by Castro, Ruy
Jorge Ben didn’t like Los Angeles much. To improve his mood, he decided to get his hair cut. He found a barber shop in Vine Street and went in. It was empty, and the two barbers working there were reading the newspaper, with their scissors and combs tucked into the pockets of their jackets. Jorge nonchalantly sat down in one of the empty chairs, said “Shave and a haircut” and waited. The barbers looked at one another, then at the young black man, and then at one another again. Jorge Ben only realized what was going on when one of them hissed at him, out of the corner of his mouth, “We’re busy.” Ben left and went straight to Varig Airlines to buy his return flight home.
It was a shame, because he missed out on a great night, a few days later, when Sérgio and the group performed at Shelly’s Manne Hole, a nightclub in Los Angeles owned by Shelly Manne, Stan Kenton’s former drummer. In the middle of the performance, someone in the first row shouted out:
“Don’t you dare stop! I’ll be back in fifteen minutes!”
It was guitarist Barney Kessel. He went running back to his house to get his guitar, and within the promised fifteen minutes, was back with it. He played with them for the rest of the night, and it was little Wanda Sá’s turn to feel just like Julie London.
There was another important person in the audience: Dave Cavanaugh, president of Capitol Records. In the weeks that followed, he recorded two albums with Sérgio Mendes and the group Brasil ‘65. Mendes felt that those records would set them on their way, and got in touch with Nesuhi Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records and someone who used to frequent the Lane in Rio. At Atlantic, he recorded other albums with Brasil ‘65, one of them with arrangements by people with ties to bossa nova, like pianist Clare Fischer, or merely with a wide scope of experience, like Bob Florence—but neither one of them did much for Dori Caymmi and Edu Lobo’s songs, which Sérgio was introducing. He still hadn’t hit upon the formula he wanted; his albums continued to sound like a trio from the Lane expanded with string or brass instruments, but a trio from the Lane nevertheless.
Wanda Sá, singing alone, was a hit. After the standard set by Astrud, which freed up mankind to accept singers with a mere whisper of a voice, Wanda, with the same whisper, found herself with the chance of a great future in America: she was prettier, and had the figure of a siren, a fantastic stage presence, and a sly and sensual way of using the microphone. She recorded a solo album at Capitol, entitled Softly, and the industry prepared itself to continue recording her. But at the time, her heart overruled her head, and she preferred to return to Brazil and take her love for Edu Lobo, whom she married, seriously.
Guitarist Rosinha de Valença and drummer Chico Batera also returned at the end of 1965, and Sérgio Mendes brought over guitarist-composer Marcos Valle, his breathtakingly beautiful wife, Ana Maria, and drummer João Palma to replace them. They were a good choice, but the timing was wrong: it was hard for Sérgio Mendes to book a couple who sang in Portuguese to a guitar beat anywhere in Los Angeles. The problem was resolved a few weeks later, when there was a knock at the door of Marcos Valle’s hotel suite on Sunset Boulevard:
“FBI,” stated an American who appeared to be ten feet tall, making the classic gesture of showing his badge. “You should have sailed for Vietnam yesterday.”
Like all immigrants, Marcos had had to enlist in the American Armed Forces, and with his perfect health record, he was a sure candidate to be sent to face the Vietcong. Once he recovered from the shock, he told them he was on his way and jumped on the first night plane—back to Rio. And thus Sérgio Mendes was left to find his own perfect blend of harmony.
“Tom, I’ve got money on my mind!”
The American lyricist Ray Gilbert entered Tom Jobim’s hotel room in New York in 1964 with several quarters stuck to his forehead. What he meant to say was that with Jobim’s songs, translated into English by him and released by the publishing houses that he planned to establish to exclusively release bossa nova—RioCali and Ipanema Music—the two of them would be rich. But Jobim wasn’t entirely convinced.
It’s a fact that Jobim wasn’t happy with the hurried versions of his songs that had been written by Norman Gimbel, Gene Lees, and Jon Hendricks. He felt they reduced the imagery penned by Vinícius de Moraes or Newton Mendonça to that uncultured stereotype of “coffee and bananas.” Johnny Mercer, the founder of Capitol and lyricist for “Midnight Sun,” “Blues in the Night,” “Too Marvelous for Words” and other songs that made Jobim sigh, telephoned him to tell that he would love to compose something with him. But they couldn’t work together. Mercer was associated with ASCAP (American Society of Composers and Performers) and Jobim with BMI (Broadcasting Music, Inc.)—and anyone who belonged to either one of the two dues-collecting super-organizations could not work in partnership with someone who belonged to the other. (This unfortunate prohibition would be abolished many years later, but Mercer died in 1976.) So Jobim had to make do with Ray Gilbert, who was recommended by his friend Aloysio de Oliveira.
Broadway produced some of the best lyricists of the century: men like Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Howard Dietz, Alan Jay Lerner, E. Y. Harburg, the Betty Comden–Adolph Green duo, Stephen Sondheim, and, of course, Johnny Mercer—not to mention exceptional second and third teams, who were only ranked second and third because there was room for only eleven names at the top. Compared to any of them, Ray Gilbert wasn’t even fit to be their errand boy. Jobim’s songs deserved the best American lyricists, but the big names on Broadway found it hard to put lyrics to independent songs. There were craftsmen who carried out this kind of work, and among them, there were several who would have been capable of doing a great job with Jobim. At the time that his songs were being released in the United States, Dorothy Fields, Sammy Cahn, Carolyn Leigh, and the Alan–Marilyn Bergman duo were on the scene, and available. But it was inevitable, because it came down to Aloysio, that preference would be once again given to Ray Gilbert.
Until his foray into bossa nova, Ray Gilbert’s only venture into the annals of American popular music was when he dragged out an old instrumental New Orleans jazz classic (“Muskrat Ramble,” by Kid Ory, from 1926) and wrote lyrics for it thirty years later. Except for this, everything else he had done was linked to Walt Disney or Carmen Miranda—that is, to Aloysio de Oliveira. Aloysio had met him at Walt Disney’s studio in 1942, during the filming of those South American cartoons starring Donald Duck, Zé Carioca, and the whole cast. Gilbert’s job was to translate songs like “Na Baixa do Sapateiro,” and transform the lyrics “Na Baixa do Sapateiro encontrei um dia / A morena mais frajola da Bahia” (One day I met, in the Shoemaker’s Hollow / The sassiest brunette in Bahia) into “I live the memory of many dreams ago / When the stars were bright and you were mine alone.” As you can see, he didn’t really have the native touch. Unless, of course, you’re talking about playing around with “goo-goo ga-ga” onomatopoeias, like “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” one of his songs. He also wrote the English lyrics to the bolero “Solamente una vez” (You Belong to My Heart). And if Jobim was unhappy with the insertion of bananas into his songs, it was probably because Gilbert was the author (in partnership with Aloysio de Oliveira) of a song called “I Make My Money with Bananas.”
The fact that he applied his meaningless lyrics to a large number of Jobim’s songs, perhaps preventing them from going even further in vocal cover versions, was merely to be expected. But of course, as their editor, through his links to RioCali and Ipanema Music, Ray Gilbert also acquired ownership of the songs. In fact, he did even better than that because he earned a 50 percent share of the profits for each song as editor, plus a percentage for being a partner in each one. In the case of a song that Jobim had written alone, like “Fotografia,” Gilbert got 75 percent of the money. And this was how, with the exception of omissions, Gilbert enriched both his life and career with the following songs by Jobim and his collaborating partners:
“Esperança perdida” (I Was Just One More for You) (with Billy Blanco), “Por causa de v
ocê” (Don’t Ever Go Away) (with Dolores Duran), “Ela é carioca” (She’s a Carioca) and “O morro não tem vez” (The Hill) (with Vinícius), “Dindi,” “Inútil paisagem” (Useless Landscape / If You Never Come to Me), “Só tinha de ser com você” (It Had to Be Only with You), “Samba torto” (Pardon My English) and “Preciso de você” (I Need You) (with Aloysio), “Surf Board,” “Valsa de ‘Porto das Caixas’” (Porto das Caixas Waltz), “Bonita,” and “Fotografia” (Photograph) (by Jobim alone).
However, following the example of their elders, the young bossa nova composers also handed their work to Gilbert on a plate. Some of the highlights in the lineup were “Preciso aprender a ser só” (If You Went Away), “Seu encanto” (The Face I Love) and “Vamos Pranchar” (Let’s Surf) (by Marcos and Paulo Sérgio Valle), “Você” (You), “A morte de um deus de sal” (The Death of a Salt God) and “Tetê” (by Menescal and Bôscoli), “Berimbau” (by Baden and Vinícius), “Chuva” (The Day It Rained) and “Tristeza de nós dois” (Our Sadness) (by Durval Ferreira), “Razão de viver” (A Little Tear) (by Eumir Deodato), “Imagem” (Image) (by Luizinho Eça and Aloysio de Oliveira), “Morrer de amor” (I Live to Love You) (by Oscar Castro-Neves and Luvercy Fiorini), and “Das Rosas” (Roses and Roses) (by Dorival Caymmi).
Marcos Valle, who after his scare with the FBI decided to take a new trip to the United States in 1966, emptied out his drawers and gave Gilbert all of his songs except for “Samba de verão” (Summer Samba) for him to edit, write lyrics for, and release in the United States. In return, Marcos signed a five-year contract, during which whatever he and his brother Paulo Sérgio produced would go straight to Gilbert (or to an American lyricist selected by him). In fact, Gilbert had had his eye on Marcos Valle ever since the explosive release of “Summer Samba,” Walter Wanderley’s recording of which had sold one million copies, and which had already been edited by Duchess Music.
Mind you, there was nothing illegal about this kind of business. It was merely a clever game—that was played everywhere in the world, including in Brazil—but one in which the composer never came out with the lion’s share. If you didn’t want the pile of money you earned to shrink too much, then you had to sleep close by. Many bossa nova musicians—Jobim, Bonfá, João Gilberto, Eumir Deodato, Oscar Castro-Neves, Sérgio Mendes, Walter Wanderley—preferred to move to the United States, some for extended periods of time, others to stay. For the first time, an entire generation of Brazilian musicians was facing the same dilemma that Dick Farney had encountered.
Marcos Valle stayed for just a year, 1966, worried about Vietnam. He sent his songs from Los Angeles for Paulo Sérgio to write the lyrics. Paulo Sérgio was an airline pilot on the Rio–Manaus route, and spent more time in the air than on the ground. Several of his song lyrics were written at 30,000 feet—including those to “O amor é chama” (Love Is a Flame). But it was he who had his feet on the ground when it came to threatening to beat up Ray Gilbert when he practically abandoned them in 1968, yet forbade them to find another editor. Gilbert’s justification was that, without Marcos Valle in the United States, it was just too difficult to promote his songs, and that five years was the minimum amount of time needed to establish him in the market.
Perhaps. But keyboard player Walter Wanderley had needed far less—just five months—to become extremely well known in America, and he did so with one of Marcos Valle’s own songs. Wanderley (whose name had the advantage of being able to be pronounced wond’rli) arrived in New York in 1966, hired by Creed Taylor. He recorded “Samba de verão” in May, and it went straight into the charts. In Brazil, he enjoyed great respect among musicians and his albums were popular, but nothing that would have brought the house down. His repertoire was a festival of boleros and cha-chas, when it was clear that the unbelievable rhythm of his organ deserved much more worthy material.
Those who knew him from the São Paulo nightlife already knew this in 1958, when Walter, at the age of twenty-six, arrived from Pernambuco to play at the Oásis nightclub and in the Captain’s Bar of the Comodoro Hotel. At the time, he was married to singer Isaurinha Garcia, whom he accompanied and wrote arrangements for. Around 1963, he started accompanying and writing arrangements for Claudette Soares and took advantage of the opportunity to change his repertoire, which everyone benefitted from—except perhaps Isaurinha, who lost her husband. Tony Bennett, who heard him on one of his trips to Brazil, thought he’d never heard organ music like it, recommended him to Creed Taylor, and the rest is history.
Or maybe not. Walter Wanderley’s huge success in the United States would have passed unnoticed in Brazil if his American records hadn’t occasionally been released over there, where they were received with the usual apathy. No Brazilian businessman was ever interested in bringing him over to play in his own country. The Americans, on the other hand, compared his personality to that of Fats Waller, the first jazz organist, and his technique to that of Jimmy Smith, the last. At one point, Walter Wanderley had all of the Los Angeles area jazz clubs eating out of his hand, and was constantly going off on tour to Mexico, Europe, and Japan.
Unfortunately, he appeared to suffer from that affliction that haunts certain musicians and creates barriers between them and their chance of success, as if the latter were a dangerous tiger to be kept at a distance. In his case, the barrier came in bottles. After a series of disasters that made even his most enthusiastic supporters fearful of contracting him, in 1969 the opportunity of a lifetime fell into Walter’s lap: to spend the next few years, sponsored by Holiday Inn, performing at the hundreds of hotels in the chain in the United States, Mexico, and Japan. His debut show would be the inauguration of the San Francisco Holiday Inn. For this particular show, they even invited Cyva and Cybele, from The Girls from Bahia, to do the female vocals.
All was well during the first set of the opening night. During the second set, his style was starting to become heavily influenced by Johnnie Walker. Between the second and last set, Wanderley must have swallowed a Molotov cocktail in his dressing room, because he barely managed to signal to the girls that he was going to start playing—one-two, one-two-three—before he collapsed over his keyboard like a dead weight. When they finally managed to wake him, hours later, it was goodbye Holiday Inn.
“Anyone who says they went to America and made lots of money is lying. Including me,” declared veteran guitarist Laurindo de Almeida, former Stan Kenton band member.
There are those who disagree.
“My name is Luiz Bonfá. I’m the composer of Black Orpheus.”
Joking aside, rumor has it that this is how Luiz Bonfá usually introduced himself to people in the United States, as if he were reading the information on a business card. This was, of course, before 1967, when he had to change what he said to: “My name is Luiz Bonfá. I’m the composer of ‘Gentle Rain.’”
Bonfá wasn’t exactly the composer for the film Black Orpheus, because there had been another, named Antonio Carlos Jobim, but it was true that “Manhã de carnaval,” which became known internationally as “A Day in the Life of a Fool” had covered more ground than any other song in the entire score. Bonfá was one of two Brazilians in the United States (the other, of course, was Jobim) who could introduce himself as the composer of more than one song that everyone seemed to know.
The world was kind to Bonfá as he ventured around its axis. At the start of the 1950s, he left the Quitandinha Serenaders (remember?) in order to write and play music solo. As a songwriter, he was soon taken on by Dick Farney, who felt he was modern enough to record practically everything he had written up until then, including “Sem esse céu” (Without This Sky), “Perdido de amor” (Lost in Love), and “Ranchinho de palha” (Little Straw Hut). As a guitarist, Bonfá also impressed him from the start with his technique and the different harmonies he used to embellish any song that fell into his lap. In 1957, he was already a name in Brazil, and when he was asked how he came up with those harmonies, he replied, in all seriousness:
“I once went to
the cinema to see a movie called Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing; I heard the music and told myself that’s what I wanted to do.”
If the interviewer laughed, Bonfá didn’t need to provide further explanation; if he didn’t, no explanation would help. The song he was referring to, “Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing,” by Paul Francis Webster and Sammy Fain, was a hit in 1956, when he, Bonfá, was already more than ready. In 1958, he packed up his guitar and left for New York with all his savings. Before he took off, he left two songs (“Manhã de carnaval” and “Samba de Orfeu” [Orpheus’s Samba]) with Sacha Gordine, for the film that would become Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus). In New York, the goddess of Broadway, singer Mary Martin, heard him at a party at the home of Julius Glazier, owner of Cartier jewelers, to which he had been taken by a rich Brazilian friend. Mary Martin liked him and invited him to accompany her on a long tour that would be starting in Alaska.
While Bonfá was playing in Alaska and in other more hospitable places, Orfeu Negro was gathering awards on the worldwide screen, and people were going crazy for “Manhã de carnaval,” with his guitar and Agostinho dos Santos’s vocals. When he returned to Brazil in 1959, bossa nova was just starting to creep onto the scene, and he felt as comfortable with the new genre as if he had been one of those responsible for bringing it into the world—without changing his style of playing or composing. In 1962, when singers and musicians in Rio were tumbling over each other for the concert at Carnegie Hall, there was no need for him to hurry: after Jobim and João Gilberto, he was one of the few artists whom Sidney Frey truly couldn’t do without. That night, at Carnegie, he played solo, accompanied Agostinho in “Manhã de carnaval,” thanked the audience whenever possible for their applause, and decided to continue his career in New York, with his new wife and partner, Maria Helena Toledo. And he had already recorded a multitude of discs when, in 1967, he had the idea of inviting the young keyboard player, pianist, guitarist, composer, arranger, producer, and conductor Eumir Deodato to come and work with him in New York.
