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

by Castro, Ruy

  Bonfá even paid his airfare—which was very cheap, when you take into consideration the number of musical instruments Eumir Deodato took on the plane as luggage. In Rio, in 1959, at the age of sixteen and in the flower of his youth, Deodato formed part of the very first bossa nova gang. He then retired to his apartment in Laranjeiras, where he spent the next few years sitting in a swivel chair in his pajamas, surrounded by his piano, keyboards, and study desk, learning all about theory, harmony, counterpoint, solfeggio, arrangement, and instrumentation by correspondence, with all the imported books and course packets that the mailman brought him. One of the courses he took was that of Henry Mancini. And, as had happened with the generation immediately before his (Menescal’s generation), the record he listened to with his external ear while he studied with his internal one was the same Julie Is Her Name, with Julie London and Barney Kessel.

  When he felt he was ready, Deodato went out and approached the studios—literally, all the studios in Rio. From 1963 to 1967, he took part in dozens of recordings in one or another of the many capacities which he was capable of fulfilling. His arrangements backed just about every singer of the era you could name: Wilson Simonal, Marcos Valle, Wanda Sá, Maysa, Nara Leão, Pery Ribeiro, Leny Andrade, Quarteto 004, Tita, Elis Regina, Pacífico Mascarenhas’ Samba-Cana, among many others. Whenever the public bought a record by Elenco entitled A Bossa Nova de Roberto Menescal (Roberto Menescal’s Bossa Nova) or A nova Bossa Nova de Roberto Menescal (Roberto Menescal’s New Bossa Nova), they were under the impression that they were buying a record by Roberto Menescal, but in fact, they were buying one by Eumir Deodato—Menescal was merely cheerfully acting as a kind of front man. Other discs without definitive paternity, like the two recorded at Philips by Os Gatos (Os Gatos and Aquele som dos Gatos—The Cats and The Sound of the Cats) could have been ace guitarist Durval Ferreira, but they were also Eumir Deodato. There’s nothing like being twenty years old.

  Eumir Deodato must already have felt like a veteran at this age. When he had released his real first album—Inútil paisagem, with Roberto Quartin’s new label Forma—he astonished everybody with his maturity. Four long years later, in 1967, there was no other way out for him than Galeão airport, as Tom Jobim used to say. This was primarily due to the fact that Deodato had just been fired from EMI-Odeon, where he worked as an arranger. The alleged reason given by Milton Miranda, the artistic director of the recording company, was that his arrangements were “too complicated and they confused the singers; and besides, his albums weren’t selling.”

  That was when Bonfá sent him a ticket to New York, so that he could do the arrangements on a record by his wife, Maria Helena Toledo. Deodato did the arrangements, and, chosen by Astrud Gilberto to write the arrangements for her record Beach Samba, astonished producer Creed Taylor by arranging and recording five songs in just six hours—which was typical of a hotheaded Brazilian trying to impress. But Taylor knew he was capable of doing an even better job if he worked a little more slowly and, little by little, started entrusting him with other contracted artists: Jobim himself, Walter Wanderley, Wes Montgomery, Paul Desmond, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, and, yes, Frank Sinatra. At the end of 1972, Deodato—at the ripe old age of twenty-nine—recorded his first official disc for Creed Taylor, entitled Prelude, and introduced it with a jazz-pop arrangement of “Also sprach Zarathustra.” The single sold five million copies.

  This was an unquantifiable achievement, given that the market then was much smaller than it is today, when sales of that figure are still impressive. Giving “Zarathustra” a pop rhythm was certainly less work (and less fun) for him than another project he undertook that year: untangling six hours’ worth of tape that João Donato had recorded in a studio in New York—free improvisations on old themes, such as “Cadê Jodel?” (Where Is Jodel?) and others that Donato had made up on the keyboard as he went along—with a note for the producer at Muse Records, whom he owed a record: “Give this to Eumir Deodato. He understands me and he’ll know what to do.”

  Deodato took the spool of tape, added his own keyboard, sprinkled in a few brass instruments, with Maurício Einhorn’s harmonica and percussion by Airto Moreira, and the result was a classic bossa nova–Latin jazz fusion: Donato/Deodato, which was released almost clandestinely in Brazil.

  Deodato’s presence in the United States also had positive repercussions for the career of the man who had opened the gates to New York for him: Luiz Bonfá. He modernized Bonfá, opening him up to a more jazz-influenced style, and convinced him to experiment with other guitars, such as the Craviola, the Ovation, and even an electric guitar. Bonfá was no less revered as a composer and great virtuoso, and expanded his audience even further, recording surprising albums like The New Face of Luiz Bonfá, in 1970, and the record widely considered in the United States to be one of the classics of solo guitar, Introspection, in 1972. These records went practically unnoticed in Brazil.

  Eumir Deodato’s career was now taking the kind of leaps that Superman did in the early comic books before learning how to fly. In the future, the walls of his studio in New York would play host to no less than fifteen platinum records—totalling fifteen million copies sold—as a pop music instrumentalist, arranger, and producer. He came to earn $250,000 for the arrangement and production of a single track and, in 1988, had to pay more taxes in the United States than Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, who were very successful, earned in a year.

  Eumir has not appeared in public for several years—nor does he need to. To be precise, he hasn’t since 1976, when he had Carnegie Hall to himself, and his band, for the last time.

  On stage at the Opera House in Chicago in 1968, the miniskirt worn by Karen Phillips, one of the two American vocalists of Sérgio Mendes’s Brasil ‘66, almost made the audience overlook the fact that she was in fact very tuneful and competent. Likewise the skirt worn by the other female vocalist, Lani Hall. After the show, the band received an important guest in their dressing room: Senator Robert Kennedy. He was so impressed with the sound of Brasil ‘66, particularly with the rhythm created by Tião Neto on double bass, Dom Um on drums, and Rubens Bassini on percussion, that he had decided to go to the dressing rooms to meet Karen Phillips. Kennedy was hard to resist, but Karen held herself in check; she knew it was dangerous to keep company with him. You know what those assassination attempts are like; anyone close to the target ran the risk of being hit by a stray bullet. (Robert Kennedy was killed just a few months later.)

  With the implosion of the Beatles the following year, Sérgio Mendes became the greatest influence on the pop market. At the end of 1965, he had decided to experiment with a new formula for his group, then called Brasil ‘66, and hired two female vocalists to sing in English; he switched the rhythmical ingredients around, eliminated every last vestige of jazz influence, and created a combination of samba, pop, and bossa nova; and began to use the more dance-oriented themes that young Brazilian composers offered him, combining them with the Bacharachs and Lennons and McCartneys of the era. Herb Alpert, the leader of a Tex-Mex group named Tijuana Brass and owner of a small label, A & M, heard him, liked what he heard, and began to invest in his music. In 1966, Mendes released several hit singles and the LP Look Around. In 1968, Brasil ‘66 had already sold four million singles of “Fool on the Hill”—more than the Beatles had sold of their own recording.

  Someone who didn’t like what was going on was his old Brazilian friend Armando Pittigliani, of Philips. In 1960, Pittigliani had invited Sérgio Mendes to cut a disc at his recording company—a dance record. Mendes had resisted: he wanted to make a jazz record. Pittigliani managed to persuade him to change his mind, and Dance moderno was made, but Mendes styled the arrangements with so many complicated, jazzy innovations that nobody could dance to it. The record did not sell. A few years later, here he was, recording dance music, only in someone else’s studio. At the time, Pittigliani had lent him some money and Mendes had repaid him with a check—which had bounced, because he was har
d up. When they met again in 1968, Pittigliani reminded him, laughing, of the bad check. Sérgio Mendes, who was by then rich and famous, gave him a suggestion: “That check is valuable now. You should have it framed and hang it on the wall.”

  In just two years, from 1966 to 1968, the group had already played in hundreds of American cities, toured the whole of Europe (sometimes playing in two different countries on the same day), Australia, and the Far East, particularly Japan, where they played twenty-seven cities on each tour—at a minimum of two Japanese tours per year. At first, Sérgio Mendes was opening several shows for Frank Sinatra, but shortly afterward, he wasn’t opening shows for anyone. He became as big a featured artist as the Rolling Stones. All that was left was for Sérgio Mendes to fulfill the promise he had made to old colleague of the Lane, Ronaldo Bôscoli: to steal a pair of Sinatra’s underwear that had been only “slightly worn.” He didn’t fulfill this particular promise.

  When he decided to acquire his very own Xanadu, Sérgio Mendes soon found it: a house in Encino that Clark Gable had had built for his wife Carole Lombard in 1939. He moved into the house, filled it with paintings by Di Cavalcanti and colonial Brazilian furniture, decorated it with cast-iron craft-ware and, just for fun, installed a recording studio in the basement—which, years later, he sold to the Brazilian recording company Som Livre. And when he established his two music publishing houses, Rodra and Berna, his offices were inundated with the entire Brazilian music production of the era: Marcos Valle, Edu Lobo, Dori Caymmi—all those who wanted to be free of opportunists like Ray Gilbert gave him their songs. Sérgio Mendes’s house in Encino became the Mecca, like Nara Leão’s apartment in Copacabana in the old days, only for different reasons.

  In the years that followed, Sérgio Mendes performed several times at Carnegie Hall. But for some reason, the renowned New York theater no longer held the same special charm that had flooded his senses when he had led his sextet in their performance of “Batida diferente” (Different Beat), by Durval Ferreira and Maurício Einhorn—the first number played at the bossa nova concert in November 1962. Not that the Carnegie had suddenly become chopped liver, but because nothing seemed capable of exceeding the feeling he had experienced that night.

  Sérgio Mendes, Tião Neto, Dom Um, and Rubens Bassini would be struck by a similar feeling, perhaps, an even greater one, on May 5, 1968, at the very same Opera House in Chicago. Brasil ‘66 was to be the final attraction of the night. And whose band do you think was opening the show for them?

  Stan Kenton’s.

  If they were to tell the clerks at the Murray, nobody would have believed them.

  21

  The World as an Exit

  Frankie goes to bossa nova: Jobim and Sinatra at the definitive recording session

  Meanwhile, in Brazil …

  “Nara sings very badly, but she’s an eloquent speaker,” said Elis Regina. “She’s always in the papers, denying something she said the night before. And she’s betrayed every musical genre she’s ever been a part of: bossa nova, samba de morro, protest songs, and ye-ye-ye.”

  Nara Leão didn’t hold her rival in very high regard, either: “Elis is a childish, aggressive, and unstable woman,” she declared.

  That was the battle of the stars in 1966. But it was more like a disagreement between bosom buddies. A few minutes before they had issued those statements, the two of them had posed together, all smiles, for the Manchete magazine reporter who had asked them individually what they thought of one another.

  It wasn’t as if the public was so divided: Nara’s fans were more or less the same as Elis’s, and both singers recorded for Philips. Nara, in fact, had little patience for putting on a front—the only thing about her appearance that never changed were the bangs she had worn since childhood. But it was antagonistic of Elis to accuse her of having betrayed ye-ye-ye, given that she had never really been a part of the genre. The closest she had ever gotten to this kind of music was her brief relationship with Roberto Carlos, a scoop revealed by commentator Claudio de Mello e Souza on TV Rio. And, by the way, the news didn’t please the fans of either one of the two.

  It wasn’t merely a disagreement between two singers. In the extensive hullabaloo that surrounded Elis and Nara, what ended up being relegated to a corner was popular music itself. The quarrel was supposedly political, and the litigants were a new group of composers who were much busier ruining their eyes over the works of the sociologist Herbert Marcuse than over books about guitar methods or composition. That was not the case with Edu Lobo, who took his studies seriously, but it certainly was with Geraldo Vandré, for whom two chords were more than enough with which to compose a song. “What matters is communication with the people,” he used to say. “Communication” and “people” were, by the way, two very important words in those days.

  Elis and Nara were merely along for the ride. The success of “Arrastão” (Fishing Net), by Lobo and Vinícius, sung by Elis, at the TV Excélsior song festival in 1965, proved that it was foolish to just try and preserve folk music—as Sérgio Ricardo had done in 1964, for the film Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Black God, White Devil). Who wanted to listen to that? And furthermore, what on earth for, if it was possible to mass-produce the same music in a studio, with European harmonies, and still win festivals?

  “Arrastão” made possible the existence of “Disparada” (Stampede), a guitar moda by Théo de Barros, with lyrics by Geraldo Vandré, performed by Jair Rodrigues in the 1966 festival, now hosted by TV Record. The accompaniment provided by Quarteto Novo in “Disparada” included the former Sambalanço percussionist and future Weather Report frontman, Airto Moreira, playing a donkey’s jawbone that he found by the side of the road somewhere. It was all well and good that sophisticated urban music was being invaded by Northeastern rhythms, but did it have to happen so fast? Just a year earlier, for example, Vandré was answering questions about bossa nova on the awards show O céu é o limite (The Sky’s the Limit) on TV Record, in São Paulo, and going on tour with Rhodia, decked out in silks and satin.

  In contrast to the aggressiveness of “Disparada,” which was a kind of “Carcará” (Caracara) on horseback, the same festival also saw the provincial and nostalgic “A banda” (The Band), written by Chico Buarque de Holanda and sung by—who?—the former black sheep Nara Leão. The year before, Nara had brought Chico Buarque into the limelight with songs like “Olê, olá” and “Pedro pedreiro” (Pedro the Bricklayer), and Brazil had fallen in love with the composer. Chico Buarque managed to win over not just a large sector of the younger generation, but he also thrilled his older audience, who soon dubbed him “the new Noel Rosa.” With bossa nova still echoing in the ears of many people, the music he wrote in fact seemed like a younger approach to the old samba style, but so what, if it was good? As well as being João Gilberto’s brother-in-law, Chico was practically bossa nova’s nephew, given that his father, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, had been almost a brother to Vinícius de Moraes for thirty years. And even before “A banda,” when anyone casually asked Vinícius what was new, he would reply: “Chico Buarque de Holanda.”

  But enthusiasm for “Disparada” was also marked among members of its audience who considered themselves more politically minded, and the two songs got a boisterous reception when performed at the Record Theater. The jury cast their votes, the ballots were counted, and “A banda” won, but in order to avoid a conflagration in the auditorium, Paulo Machado de Carvalho Filho, the director of Record, decided that they had tied. Neither of the two sides were pleased, but Philips thought it was great—they had released both songs.

  In record time, Philips released Nara’s single of “A banda” and it sold fifty-five thousand copies within just the first four days. The swift release time can be explained: the disc had already been recorded two months earlier, but Philips had held onto it, so that the song could be entered in the festival. It was fortuitous for Nara—and not so lucky for Os Cariocas, to whom Chico had offered the song just a short time
before, and who had felt it was not in keeping with their style.

  “In the days of ‘A banda,’” remembered Nara in 1973, “I could have been surrounded by ten slaves tending to my every whim, holding my purse, pulling out my chair so that I could sit down. I felt like the only child of a rich family. Once, in Bahia, I made a plane wait while I finished eating a dish of caruru. They paged me over the intercom and I told them to wait—and they did!”

  “Disparada,” sung by Jair Rodrigues, also sold well, and was recorded almost immediately—most appropriately—by the country duo Tonico e Tinoco. Of course, Geraldo Vandré would never have allowed it, but Brazilian politics had undergone so many upheavals since that time that perhaps nobody was really surprised when his guitar moda was adopted as the signature tune for the 1989 presidential campaign of ultra-right-wing candidate Ronaldo Caiado, of the UDR (Rural Democratic Union).

  Elis Regina was out of the running for that 1966 festival, but she couldn’t really complain. She had recorded the second volume of Dois na Bossa (Two in Bossa) with Jair Rodrigues, which looked likely to be as successful as the first (it wasn’t quite, but almost) and brought the house down with the weekly show O fino da Bossa (The Best of Bossa), which was also shown on TV Record. The unforgettable highlight of the show was her rendition of “Canto de Ossanha” (Ossanha’s Chant), an afro-samba by Baden and Vinícius. When she sang the refrain “Vai, vai, vai, vai!” (Go, go, go, go!), it was feared that her audience would indeed take flight, but she was gaining admirers even among people from whom it was least expected: “Elis Regina manages to turn just about any song into the Marseillaise,” remarked author Nelson Rodrigues to his friend journalist Otto Lara Resende when the two of them attended Elis and Baden’s show at the Zum-zum.