with Charlie Byrd, but unfortunately, not even the exclamation point in the title managed to stir up much interest in potential buyers. He didn’t want the same thing to happen with Getz/Gilberto.
The more he listened to it, especially the two tracks with Astrud, the more Taylor convinced himself that it would be foolish to sell it merely as a prestigious album. At the end of the year, Taylor did what reason dictated he do, although it broke his heart: he wielded the scalpel and excised João Gilberto’s vocals from “The Girl from Ipanema.” In doing so, he cut out one minute, twenty seconds and shortened the length of the track to three minutes, fifty-five seconds, leaving it an appropriate length for being played on the radio. He packaged it as a single, released it under the recording label’s Latino collection, and crossed his fingers. Nobody knows why these things happen, but the single containing just Astrud’s voice helped to make the album a huge success, and brought it a collection of Grammys and lots of money in the bank for everyone involved. Well, almost everyone.
18
The Armed Flower
Nara Leão, with Zé Kéti (left) and Nelson Cavaquinho at the famous apartment, swaps bossa nova for the music of the “past”
Collection of Nara Leão
In 1961, Aloysio de Oliveira found a live cockcroach inside his drawer at Philips. “Oops!,” he exclaimed, slammed the drawer shut, and decided to leave. It wasn’t the cockroach, evidently, that led him to resign his position as artistic director of the recording company just one year after leaving the same job at Odeon. He had left Odeon because they had gotten rid of Sylvinha Telles, as well as Lúcio Alves and Sérgio Ricardo, with whom he had been developing a nucleus of modern, adult singers. But Odeon preferred to just keep João Gilberto. So he went to Philips, taking Sylvinha and Lúcio with him, and started doing the same thing there, but he felt he had no professional freedom. The cockroach merely reinforced his decision. The ideal solution would be to start his own label, at which he could reunite that entire crowd of talented people without a home base who were connected to bossa nova.
His resistance to singers “with no voice” had begun to crumble with an album he had produced at Philips shortly after his arrival: Bossa Nova Mesmo (True Bossa Nova), performed by the gang that hung out with Carlinhos Lyra after his split with Ronaldo Bôscoli. Almost nobody on that album could sing, including Vinícius de Moraes, who was making his first record. But the result was excellent, and André Midani was perhaps right when he said that they should take advantage of what the young gang had to offer.
The result of those ruminations that filled Aloysio de Oliveira’s mind was the small label Elenco, which he spent the year of 1962 organizing, while producing shows for Flávio Ramos at the Bon Gourmet. Aloysio’s original idea was for Elenco to be a label within a recording company, in order to ensure guaranteed marketing and distribution. He sent a proposal to CBS, but they weren’t interested. As he wasn’t particularly keen on approaching either Odeon or Philips, he decided to start it up anyway, in partnership with Flávio Ramos, manufacturing the records at RCA Victor. Ramos contributed the capital, his administrative experience, and his spacious apartment in Rua Marquês de Abrantes in the Botafogo neighborhood, to serve as the temporary office and rehearsal site of the recording company. Aloysio contributed his ideas, his dedication, and a gang that would follow him wherever he went.
Once the label was up and running and the first titles had been released, the two partners quarreled and Ramos withdrew his investment. The money could be obtained from another source, but now Aloysio was left to care of the business side of things, for which his capacity was zero. André Midani described him as “a master—but only inside the studio.” And that must really have been the case, because against all adverse factors, he made Elenco the only Brazilian recording company whose records were sought out in stores for the label alone. Buyers would habitually ask store clerks, “Has Elenco released anything?”
They had good reason to ask because during the three years (1963–1966) that Elenco was directly under Aloysio de Oliveira’s leadership, it produced or released almost sixty records, featuring Jobim, Sylvinha Telles, Dick Farney, Lúcio Alves, João Donato, Sérgio Mendes, Sérgio Ricardo, Baden Powell, Roberto Menescal, Quarteto em Cy; first albums by Nara Leão, Edu Lobo, Rosinha de Valença, Sidney Miller, and even Billy Blanco as a singer; recordings of live shows by Maysa, Lennie Dale, Vinícius, and Caymmi; a series of collaborations, such as those of Caymmi and Jobim, Vinícius and Odette Lara, Sylvinha and Lúcio Alves, Dick Farney and Norma Bengell; and extremely successful comebacks by old guard singers, like another album by Mário Reis, and an exceptional one by Cyro Monteiro singing compositions by Baden and Vinícius. Sometimes Aloysio slipped up on an idea that seemed good at first but didn’t work out, such as recording Carlos Lacerda, who was governor of the Guanabara state at the time, reading his own translation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—the surplus of which still, years later, remained piled high in the bathroom of Elenco’s tiny office on Avenida Presidente Antônio Carlos, in the Center.
Elenco’s records could be recognized at a distance by their sleeves: they were always white (with only two or three exceptions), with Chico Pereira’s black-and-white photographs processed in high contrast by the art director, César Villela. To theoreticians, this style of album cover—economical, no-nonsense, without fanfare, just like the music printed on the disc itself—was revolutionary. Chico Pereira attributed their economical appearance to a pure and simple lack of funds. On one of the most amusing album sleeves published by Elenco, Surf Board, Menescal’s musicians appear dressed as acrobatic water clowns. But there was no money with which to buy the costumes, so they had their picture taken in their underwear—and César Villela drew their nankeen outfits on over their photograph.
According to Chico Pereira, Elenco’s record sleeves would have been more colorful than those of Odeon, had they had the resources. But like it or not, the high-contrast photos ended up becoming a bossa nova trademark, and the other recording companies shortly followed suit. (Philips was the first, with Tamba Trio’s records, followed by RCA and RGE.) Even more serious than the lack of resources, however, was the lack of information on thecovers. Aloysio, in trying to do everything, didn’t always remember to give due credit on the album sleeves—for which he himself wrote the texts. It was commonplace for the list of musicians that made up a singer’s backing band to be missing, and sometimes he would even distractedly omit the name of his main collaborator: the assistant artistic director José Delphino Filho, a man who was capable of finding a tuba or bassoon player at three in the morning at the slightest whim of one of the arrangers, generally Lindolfo Gaya.
Elenco did not have any staff to handle publicity. Aloysio himself wrote the press releases, mimeographed them, licked the envelopes, and mailed them to the newspapers and magazines. He was eventually assisted in this task by the young Guilherme Araújo, who would later become an important show business entrepreneur. It was also down to Aloysio to burn the midnight oil in the Rio-Som studio, equalizing and mixing the delicate combinations of voice and instruments. He wouldn’t allow anyone to do anything that he knew—or even didn’t know—how to do.
Nobody at Elenco had a contract, not even the artists. They all received royalties, which would have been a major bonus had Elenco’s records sold millions of copies. But this wasn’t the case. The initial production run was two thousand copies, and the recording company’s greatest fear was that one of its records would be successful enough to reach the ten thousand mark and they would have n
o way of meeting demand. Some of them hit the goalpost—Vinícius e Caymmi no Zum-zum (Vinícius and Caymmi at the Zum-zum), Dick Farney & Norma Bengell—but none of them actually made it into the net. But it was irrelevant whether Elenco cut two or ten thousand records, because they had no way of getting their records to their customers. In 1963, the distribution networks in effect today did not exist, and it was down to the recording companies themselves to distribute the records, practically door-to-door. The unabashedly popular Continental, for example, even had salesmen who rode on the backs of mules, distributing records as far afield as the Goiás boondocks. It was already enough of a challenge for Elenco to get its records to the downtown Rio stores, never mind those of other cities.
This problem was also experienced by another courageous little label at the time, Forma, run by Roberto Quartin, which was mounting an ambitious project. Its records were strictly luxury items, with thick double sleeves illustrated with modern artwork and title graphics, such as Coisas (Things) maestro Moacyr Santos’s impressive album, Novas estruturas (New Structures) by Bossa Três, and Inútil paisagem (Useless Landscape) Eumir Deodato’s first official record. Forma ended up having to cut costs and go back to a more traditional style of cover, although its albums continued to present a challenge, such as Os afro-sambas (The Afro-Sambas), by Baden and Vinícius.
Aloysio de Oliveira made another mistake with Elenco: he took exactly one year to launch his label in São Paulo, where the major bossa nova market had always been located. And by the time he did this, in 1964, São Paulo was already producing and recording its own bossa nova in copious quantities. It started with José Scatena’s RGE, which had always had Agostinho dos Santos, and then also signed Ana Lúcia, Manfredo Fest, Paulinho Nogueira, and the Zimbo Trio, and would later even acquire Tenório Jr., Wanda Sá, and Francis Hime, all from Rio. São Paulo also played host to the Brazilian branch of Audio-Fidelity, which recorded important albums with Alayde Costa, Milton Banana, and César Camargo Mariano’s Sambalanço Trio, and was the first to release Walter Santos and Geraldo Vandré on LP. Not to mention the small recording company Farroupilha, run by Tasso Bangel, which had Vera Brasil and Pedrinho Mattar and would gain phenomenal success with “Menino das laranjas” (The Little Orange Seller), written by Théo de Barros and released by the sensational Jongo Trio.
But the main conquest of bossa nova in terms of record sales—against which Aloysio had no hope of competing—was by Philips, from which he had resigned, and which was being mobilized by the man who had replaced him: Armando Pittigliani. In a swift and cunning move, Pittigliani had managed to round up Os Cariocas, the Tamba Trio, Sérgio Mendes’s Bossa Rio, Walter Wanderley, and Eumir Deodato and Durval Ferreira’s Os Gatos. Pittigliani had already “discovered” Jorge Ben in the Lane, recorded him, and his first record, Samba esquema novo (New Scheme Samba) sold one hundred thousand copies in two months in 1963. But Pittigliani’s greatest achievement was stealing Nara Leão away from Aloysio de Oliveira.
Nara Leão’s father, Dr. Jairo, was sitting on the sofa in the famous apartment with his legs crossed, reading the Correio da Manhã newspaper, when Nara informed him that she had just accepted Carlinhos Lyra and Vinícius de Moraes’s invitation to star in the show Pobre Menina Rica (Poor Little Rich Girl) at the Bon Gourmet restaurant. Dr. Jairo didn’t even so much as uncross his legs. He merely lifted his eyes from the newspaper and remarked: “Ah, you mean to say you’re going to become a common whore?”
Flávio Ramos, the owner of Bon Gourmet, remembered the episode. Nara’s father went back to his newspaper and Nara, deeply upset, withdrew to her room. But she had already made up her mind, and besides, she was tired of being protected and ordered around by everyone.
While she sang in apartments and at the bossa nova university shows, nobody paid Nara Leão much attention. She was, at most, an ornament who was much loved by everyone—Menescal, Lyra, and of course, her fiancé Ronaldo Bôscoli. When the little gang began to turn professional at the end of 1960, they took it upon themselves to see to it that Nara didn’t. She had to retain her role as their “muse.” Ronaldo was unable to discern qualities as a singer in her, and he never hid this fact from her. The others felt that, given her slight frame, which was as fragile as a dragonfly, Nara should not get herself involved in the rat race without the scrupulousness of the semi-professional. And—to confim André Midani’s initial opinion—their preconceived ideas of her were so belle époque that they felt she wasn’t the kind of woman who ought to sing “at night.”
When the Maysa/Bôscoli scandal hit the headlines and Nara suddenly found herself without a fiancé, she decided that her committment to the gang had also come to an end. Hurt beyond belief by Bôscoli, she turned once again to her old friend Carlinhos Lyra, who was heading yet another gang of musicians. In 1963, he also changed his mind, and decided that Nara should sing. He had written a musical comedy with Vinícius whose title reminded one somewhat of a song written by Noël Coward in 1920, “Poor Little Rich Girl”; it featured a virtual treasure chest of great songs: “Samba do carioca” (Carioca’s Samba), “Sabe você?” (Do You Know?), “Pau-de-arara” (Flatbed Truck), “Maria Moita,” and “Primavera” (Spring), among others. They were going to put on the show at the Bon Gourmet, and Nara would be the original poor little rich girl.
Her father did nothing to stop her except grumble, and Nara appeared at the nightclub in the first part of that year—absolutely terrified at singing in front of an audience. It was no longer a matter of singing at home, or in auditoriums that were sometimes smaller than the living room of her apartment. And at the School of Architecture shows, where there were hordes of people, she hadn’t managed to make anyone out in the tiered seats. At the Bon Gourmet, she knew almost everyone sitting at those tables, and felt completely exposed on the little stage, even with Lyra and Vinícius at her side. Aloysio de Oliveira, the director of the show, had to use all his powers of persuasion: “You’re among friends, Nara,” he said. “Sing at the Bon Gourmet as you would at home.”
With a huge effort, Nara completed the three-week run. Flávio Ramos had a miserably half-empty house every night, and the show didn’t achieve even a mere shadow of the success that the concert with Tom, Vinícius, João Gilberto, and Os Cariocas had a few months earlier. “Nara couldn’t hold the audience,” remembers Flávio. “She wasn’t yet a professional.”
She began to date the avant-garde filmmaker Ruy Guerra, who would soon film Os cafajestes (The Scoundrels) with the famous scene in which Norma Bengell was naked for almost five minutes—which in those days was a stretch of nudity just about as long as Gone With the Wind. Ruy Guerra was “left-wing,” like Carlinhos Lyra, who was more political with every passing day and who already spoke of bossa nova as if it were a thing of the past: “Bossa nova was destined to be short-lived,” he stated at that time. “It was merely a new musical format of repeating the same romantic and inconsequential things that we’ve been saying for a long time. It didn’t change the content of the lyrics. The only true path is nationalism. Nationalism in music isn’t the same as provincialism.”
The fact that Lyra had made this statement in November 1962 didn’t prevent him, just a few weeks later, from singing at Carnegie Hall. But on his return to Brazil, he was more inclined than ever to dedicating himself to learning all about the old sambistas de morro for whom he had finally developed a passion: Cartola, Nelson Cavaquinho, Zé Kéti. Suffused with ideological ammunition by his collaborating partner, Nelson Lins de Barros, Lyra invited them to his apartment in Rua Barão da Torre in Ipanema. The idea was to try and compose something in partnership with them. The journalist José Ramos Tinhorão, who continued to be the angel of doom for bossa nova, surprisingly participated in one of those gatherings and remembers being highly amused at seeing Lyra serving cachaça and beer to the sambistas—because “that’s what sambistas like”—while they themselves drank Scotch. “It didn’t occur to them that those older black men might also have liked whiskey,”
laughs Tinhorão.
The results of those efforts to compose together were below standard, according to Tinhorão, because Nelson and Lyra’s musical language, whether they liked it or not, was too elaborate for Cartola and Nelson Cavaquinho. The only collaborative effort to emerge from those rivers of beer was “Samba da legalidade” (Lawful Samba), by Lyra and Zé Kéti—not coincidentally, the only one of the three sambistas who was not a real musician and was capable of merely contributing his autochthonous know-how. They ended up deciding that the best thing was every jack to his trade, although this would not prevent the almost unpublished compositions of the sambistas from being recorded in a modern style—that is, the bossa nova style. Which is what Nara immediately wanted to do.
The album Nara, recorded at the end of 1963 by Elenco, was not Nara’s recording debut, as is commonly held. Months earlier, she had sung on two of the tracks on Carlinhos Lyra’s third and best album up until that point, Depois do carnaval (After Carnival). But for her own record, she would make the sambistas descend their hill. For months, it was her turn to gather Cartola, Zé Kéti, and Nelson Cavaquinho at the enormous apartment in Avenida Atlântica. She did not commit the same gaffe as Lyra and Lins de Barro, and appropriately served them whiskey, allowing them to at least bask in the sweet scent of bourgeoisie while she learned their sambões.
Aloysio de Oliveira, who was going to produce the album, didn’t like her choices at all. For him, bossa nova had fallen from the sky to feed the musical appetites of the urban and sophisticated consumer, but it had already been a supreme effort for him to sell music that was performed by singers “with no voice.” Now that he had finally gotten used to it, Nara, who had still less of a voice, was trying to exchange the pervasive themes of love and the sea for things related to slums and poverty, which were completely alien to the movement. But Nara insisted and recorded “Diz que vou por aí” (Tell ‘em I’m Going By) by Zé Kéti; “O Sol Nascerá” (The Sun Will Rise), by Cartola and Elton Medeiros; and “Luz Negra” (Black Light), by Nelson Cavaquinho.
