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

by Castro, Ruy

  But if you peeled off her outer veneer, she was still the same romantic girl who listened to the radio in Porto Alegre and dreamed of being a star. When she fell for Edu Lobo after the festival, she started drawing hearts pierced with arrows and scribbling with permanent marker pen on the cubicle dividers of the dressing room at TV Record: “Elis loves Edu, Eduardo Góes Lobo.” And—what must have been shocking for Elis given the person she would become—she gave in-depth interviews to the corny Revista da Rádio, divulging information like her favorite color (brown), perfume (Réplique), hair-style (top knot), and authors (Walt Disney and Sophocles).

  In April 1965, some days before the first anniversary of her leaving Porto Alegre, Elis did a show at the Paramount that resulted in a disc that broke all sales records and a television program that, in a way, would be a shot in the arm to bossa nova. The show and the record were made with singer Jair Rodrigues and the sensational Jongo Trio. The program was O fino da Bossa.

  Moving to São Paulo was the best thing for bossa nova once it began to stagnate. In Rio, none of the shows at the Bon Gourmet in 1963 managed to repeat the success of the show with Jobim, Vinícius, and João Gilberto—which also meant no profit for owner Flávio Ramos. What he spent on pampering his stars led him to ask himself if he shouldn’t be managing someone like Maria Callas or Renata Tebaldi. Pobre menina rica had suffered as a result of Nara’s inexperience, and subsequent shows also gave Flávio Ramos a few splendidly gray hairs.

  Baden Powell’s show, which followed, would sometimes be interrupted halfway through because Baden—already drunk as a skunk—would bend over his guitar, as if he were searching for a note in the depths of his chest—and, when the audience realized, astonished, that the right note was not coming, some of them would cup their hands over their ears and hear a gentle hum. The guitarist had fallen over his instrument into a deep sleep, with his hands in the position of the chord he was looking for. It’s worth mentioning that Baden moved to a room in the cellar of the Bon Gourmet, where he could sleep at will without risking being late for work. When he awoke to the sight of all those bottles, he thought he had died and gone to Heaven. He imbibed most of what he earned and, by the end of the show’s run, ended up almost in the red with the nightclub and went straight to the Clínica São Vicente.

  Maysa’s show—the last one produced for Flávio Ramos by Aloysio de Oliveira—was written à propos. Maysa left the audience and took the stage with a glass in her hand, singing “Demais” (Too Much), written by Tom and Aloysio (“Every one thinks I talk too much / And that I drink too much / And that this restless way of life / Is good for nothing / Going here and there, from bar to bar, from bar to bar”)—and nobody doubted her sincerity in the slightest. Not everyone in the audience knew that before she had come on stage, she had spent more than an hour having makeup applied by the Bon Gourmet coat-check girl, who was trying to hide the swellings and bruises on her face from the fights she had on a daily basis with her new boyfriend, a Spanish bullfighter named Miguel Azenza. Despite all of this, Maysa gave a fantastic performance almost every night. (One of them was recorded by Aloysio and released on disc by Elenco.) At the end of the show, she was taken home almost in a dead faint in the famous black Cadillac. After all those exciting events, the Bon Gourmet closed its doors in December 1963.

  Almost nobody was terribly professional in those valiant days, and the few that tried to be, like Sérgio Mendes, were accused by the others of being mercenary. But some of them were catching on. Menescal was performing with Sylvinha Telles at the Zum-zum, the nightclub in Copacabana that replaced the Bon Gourmet in 1964, and wasn’t happy when payment for his performances started being delayed more than he expected. Without batting an eyelid, he enlisted the help of his old friend Candinho, Sylvinha’s ex-husband, former guitarist, former carouser, and now a sober lawyer—and Candinho impounded the Zum-zum’s refrigerator by way of payment for Menescal.

  One night during the show’s run, Sylvinha closed the show, washed down a tranquilizer with a shot of whiskey, and got into her little bottle-green Fusca to go home, a few blocks away. She fell asleep at the wheel coming out of the Major Vaz tunnel, in Rua Toneleros, and hit a Chevrolet head-on. The Chevy and Sylvinha’s car then hit three other cars. The impact caused the steering wheel to crumple against her stomach. She broke her front teeth and the windshield shattered, embedding shards of glass in her forehead. Sylvinha passed out and was rescued by Portuguese singer Francisco José, who happened to be passing by and saw what happened. He did not recognize her right away beneath the copious quantity of blood on her face. He took her to the Miguel Couto hospital and she was treated for, among other things, internal hemorrhaging. Sylvinha would not allow them to perform plastic surgery—a few months earlier, she had undergone six procedures in one sitting, with Dr. Urbano Fabrini, which had left her looking like a then-unknown singer named Barbra Streisand. That wasn’t her first accident—in 1962, she had hit a car on the Rio–São Paulo highway and broke her arm. Unfortunately, it also wasn’t her last accident, either.

  Since 1961, Sylvinha’s career and personal life had been in the hands of Aloysio de Oliveira. From that year on, he was instrumental in arranging for her to record a series of great albums for the American market with arrangers like Nelson Riddle, Calvin Jackson, Bill Hitchcock, and the idolized guitarist Barney Kessel, and took care of her television appearances in the United States. But Aloysio was merely her instructor in the studio, because their marriage was one of the most fiery, jealous matches in the history of bossa nova. At one time, Sylvinha took to carrying a gun, in case she caught him with another woman. Even so, when they split up so that he could marry Cyva, of The Girls from Bahia, Sylvinha made a point of insisting on being the matron of honor. Her heart was bigger than a triple album.

  Despite being “older” (after all, she was from the same generation as Dolores), Sylvinha continued to be the female face of bossa nova, resisting following in the doomed footsteps of the new singers who joined the movement every fifteen minutes. Except for Carnegie Hall, she was present at all of bossa nova’s most important moments. She recorded the 78 r.p.m. of “Foi A Noite” (It Was the Night) in 1956; her name practically carried the University Hebrew Group show in 1958; she was the first professional to bridge the gap between the gangs; and, almost right up until the end, she never sang anything that couldn’t be classified as modern samba. Not only that, it’s far from preposterous to assert that, despite the stylistic incest between the first bossa nova singers and João Gilberto, she had influenced him—and not the other way around. Remember that the two of them had dated back in 1952, when João sang with a strong voice like Orlando Silva and would accompany her all day long on his guitar. We can’t be sure how she sang in those days, but from her first 78s, beginning with “Foi A Noite” in 1956, to 1959, when she recorded “Amor de gente moça” (Young Love), Sylvinha was still the same singer. She hadn’t changed, but João Gilberto had.

  In 1966 on TV Globo, on the show O jogo de verdade (Truth or Dare), hosted by comedian Dercy Gonçalves, Sylvinha condemned the singers who were turning bossa nova into “calisthenics.” She didn’t single out Elis Regina, who was then at the peak of her whirling arms quirk, and perhaps she didn’t intend to refer only to her. At about the same time, Pery Ribeiro was introducing to Brazil the fashion of leaping on stage to the sound of clashing cymbals, and Elis’s partner, Jair Rodrigues, managed to sing while upside-down. Many singers were inventing their own gimmicks and increasingly forgetting how to sing. That just wasn’t Sylvinha’s cup of tea.

  Sylvinha was going to return to New York in December 1966 to record another American disc. Kapp Records wanted her in the studio that month, but she decided to postpone the recording and only go after Christmas. In the early morning of December 17, a Saturday, she got into her Beetle with her little dog, Nicole; the lawyer Horácio de Carvalho Jr., her ex-boyfriend from a rich Brazilian family, was driving, and they left on the Amaral Peixoto highway, bound for Ma
ricá, in upstate Rio. It was a farewell journey for both of them, as they planned to definitively go their own ways from then on, Horácio was engaged to another girl, and Sylvinha was going to the United States for a prolonged stay. The sun was coming up over Kilometer 24 of the Amaral Peixoto when the Beetle zig-zagged across the highway, went under a truck loaded with pineapples, was dragged along by it, and finally plunged into thick undergrowth several meters down. They were both killed. The Rio state police concluded that Horácio had fallen asleep at the wheel.

  The original lineup for the show at the Paramount Theater in São Paulo that April of 1965 included Elis Regina, Wilson Simonal, and the Zimbo Trio. But Lívio Rangan, of Rhodia, booked Simonal and the Zimbo Trio for a tour of Brazil. The producer of the show, Walter Silva, had to settle for Elis, Baden Powell, and the Jongo Trio instead. The day before the show opened, Baden decided he’d rather go and play in Germany. Silva and Elis went to look for businessman Marcos Lázaro at the Cave nightclub and saw Jair Rodrigues performing on stage. Jair Rodrigues had had a hit the year before, “Deixa isso pra lá” (Leave That over There), which he sang while gesticulating extensively. He already grated on the nerves of anyone who listened to him, but he was cheerful and had a suitable physical strength for being teamed up with the dynamic Elis. He was hired on the spot. The first rehearsal took place in the afternoon of the opening night, with the sequence of songs for each medley painted on the stage floor: “O morro não tem vez” (The Hill), “Feio não é bonito” (Ugliness Is Not Beautiful), “Samba do carioca” (Samba of the Carioca), etc.—twelve songs in each medley.

  Jair Rodrigues wasn’t what you’d call a modern singer. His personal preferences were more for música sertaneja (Brazilian country music) than for what was starting to be called MPB (Música Popular Brasileira). As far as bossa nova went, therefore, he was a total virgin. Some of the songs in the show’s repertoire bothered him, like “Menino das laranjas” (The Little Orange Seller), written by Théo de Barros, and “Marcha da quarta-feira de cinzas” (Ash Wednesday Marcha), by Carlinhos Lyra and Vinícius. “These songs sound very communist,” he remarked.

  His concern must have revolved around the no entanto (nevertheless) in the line “E no entanto, é preciso cantar” (But nevertheless, we need to sing) in Lyra’s song. He thought it was a reference to the military coup d’état of 1964. But they managed to convince him that it had nothing to do with it, to such an extent that, just the following year, 1966, he sang a rustic guitar moda, “Disparada” (Stampede), also by Théo and Geraldo Vandré, at Excélsior’s second song festival—almost certainly without realizing that he was singing what seemed, at the time, like an open exhortation to rural insurrection.

  Elis Regina, Jair Rodrigues, and the Jongo Trio packed the Paramount in São Paulo on April 9, 10, and 11, 1965, with their resounding combination of bossa nova themes and traditional sambões, cemented by a strong jazz base accompaniment. It was MPB in the making. Walter Silva recorded the show’s opening night, and contrary to what he had previously been doing, he did not sell the tape to RGE, but to Philips, with whom Elis and Jair worked under contract. The recording, made into the album Dois na Bossa (Two in Bossa), became the “bestselling Brazilian music record in history” up until then, although nobody seemed to be anxious to produce the requisite figures. We know that the sale of the tape was a cash transaction: had it been done on the base of royalties for Walter Silva and the musicians, they would all have earned a lot more money. According to the double bassist Sabá, the Jongo Trio never saw so much as a penny.

  The Jongo Trio were a miracle, as they would prove when they released their own album, Jongo Trio, with the recording company Farroupilha that same year of 1965. Nobody could have guessed that anything particularly spectacular would emerge under bossa nova skies in the trio department, since the explosion onto the scene of the Tamba Trio in the Lane, at the end of 1961, had instigated a flood of combos comprising piano, double bass, and drums.

  The Tamba Trio, composed of Luizinho Eça, Bebeto, and Hélcio Milito, was not just a trio, because double bassist Bebeto also played the flute. Their first album, Tamba Trio, recorded with playbacks so that Bebeto could play both instruments at the same time, was perfect—which meant that it was an instrumental record, merely dotted here and there with a few vocals by the trio on some of the tracks. On the records that followed, the voices of Luizinho, Bebeto, and Hélcio began to fight to be heard above the instruments, and none of the trio was much of a singer. Ronaldo Bôscoli, with typical bluntness, commented at the time, “If the Tamba Trio just played and Os Cariocas just sang, what a marvelous thing that would be.”

  He was referring to the fact that Os Cariocas’s musical accompaniment was not up to the same standard as their fabulous vocals. To Bôscoli’s surprise, one member of Os Cariocas, Badeco, agreed with him and felt that the two groups should join forces to make a record that would be hard to beat. Besides, the two groups were both contracted at Philips. But their respective leaders (Eça, for the Tamba Trio, and Severino Filho, for Os Cariocas) weren’t interested and the idea never got off the ground. The Tamba Trio, however, almost achieved Nirvana with the record Luiz Eça & cordas (Luiz Eça & Strings), which was in fact the trio minus vocals, with violins masterfully arranged by Eça in their place.

  The other great trio that followed onto the scene, although merely instrumental, was the Bossa Três, with Luís Carlos Vinhas on piano, Tião Neto on double bass, and Edison Machado on drums. They also made their debut in the Lane in 1962, and by the beginning of 1963 they were already in New York under contract with Sidney Frey, the owner of Audio-Fidelity and the organizer of the Carnegie Hall concert. Frey made them record a series of discs for the American market, took them on the Andy Williams Show on television, and featured them at the Village Vanguard, one of the hallowed jazz havens. But they missed out on other good opportunities, like playing at Birdland accompanying important people, because one of their members, Edison Machado, did not read music.

  All of the pianists in the Lane, like Don Salvador, Sérgio Mendes, and Tenório Jr., and even the drummers, like Milton Banana and Edison Machado himself, eventually formed their own trios. But time would prove that, due to the number of nightclubs and recording companies ready to hire them, instrumental trios were a phenomenon particular to São Paulo. At one time, between 1963 and 1966, the following groups co-existed in the city: the Zimbo Trio; César Camargo Mariano’s Sambalanço; the trio of Walter Wanderley, whose leader played the electric keyboard instead of the piano; the trio of Pedrinho Mattar; Amílson Godoy’s Bossa Jazz; the trio of Manfredo Fest; and that of Ely Arcoverde—and those were merely the most prominent ones. There were dozens of them. Of all of them, the only one to survive into the nineties was the highly technical Zimbo Trio, formed by Amílson Godoy and two men with more night experience than Count Dracula’s entire family line: double bassist Luís Chaves and drummer Rubinho Barsotti.

  The most ephemeral trio (together for less than a year; just one record of their own) was the most exciting: the Jongo Trio. With their official lineup, pianist Cido Bianchi, double bassist Sabá, and drummer Toninho Pinheiro, they burst onto the scene in 1965 with their recordings of “Feitinha pro poeta” (Made Just for the Poet), written by Baden Powell and Lula Freire in honor of Vinicius, “Seu Chopin, desculpe” (Sorry, Mr. Chopin) by Johnny Alf, and their own “Menino das laranjas.” Their instrumentals were not only powerful and polished, but their vocals were also very bold, because Sabá, brother of Zimbo’s Luís Chaves and former accomplice of Johnny Alf at the Baiúca, had been a member of vocal ensembles in the state of Pará at the beginning of the fifties. During that entire year, the Jongo Trio caused long lines to form when they were billed to participate in bossa nova shows at theaters, universities, and clubs, and their album, Jongo Trio, was even a hit on Rio radio, which had never had much patience for São Paulo’s heavily jazz-influenced trios.

  The bossa nova trios had their moment of glory, and contributed i
nstrumental music the likes of which had never before been heard in Brazil, a country that was traditionally deaf to anything with no vocals. The musicians, in turn, never had more opportunities for work. But this phase passed by quickly because the trios drained the public’s interest, multiplying like rabbits and repeating styles—and because, around 1966, the younger market was being definitively swallowed up by something called ye-ye-ye—the Brazilian rock ‘n’ roll.

  20

  The Diaspora

  With the money he earned from the Getz/Gilberto album when it was finally released in July 1964, Stan Getz bought a home in Irvington, New York, that had belonged to Frances Gershwin, sister of the late George. It was a Gone With the Wind–style mansion with twenty-three rooms and white two-story columns—all it was missing was its very own Scarlett O’Hara. For his participation on the record, João Gilberto, as co-star, received $23,000 in the first part of the year and a coveted pair of Grammys for his vocals and guitar playing—two statuettes that he stored in a closet and lost when he moved and left the closet behind. Astrud Gilberto, who sang “Garota de Ipanema” in English and was responsible for the record’s international success, earned what the American musicians’ syndicate paid for a single night of work: $120. Great, don’t you think?