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

by Castro, Ruy

  Bossa nova didn’t come into the world to produce Marseillaises, but in 1966, O fino da Bossa had already stopped being about Bossa and had its title cut to just O fino. The main reason was Horácio Berlinck’s departure from the production team, and he owned the title of the show. But it made no difference, because for some time the program had been a kind of Top Ten of all Brazilian pop music that couldn’t be classified as rock ‘n’ roll.

  One of the up-and-coming stars of O fino was a Bahian named Gilberto Gil. In 1965, he arrived in São Paulo sporting a suit, tie, and briefcase, to work as a bureaucrat at Gessy-Lever, bringing with him songs like “Louvação” (Praise), “Roda” (Circle), and “Lunik 9”—the latter, by the way, an admonition against the artificial satellites that threatened to steal the moonlight from poets, serenaders, and lovers. (Former Sinatra-Farneys Armando Cavalcanti and Klécius Caldas had already broached the weighty issue in a carnival marchinha from 1961, “A lua é dos namorados” [The Moon Is for Lovers]). Gil’s songs were energetic, written to be sung at the top of one’s voice—Marseillaise-style—and he arrived on the scene none too soon for Elis, with her nationalistic and proclamatory song themes. Gil himself was one of those singers who could be heard at quite a distance. A short while later, concerned about the increasing popularity of Brazilian rock ‘n’ roll, Gil, Elis, Edu Lobo, and a small gang of artists and groupies marched from the Paramount Theater toward the Largo do São Francisco, in São Paulo, in the burlesque incident that became known as the “protest march against electric guitars.”

  “It wasn’t exactly against electric guitars,” remembered Gil, years later, in an interview with reporter Regina Echeverria. “In fact, it evolved from a surge of people’s utter resentment, a half-xenophobic, half-nationalistic thing ‘in support of Brazilian music.’ That rally was in protest of several things, but the wording of the slogans was aimed against foreign, alienating music. It was a semi-Geraldo Vandré thing.”

  Gilberto Gil had every reason to gently blush when talking about the incident because, in less than a year, he himself was using Os Mutantes’s electric guitars in his performance of “Domingo no parque” (Sunday at the Park) at a song festival. He would have been even more uncomfortable had he known that that protest march, as has been confirmed by some, was merely a strategy dreamed up by Paulinho Machado de Carvalho to stir up rivalry between the two music shows broadcast by his TV station: Elis Regina’s O fino, and Roberto Carlos’s Jovem Guarda (Young Guard).

  Jovem Guarda first aired in September 1965, five months after O fino (which at the time was still da Bossa), and was shown live on Sunday afternoons, a sort of matinée performance. It brought together the gang of young rockers that Carlos Imperial had been trying to develop for years in Rio, without much success. Now in the hands of an astute businessman from São Paulo, Marcos Lázaro, and with Roberto Carlos already famous for his cover of “Splish Splash,” they were ready for things to turn around. This happened with “Quero que vá tudo pro inferno” (I Want All the Rest to Go to Hell) in 1966, and from that point on, all they had to do was grow and iron their hair. André Midani’s recipe for successful record sales in that long-ago year of 1958 was more on target than ever: young people were the biggest market. And the music they were now listening to was rock ‘n’ roll.

  “Elis Regina can always take comfort in the fact that the Vietnam War is much worse,” wrote columnist Carlinhos de Oliveira in the Jornal do Brasil, when news broke of Elis’s marriage to her sworn enemy, Ronaldo Bôscoli.

  History had already been privy to other surprising matches—Hitler and Stalin in 1938, Brazilian Communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes and dictator Getúlio Vargas in 1945, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller in 1956—but nobody from Rio to São Paulo was expecting what happened in 1967. Ever since their famous rift in the Lane, in 1964, Elis and Bôscoli had spent the next three years hurling darts instead of words when they spoke of each other, whether in writing, through messages, or in poisonous interviews. The vitriol was confined to each other’s professional careers because up until then, their only physical contact had been a warning finger on their respective noses. Bôscoli even produced a show in Rio for the singer Cláudia, entitled Quem tem medo de Elis Regina? (Who’s Afraid of Elis Regina?)

  But by the middle of 1967, O fino was losing its audience—due in part to the rise in popularity of Jovem guarda, but mostly because it had deviated considerably from its original format, in hosting popular music artists who had little or nothing to do with bossa nova, like Elizeth Cardoso, the regional style of maestro Caçulinha, rustic singer Ary Toledo, the boring Juca Chaves, and, of course, Jair Rodrigues. In TV Record’s opinion, the way to save the show was to hire a new duo of producers: Miéle and Bôscoli. To Elis Regina, this solution seemed about as stable as throwing her a high-voltage cord to pull her out of a well.

  That year, Ronaldo Bôscoli’s prospects in Rio didn’t seem all that great either. Almost the entire bossa nova gang had left Brazil. Tom Jobim, João Gilberto, Eumir Deodato, Luiz Bonfá, Maria Helena Toledo, Astrud Gilberto, and Hélcio Milito had all moved to New York. Sérgio Mendes, João Donato, Tião Neto, Dom Um Romão, Luizinho Eça, Oscar Castro-Neves, Walter Wanderley, The Girls from Bahia, Aloysio de Oliveira, Moacyr Santos, Raul de Souza, and Rosinha da Valença were all in California. Pery Ribeiro, Leny Andrade, Bossa Três, and Carlinhos Lyra were in Mexico. Baden Powell was in Paris. Francis Hime and Edu Lobo had their bags packed and were ready to go. Marcos Valle couldn’t make up his mind whether to stay or go. And Vinícius de Moraes was on a permanent world tour.

  Os Cariocas had just split up. Sylvinha Telles had died. The Lane ceased to exist when Alberico Campana sold his nightclubs in 1966. Aloysio de Oliveira had practically given Elenco to Philips. He, Ronaldo, was composing less and less with Menescal, or anyone else, for that matter. Of the old gang, Chico Feitosa had become a jingles producer, Normando was off the air, and Nara still wasn’t speaking to him. What was left of bossa nova? A group of young people who were more interested in talking about politics or winning festivals than in making music—and the radio stations and recording companies were totally caught up in rock ‘n’ roll.

  It was the end of that long, unforgettable holiday.

  So Ronaldo Bôscoli, together with Miéle, swallowed his pride and went to São Paulo, with the purpose of trying to save O fino for Elis Regina—and for himself, too. He wasn’t successful, because the damage that had been done to the show was too great to repair. If anyone had told him, on the way to TV Record for his first meetng with Elis, that on December 5 of that year, he would be married to the woman, Bôscoli would have replied that Frank Sinatra would come to Brazil to sing at the dollhouse-sized Zum-zum before that was likely to happen.

  Sinatra, Bôscoli’s idol since 1940 (“I love Frank Sinatra more than I love women”), was one of the major bones of contention in his marriage to Elis. After they were married, he walked into the house on Avenida Niemeyer, in Rio, where they were going to live, with a trunk containing his entire collection of Sinatra releases: hundreds of albums, some of them rare, others already out of print, all of them valuable, and many of them bought at Flávio Ramos’s record shop at the beginning of the 1950s.

  Bôscoli’s entire life (well, almost) was in those imported Sinatra albums, such as Swing Easy, from 1954, Songs for Young Lovers, from 1955, Close to You, from 1957, and Only the Lonely, from 1958. So just imagine his horror on returning home after a fight with Elis only to find that she had gone out onto the balcony and launched them all, like flying saucers, into the Atlantic Ocean. Some of the records hadn’t quite made it to the sea, and could be seen lying like dead fish on the asphalt of Avenida Niemeyer. This was not Elis’s first vendetta. Some time before, she had set fire to another of Bôscoli’s trunks, which had contained letters, poems, original copies of lyrics, and photos of fishing trips, nights at the Lane, and his many ex-girlfriends.

  Columnist Carlinhos de Oliveira had been right: this wasn’t a marriage,
it was Vietnam, although it was hard to figure out who was playing the role of the Americans—and Bôscoli wasn’t exactly a victim. One of their fights erupted when Elis received her credit card statement and found a charge from the King’s Motel. Ronaldo had only stopped by the motel with a dancer from TV Globo, and paid with Elis’s credit card. Furniture flew and Elis, as always, took João Marcelo, their son, and went to stay with Jacques and Lídia Libion in Copacabana. Sometimes she would storm out of the house after a fight, go to Jacques and Lídia’s house, and find Bôscoli already settled in. He had also gone there in search of refuge.

  These, at least, were fights with concrete reasons behind them—because, in the four years and four months they were married (until 1972), not one day went by in which the gossip in Rio surrounding Elis and Bôscoli wasn’t further augmented with pulse-quickening details of domestic disputes. And that didn’t even include the fights they had on the eve of their wedding day and on the actual day itself. In 90 percent of the cases, nobody, not even themselves, could tell you how the fight had started. Foundering in those turbulent waters, the marriage between the singer of “Arrastão” and the composer of “O barquinho” (The Little Boat) wasn’t exactly the most fertile soil for the continued growth of bossa nova.

  One reason for this was, according to Bôscoli, that Elis lived in a perpetual state of discord with the big names in bossa nova. She had never completely recovered from the veto imposed on her by Jobim in the recording of Pobre menina rica (Poor Little Rich Girl), and although she eventually included his songs in her medley albums (what modern Brazilian singer could do without Jobim in the 1960s?), she didn’t do so with the same zeal that she reserved for Edu Lobo, who was, for a long time, her favorite. But Jobim was a friend of Bôscoli’s, and frequently came to their house. In the beginning, Bôscoli had to keep a careful eye on Elis to make sure that she didn’t serve him charred steak during the barbecues that the couple held in Avenida Niemeyer.

  It was a marriage that would have put the Borgias to shame, but at least it served to heal old wounds between the greatest female vocalist (Elis) and the greatest composer (Jobim) in Brazil, because in 1969 she recorded an entire song of Jobim’s (“Wave”) for the first time, on the record she made with harmonicist Toots Thielemans in Sweden. From that point on, she regularly included Jobim’s compositions in her repertoire, made “Águas de março” (Waters of March) her own and, in 1974, two years after her official separation from Bôscoli, she recorded her best record up until then, Elis & Tom, with Jobim in Los Angeles—on which the orchestra was, coincidentally, conducted by Bill Hitchcock, the man who had discovered Dick Farney at the Urca Casino in 1946.

  “OK, stop telling stories,” said the singer Dionne Warwick in Rio, in 1966, to Ronaldo Bôscoli. “Everyone knows that Burt Bacharach invented bossa nova.”

  What do you mean “everyone”?—Bôscoli might have asked. But then, had she been French, Dionne Warwick probably would have attributed bossa nova to Francis Lai and Pierre Barouh, whose score for a tremendously popular film released that year, Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman) was bossa nova at its best. The cream of the crop was the lengthy “Samba saravah”—Baden and Vinícius’s “Samba da benção” (Benediction Samba), with the authors carelessly omitted from the screen credits—which Barouh had recorded in Rio with Baden, Oscar and Iko Castro-Neves, and Milton Banana.

  Silently (which is a contradiction in terms, given that we’re talking about music), bossa nova had crept into the inner ear of people everywhere, and there were already several who could reproduce its guitar beat, sublety of percussion, and vocal style as if it had always existed.

  Antonio Carlos Jobim spent a large part of 1965 and 1966 in the United States, this time in California, doing television appearances, personal performances, and arrangements. To help stave off his homesickness, Brazilian friends who were passing through brought him gifts from his mother: Phebo soap, Garoto chocolates, and Praianinha cachaça. (One of the bottles of booze, brought over by a photographer, never reached its destination: the customs officer in Los Angeles was suspicious of its contents and broke open the bottle right then and there, flooding the entire area.) But the main activity that occupied Jobim was the records he started making for Warner, through RioCali. Ray Gilbert was working in that respect, at least—although, as is to be expected, he gave preference to the songs for which he was lyricist and editor.

  Jobim sang for the first time on one of the records, The Wonderful World of Antonio Carlos Jobim. It’s true that he was firmly backed by Nelson Riddle’s orchestra and arrangements, but this was no picnic. Quite the opposite. Goodness knows what it must have been like to feel almost a novice, and to be recording with a musician he had spent his entire life admiring, especially the man who had given new life to Sinatra’s career just eleven years previously. And besides, Nelson Riddle was used to Sinatra; he had heard him singing in the bath and was close enough to him to call him “Frankie.” It was a huge responsibility. But with the exception of his limitations as a singer, nobody would ever have guessed, on hearing The Wonderful World of Antonio Carlos Jobim, that Antonio Carlos Jobim actually felt nervous.

  Nervous is indeed what he felt some months later, in December, when he was back in Rio and settled back into his favorite niche, the Veloso Bar, having a few evening beers with friends. Mr. Armênio, one of the bar’s waiters, told him there was a telephone call for him—from the United States. Jobim picked up the receiver; it was Gilbert, and Frank Sinatra wanted to talk to him.

  Pause.

  In December 1966, if someone told you that you had a phone call, and Frank Sinatra was on the other end of the line, 10,132 kilometers (6,296 miles) away, it would really make you stop and think. How is it possible to explain to today’s reader exactly what that meant back then? There are no artists of equivalent stature in show business today. None of the post-Sinatra megastars (except perhaps for the Beatles, and even then, there were four of them and they hung out together) ever managed to accumulate the same amount of power, prestige, and inaccessibility—all at once. (Many of today’s idols might have two of those things, but none have all three.) In 1966, at fifty years of age, Sinatra also had reason to be proud of his staying power; no other singer had managed to stay the distance with the legend himself for so many years—he had been famous since at least 1940. Once, in 1939, when he was still singing with Harry James’s band, a reporter told James that he was going to interview his crooner. “For the love of God, don’t!” implored James. “The kid has only barely gotten started, nobody knows who he is, and he already thinks he’s bigger than Caruso!”

  Sinatra’s supremacy reached its peak in 1960 when, an ardent supporter of the Democratic Party, he gave his all as both a voter and an artist to John Kennedy’s campaign for presidency of the United States. With Kennedy’s victory, he was practically appointed as a minister without a cabinet. He organized the colossal show for the inauguration party, and from that point on became almost a permanent fixture at the White House—until Jack’s brother, Bobby Kennedy, began locking the door. Bobby was attorney general, and was threatening to put an end to the Mafia; he felt that he wouldn’t be taken seriously in his crusade when someone whose favorite dish was macaroni had taken up permanent residence in the guest room. Bobby’s interference ended with John Kennedy going to California and staying at the home of Republican supporter Bing Crosby—symbolizing his break with Sinatra. The latter withdrew from the White House, but he and John remained friends and the two of them still had a lot of fun together, when the president went to New York for secret flings at the Carlyle Hotel.

  Sinatra was still the biggest popular singer in the world in 1966. From 1954 to 1961, all of the albums he released with Capitol were in the top five sold in the United States. Only the Lonely, from 1958, and Come Fly with Me, from 1959, had been number one. In 1961, he set up his own recording company, Reprise, which he opened in 1963 with WEA, a business that made him even more of a millionaire than he al
ready was. And that same year of 1966, in the middle of the Beatles era, his Strangers in the Night single, a Bert Kaempfert song, was also number one. This was the man who was phoning Tom Jobim at the Veloso.

  Not that it came as a complete surprise to Jobim. Since 1964, Rancho Mirage, Sinatra’s stronghold in the middle of the desert in Palm Springs, was already indicating that The Voice wanted to record his songs. But with Sinatra, things only happened when he decided it was time—and besides, there was no reason for him to rush. For years, his market had been the adult public, and the Beatles explosion in 1964 did not affect him seriously. What was happening was a low release rate of great songs in his style—in fact, it was the beginning of the decline of great American music. Like other singers, he was looking for new types of material, and bossa nova had more than enough quality, sophistication, and commercial appeal. And to Sinatra, bossa nova was Jobim.

  Ray Gilbert passed the telephone to Sinatra, and he said, “I’d like to make a record with you, and to know if you like the sound of the idea.”

  Jobim replied, “It’s an honor, I’d love to.” Sinatra suggested the German Claus Ogerman to do the arrangements, and Tom promptly agreed—it was Ogerman who had written the arrangements for his own album The Composer of “Desafinado” three years earlier, and that was, without a doubt, the record that Sinatra must be using as a benchmark. Sinatra suggested that Jobim play guitar on the record. Handsome Jobim, a pianist, was growing a little weary of being portrayed as a guitarist in the United States—where they associated the guitar with the clichéd stereotype of the Latin lover—but that was no reason to make things complicated. He agreed, but asked for a Brazilian drummer. Sinatra agreed. In the end, Sinatra asked him if he could go to Los Angeles right away, in order to get to work with Ogerman on the arrangements—which meant that the songs had more or less already been chosen. The Voice issued his final instructions: “I don’t have time to learn any new songs and I hate rehearsing,” Sinatra told him. “Let’s stick with the best-known ones—the classics.”