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

by Castro, Ruy

  Philips treated her better: they put her on the program Noite de gala (Gala Night), hosted by Abelardo Figueiredo, a man with close connections to bossa nova. Elis’s father, Mr. Romeu, with hands roughened from his work as a glazier and an ambition befitting the mother of a beauty pageant contestant, came with her from the South and appointed himself her manager, agent, and fee collector. He wasn’t always very capable. When Pittigliani approached Ronaldo Bôscoli about doing a show with Elis in Beco das Garrafas, he already knew them both: “That squinty-eyed little girl? Her father’s a pain.”

  The Miéle-Bôscoli duo created a show for Elis at the Little Club, in which she appeared with percussionist Dom Um Romão’s band, Copa Trio, with dancer Marly Tavares, and tambourine player Gaguinho. It’s a mystery how on earth they managed to fit as many people as they did on stage for the finale. It’s true that Elis, at five feet, two inches, was the size of a transistor radio, which did not prevent her from snarling like a wildcat at Claudette Soares, who was even two inches shorter, when she saw her entering Copacabana’s Beco do Fome (Hunger Lane): “That little dwarf!”

  Beco da Fome, in Avenida Prado Júnior, was a little alleyway frequented by the carousers and musicians of the other musical lanes of the neighborhood, like Beco das Garrafas and Beco do Joga-a-Chave-Meu-Amor. During those late nights, many of those guys survived on the oxtail and collard green soups made by the mulatta Lindaura, and the raw Arab kibbe, cheap meals that were nourishing enough to keep the bossa nova gang going until the following morning. (The other option was the Frango de Ouro [The Golden Chicken] next door, which offered “a bowl of chicken soup with two spoons”—that is to say, one portion to split between two people. The two were usually Sérgio Mendes and Ronaldo Bôscoli.) Another must in the area was the Leme Pharmacy, where the musicians purchased their Stelamine, Pervitin (methamphetamine), and Preludin (phenmetrazine), the “pick-meups” in vogue at the time.

  Elis didn’t like Claudette Soares and didn’t really get along well with Leny Andrade, who was then Empress of Beco das Garrafas, either. Leny, like Wilson Simonal, was also a disciple of Lennie Dale, but only Elis would become famous for having been his pupil. Dale always denied that it was he who had taught her to whirl her arms like windmills, which earned Elis the nickname “Hélice” (Propeller) Regina. According to Dale, it was her idea and he merely agreed with her. But it was Elis herself who referred to rehearsals with him as “swimming lessons.” What is amazing is the evidence that Lennie Dale influenced Elis Regina’s style of singing: all you have to do is listen, in order, to Elis’s first three corny records; the two Lennie Dale himself made with Elenco, recorded when she knew him in the Lane; and Elis’s subsequent records, Samba eu canto assim (I Sing Samba Like This) and O fino do fino (The Best of the Best).

  Her style of singing wasn’t that different from that of Wilson Simonal, who, when he first performed in the Lane in 1963, caused a furor that today is indescribable and perhaps even unbelievable. He was quite simply the best singer of his generation: a tremendous voice, a sense of phrasing equal to that of the best American singers, and the ability to bend the rhythm to his will, without slipping out of the tune or settling for the easy scats that were Leny Andrade’s specialty. Bôscoli, who had managed to coax him away from rock-oriented producer Carlos Imperial, armed him with original material like “Telefone” (Telephone) and “Ela vai, ela vem” (She Comes and Goes) (written with Menescal) and “Mais valia não chorar” (It’s Better Not to Cry) (with Normando). But Simonal was also perfect for bossa-jazz themes like “Nanã,” by Moacyr Santos, after Mário Telles had written the definitive lyrics for it. He had released late bossa nova compositions by Tito Madi, such as “Balanço Zona Sul” (Zona Sul Swing), and by Evaldo Gouveia and Jair Amorim, such as “Garota moderna” (Modern Girl), and became the best singer of Jorge Ben until “País tropical” (Tropical Country).

  During that phase, Simonal was capable of encapsulating the most original tricks within a theme and making it irresistible. But when the tricks became the only important feature of his style, Simonal became repetitive and went back to Carlos Imperial’s domain. In 1966 he was singing silly pop things like “Mamãe passou açúcar em mim” (Momma Sprinkled Sugar on Me). In 1971, he led—with just one finger—fifteen thousand people at the Maracanãzinho stadium in a tiresome song appropriated from Imperial, “Meu limão, meu limoeiro” (My Lemon, My Lemon Tree). A few months later, he got into trouble with an obscure rumor that branded him an informant in the arts for the dictatorship’s security administration, and it ruined his career. To use the jargon that he coined during his glory days, Simonal “allowed himself to fall and got hurt.” But he cannot be left out of the bossa nova story.

  His singing style opened up the realms of bossa nova to the extent that singers with strong, deep voices, like Pery Ribeiro, who up until that point had been forced to remain on the fringes of the musical movement, became immediate converts. In 1963 Pery released “The Girl from Ipanema” and in 1965 he starred with Leny Andrade and Luís Carlos Vinhas’s Bossa Três in the show Gemini V at the Porão 73 (Basement 73) nightclub in Copacabana. Gemini V, a show typical of the style of Miéle and Bôscoli, began its run at the same time that Opinião, now starring Maria Bethânia in Nara’s place, was denouncing the military dictatorship every night in Rua Siqueira Campos. Any tourist who went to both shows on consecutive nights would feel as if he were visiting two different countries. In Opinião, a predatory bird, the caracara, flew over a rural Brazil of slums and cassava fields, in which the northeastern inhabitants either died of thirst or drowned, with figures from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics to prove it; in Gemini V, seagulls circled in a Technicolor blue sky, to the sound of passages from “Sinfonia do Rio de Janeiro” (Rio de Janeiro Symphony), to Jobim and Vinícius’s drops of dew on a flower petal, and to Menescal and Bôscoli’s sun-salt-souths, with an elaborateness that left the audience virtually seasick. For the youngsters of 1965, choosing between Opinião and Gemini V was practically a political decision, especially at the tables of bars like the Paissandu in Flamengo or the Zeppelin in Ipanema.

  Under the impetus of Bossa Três and the dynamism of Pery and Leny, Gemini V was, up to then, the most energetic bossa nova show ever. The famous guitar beat was omnipresent—in the piano, the drums, the inflections of the singers’ voices—but the projection was outward, using every decibel they could muster. It was as if, in a way, a singer named João Gilberto had never existed.

  With almost no announcement of the fact, two Rio women who had participated in the birth of bossa nova left Rio for São Paulo between 1962 and 1963, Alayde Costa and Claudette Soares. At the time, Alayde had already been branded by the stigma that would haunt her throughout her entire career: she was a legend among musicians and respected by all other singers, but she had no luck with recording companies. Since she had been “discovered” by João Gilberto in 1958 and taken to the bossa nova gatherings at Bené Nunes’s apartment, she had only managed to record one LP, Alayde canta suavemente (Alayde Sings Softly), with RCA Victor, on which “Lobo bobo” (Foolish Wolf), “Chora tua tristeza” (Cry Your Sadness), and “Minha saudade” (My Saudade) were released. Afterward, she went to Odeon, who put her on the back burner. The record companies maintained that she was “difficult” for the public to appreciate. Alayde believed it was a matter of thinly disguised racism: “They think that all a black woman can do is sing sambas and shimmy in the streets.”

  And so the former student of noted maestro Moacyr Santos (who was also black) moved to São Paulo in 1962, where she recorded an LP right away with Audio-Fidelity. In 1965, she made it to the Municipal Theater, thanks to maestro Diogo Pacheco, to sing a repertoire that included Stravinsky, Villa-Lobos, and medieval modinhas in the show Alayde, alaúde (Alayde with Lute). But her greatest hit was in 1964, when she instilled complete silence in the audience at the Paramount Theater with her rendition of “Onde está você?” (Where Are You?).

  In Rio, t
he situation in which Claudette Colbert Soares (her father was a fan of the American movie star) found herself could be considered even worse. The reputation of “little princess of the baião” that she had acquired in Rio radio in 1954 was proving more difficult to shake than Zorro’s sword mark. In 1958, she worked at the Plaza nightclub, and in 1960, she sang in the Night of Love, a Smile, and a Flower show. She was practically a veteran, but nobody would let her record anything. The most she had been allowed to do was to participate on two of the tracks on an adolescent bossa nova record, Nova geração em ritmo de samba (New Generation with a Samba Rhythm), whose historical interest was that it contained the first arrangements by Eumir Deodato, and which must have been the reason that Eumir then shut himself up in his house for the next two years to study.

  One of Claudette’s tracks, “Sambop,” by Durval Ferreira and Maurício Einhorn, was the best song on the record, but they only allowed to make her own album three years later, in 1963, once she had already moved to São Paulo and won over the public at the Juão Sebastião Bar and the nightclub Ela, Cravo e Canela. At the Juão Sebastião, there was a reason why Claudette sang sitting at Pedrinho Mattar’s piano: one more person out on the floor, even someone as diminutive as her, who would fit in a thumbnail-sized space, meant one less table for customers. As for her first record, it was recorded with Mocambo, a tiny recording company whose artistic director at the time was a man named Jonas Silva—remember him? From that point on, Claudette only went to Rio to take part in a Miéle and Bôscoli show, Primeiro Tempo: 5 X 0 (First Time: 5 X 0), with Taiguara at the Princesa Isabel theater—or to be called a “dwarf” by Elis Regina.

  Alayde and Claudette’s departure for São Paulo was the prelude to a change that bossa nova—or what was left of it in Brazil—was about to undergo. The former “samba gravestone” (as Vinícius used to call the gray, chilly São Paulo) would soon become its stage.

  On October 26, 1964, at the O remédio é Bossa (Bossa Is the Cure) show held at the Paramount Theater in São Paulo, Os Cariocas—one in each section of the audience—introduced the featured artists. When their voices, in unison, announced the name of Antonio Carlos Jobim, and he appeared on stage, two thousand rosebuds rained down from the dress boxes and balcony onto the stage. It was a great moment for Jobim, who was performing live for the first time in São Paulo (not counting his innumerable appearances on the TV show O bom Tom in 1959). The roses had been supplied by the florist Dora in exchange for a mention in the show, but the audience’s gesture was straight from the heart; for them, Jobim was the main person behind that golden age of Brazilian popular music. He didn’t know whether he should express his gratitude for the roses, whether he should pick them up, or what to do with his hands. Not knowing what to do, he went over to the piano and sang a song that was also making its world debut—”Só tinha de ser com você” (It Had to Be Only with You), written by him and Aloysio de Oliveira.

  At another point during the show, the light streamed like gold on the hair and guitar of Marcos Valle and reflected in his turquoise blue shirt while he sang “Terra de ninguém” (Nobody’s Land). Suddenly, when he got to the verses, which were the very heart of the lyrics, a spotlight illuminated a scaffolding shaped like a cheese, and a tiny woman, Elis Regina (wearing a very short, little white dress, which made her look even tinier) filled the entire theater with her voice, singing, “But the day will come / And the world will know / You cannot live without giving of yourself / Those who work are the ones who have / The right to live / Because the land belongs to nobody,” while the playful Dom Um gave it his all on the drums. It’s a miracle how the two thousand people in the audience managed to resist leaving the theater and going right out to overthrow all the major landowners.

  Jobim must have been astonished. That tiny woman was the same person who had auditioned for Pobre menina rica just three months earlier. In just thirty seconds of singing, she had managed to silence all the other stars of O remédio é Bossa—Alayde Costa, Sylvinha Telles, Carlinhos Lyra, Vera Brasil, Walter Santos, Vinícius de Moraes, Paulinho Nogueira, Os Cariocas, the ensembles of Roberto Menescal, Oscar Castro-Neves, and Pedrinho Mattar, the Zimbo Trio, and The Girls from Bahia. A star had been born—and it was obvious that she was too great to fit on the flea-sized stages at Bottles and the Little Club.

  It was what Ronaldo Bôscoli, in Rio, had suspected for some time. Elis was forever missing her shows at the Lane. The following day, she would justify her absence by saying that she had felt stressed. The same day, he heard rumors of her performances in São Paulo. He guessed that Elis’s father, for whom no amount of money was too little, was forcing her to practically live on the shuttle—or perhaps that she was in fact the one who was more interested in the São Paulo market, which seemed much more promising. The third time that Elis missed a performance, Bôscoli ordered a black band of mourning to be painted over Elis’s name on the billboard outside the door to Bottles. “But in such a way so that her name could still be read beneath the paint,” he said. Elis, who was superstitious and had a thing about death, wasn’t happy. A ferocious argument followed that would put any civil war to shame. Subsequently, she left the show, the Lane, and Rio de Janeiro, and declared herself the mortal enemy of Ronaldo Bôscoli. That is, until she married him, three years later.

  O remédio é Bossa wasn’t the first, or the last, of a long series of shows at the Paramount Theater in 1964 that gave the impression that bossa nova had a new address: São Paulo. In May the law students of the Students’ Center XI de Agosto had put on the first show, which was called O fino da Bossa (The Best of Bossa)—a name coined by the president of the Center, Horácio Berlinck, who saw a bright future ahead of it, and even decided to obtain a trademark for it. The purpose of the show was as innocent as can be: to raise money for the graduation ball at the end of the year. The result was that the air shuttle would prove to be just what the doctor ordered for bossa nova.

  From the XI de Agosto show, they had already secured the participation of the broadcaster Walter Silva, who managed to gather the Rio troops to include Nara Leão, Wanda Sá, Jorge Ben, Sérgio Mendes, Marcos Valle, Rosinha de Valença, Os Cariocas, drummer Edison Machado’s trio, as well as the singer-guitarist Luís Henrique, mixing them up with local artists: Walter Wanderley, Ana Lúcia, Geraldo Cunha, Paulinho Nogueira, the Zimbo Trio, and the adopted Paulistas Claudette Soares and Alayde Costa. The latter, as she had been at the first bossa nova shows in 1959, was once again a show-stopper—this time, with her rendition of “Onde está você?” (Where Are You?), also by Oscar Castro-Neves and Luvercy Fiorini.

  Walter Silva witnessed the tremendous line of people waiting to get in and booked the Paramount for new shows. It certainly wasn’t due to a lack of shows that students from other departments were failing to get their degrees. One after another, during the latter half of 1964, he organized a show in the School of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo (Samba Novo—New Samba), in the School of Medicine (Mens sana in corpore samba—A Healthy Mind in Samba Body, debuting unknowns Toquinho, Taiguara, and Chico Buarque), and at the School of Dentistry (Primeira dentisamba—The First Dentisamba), as well as O remédio é Bossa. In all of these shows, Walter Silva attracted an average of two thousand people per show—the Paramount had 1,700 seats, but there was still enough room for a good many more people either standing or sitting on the floor. Everything performed at these shows was recorded, and a good part of it was released on disc by RGE.

  At the School of Medicine, the first part of the show, featuring the debuting artists, was merely a warmup for the night’s main attraction: a reproduction of the show that Sylvinha Telles, Oscar Castro-Neves, and Roberto Menescal’s band were performing at the new bossa nova nightclub in Rio, the Zum-zum, owned by Paulinho Soledade. At the School of Dentistry, Alayde, Geraldo Vandré, Pery Ribeiro, and others opened the show for the person who was already becoming São Paulo’s biggest star: Elis Regina.

  Elis’s show, formerly at Bottles with Dom
Um’s Copa Rio—the same one that had earned her a band of mourning through her name on the billboard—was going to be repeated at the Paramount, but it almost didn’t happen. The Danúbio Hotel in São Paulo, where the Rio artists invited by Walter Silva were staying, exhibited blatant racism and refused to allow drummer Dom Um and pianist Salvador to stay there—and it wasn’t due to the percussionist’s Mephistophelian countenance. Elis and the double bassist, Gusmão, caused a scene in the lobby and, with Walter Silva’s intervention, the hotel did everything but give the presidential suite to the two black musicians.

  It wasn’t wise to pick a fight with Elis Regina. She got even more squinty-eyed when she was annoyed, and anything could happen, as all her friends attest. Her moods displayed more ups and downs than an electrocardiogram. She was capable of literally overturning the table if she lost at canasta and within a minute would sit down and start knitting, humming to herself. Her life, up until she began to achieve success, had been a long succession of fights—one of them against poverty. Her family lived in a high-rise tenement building in the slums (a housing project in Porto Alegre), and she was shunned by her neighbors for singing on the radio. When she recorded her first discs in Rio, the gaúchos resented her because they felt she was speaking with a carioca accent. Her father went with her to Rio, they moved into a tiny apartment in Rua Figueiredo Magalhães in Copacabana, and, a few months later, her mother and brother came out to join them. They lived on what she earned and soon a perverse relationship of dependency developed, in which she appeared to derive pleasure from being exploited by them, and able to humiliate them in return. In fact, although she gave as good as she got, Elis was the one who got hurt.

  At the beginning, she was unanimously considered ugly, tacky, and ignorant. But Elis learned quickly—sometimes too quickly. “To her, everyone had something to teach her,” Walter Silva once said. “Once she had learned all she could from them, she moved on to someone else.” Her most serious boyfriend after she arrived from the South was Solano Ribeiro, producer for TV Excélsior. The success of the Paramount shows inspired Solano to organize what would be the first Song Festival at Excélsior, in which Elis competed with “Arrastão” (Fishing Net), written by Edu Lobo and Vinícius, and “Por um amor maior” (For a Greater Love), by Francis Hime and Ruy Guerra. She won with “Arrastão.” During the festival, she got pregnant by Solano. When the festival ended, she got rid of her child and also finished with her boyfriend. There was no arguing with Elis. The nickname “Pimentinha” (Little Pepper) was given to her at this time in her life, a dubious tribute to her appalling temper, and Elis hated it. When anyone called her this, she responded by flipping them off.