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

by Castro, Ruy

  The recording was set for the end of January, and with that, the two of them bade each other farewell and caught their respective planes—Jobim to Los Angeles, and Sinatra to Barbados—on the one hand, to prepare his voice, and on the other, to recover from the tremendous crisis that was going on in his marriage to actress Mia Farrow. Sinatra, who was fifty, and Mia, twenty, had married less than a year before, and ever since, stories surrounding the event had put food on the table and paid the rent of practically every American comedian. Thousands of jokes were being made on a daily basis in the newspapers and on television. It was said that some of Sinatra’s neckties were older than Mia; that Ava Gardner had always known that Sinatra would “end up in bed with a little boy”; and that all that was left was for Frank Sinatra, Jr. to marry Maureen O’Sullivan (Mia’s mother, and former Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan).

  The problem in that marriage, meanwhile, was that Frank wanted Mia to stay at home making ravioli, and she, with the willfulness of her twenty years, insisted on pursuing a movie career—in order to avoid merely being labeled “Sinatra’s wife.” Against his will, she went to New York to film Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Her role was intense, the film was intense, and Roman Polanski was intense. All that intensity ended up draining her both physically and psychologically. If you’ve seen the film and remember Mia’s appearance in the final scenes, it’s worth noting that she wasn’t made up to look like a woman who was in labor with the son of the Devil. Filming ended, but Mia didn’t want to go back to the marriage. The two were, for all intents and purposes, separated.

  Round about the time he had telephoned Jobim, Sinatra invited Mia to spend Christmas with him in Palm Springs, in a tentative effort to salvage what was left of their marriage. She accepted, but according to columnist Earl Wilson, her stay was very much along the lines of a “visit.” The two of them agreed to “take a break,” during which Frank went to Barbados. As for Mia (once again, against Sinatra’s wishes, who thought she was being taken advantage of), she fled to India that January—in the company of John Lennon and George Harrison—to visit a meditation, relaxation, and LSD “spa” with guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. This was the atmosphere in which Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim was to be recorded.

  Antonio Carlos Jobim, in turn, no longer had any reason to go about his day whistling. Once his initial euphoria at having his music sung by the idol of his generation had worn off, he was faced with the frightening reality: it was now or never for his career. He arrived in Los Angeles and was put up in a suite with a piano and refrigerator at the Sunset Marquis Hotel. Claus Ogerman came to see him every day, and the two of them engineered, with watchmaker-like precision, the delicate workings of “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Dindi,” “Corcovado” (Quiet Night of Quiet Stars), “Meditação” (Meditation), “Inútil paisagem” (If You Never Come to Me), “Insensatez” (How Insensitive), and “O amor em paz” (Once I Loved).

  Three American songs would be included in the repertoire, after being passed through bossa nova’s superfine-mesh sieve: “Change Partners,” written by Irving Berlin, and performed by Fred Astaire in 1938 in the film Carefree; “I Concentrate on You,” by Cole Porter, which also made its world debut through Fred Astaire, in the film Broadway Melody of 1940; and “Baubles, Bangles and Beads,” which Bob Wright and George Forrest wrote for Kismet, a Broadway musical, in 1953. The purpose of including American songs was to dispense with the exclusively Latin flavor of the record—and regarding the inclusion of “Baubles, Bangles and Beads,” it’s not ridiculous to assume that Sinatra already knew how good it would sound with a bossa nova beat. Among the many albums he had listened to in order to familiarize himself with the rhythm, was It Might as Well Be Spring, which Sylvinha Telles had recorded that same year for Kapp Records, and contained the song “Baubles, Bangles and Beads.”

  The work with Ogerman didn’t take long—precisely because everything would be sorted out by Sinatra himself in the studio, at the hour of reckoning. So for the rest of January, Jobim merely sat around in his hotel waiting for Sinatra to return so that they could start work. In California, the days passed slowly, even in wintertime, when even Nathanael West’s locusts came out to sunbathe. Jobim kept himself busy by writing to Vinícius or Caymmi and painting a somewhat exaggerated picture of his situation. In one of his letters to Vinícius, he described himself thus: “A poor wretch confined to a hotel room, waiting for the summons to start recording, in that state of physical lethargy that precedes important events, incessantly watching television with a stomach full of butterflies.” And he signed it: “Astênio Claustro Fobim” (Lethargic Cloistered Lazybones).

  On January 25, he turned forty, a great age to be recording with Sinatra—thirty years after his godfather had rented a used piano so that his sister Helena could learn to play. The piano, old, ugly, and missing some of its keys, was stored in the garage at his house in Ipanema, and Helena hadn’t been very interested in it—but he had. He subsequently put in thousands of hours of practice, another good many in awful nightclubs, and still more in studios. Things had gotten better. His keys now shone, and were all in their proper place—and there he was, in that hotel room, about to go and play (unfortunately, guitar!) for Sinatra. January 25 arrived, and Jobim was feeling too lethargic to do anything special for his fortieth birthday. Until producer Sonny Burke called to say they would start recording on January 30.

  “The last time I sang so softly was when I had laryngitis,” laughed Frank Sinatra.

  He had just finished singing “Dindi,” Jobim’s first song to be recorded. Before they started, he had done a warmup with his old friends “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” and “I Concentrate on You” to get used to that guitar beat, and to practice the way he intended to project on the rest of the record. In the forties, Sinatra had incited a revolution in popular music by softening the Bing Crosby style even further. Like no other singer of his generation, he naturally prolonged certain vowels (and even some consonants) and led one phrase into another as if they were glued together, apparently without the need to take a breath. Experts loved to cite his confession that he had learned that technique by watching his former boss, Tommy Dorsey, doing the same thing on trombone, night after night.

  But Jobim’s songs demanded something—in fact, something less—from him other than mere soft vocals. Stan Cornyn, author of the sleeve text for the original edition of the album, described the atmosphere of the first night of recording, as if each person in Warner’s Studio One on Sunset Strip were trying to “sshhhh” more softly than anyone else—including arranger and conductor Ogerman, the musicians, and the technicians. Recording alien noises in the background of Jobim’s songs, explained Cornyn, would be like “washing glasses in a concrete mixer.” The recording session was set for eight in the evening, but Sinatra arrived earlier so that he could go over the songs by himself. On greeting Jobim shortly afterward, Frank told him that “he would make an effort to restrain himself, so as not to rob bossa nova of its subtlety.”

  From the studio, separated from the rest of the world by a thick pane of glass, Sinatra could see the control booth filling with several people who, clearly, had about as much of a right to be there as Sammy Davis, Jr. at a Ku Klux Klan meeting. There was a list on the door containing the names of the people who were to be allowed entrance, and they weren’t on it. He sent one of his men to ask who the guy with the yachting cap was, and the one with the white mustache. He was told that they were “Brazilians” who were with the president of the recording company, Mick Martrand: one of them was Ray Gilbert; the other, Aloysio de Oliveira. Sinatra killed them with a look and they both cowered in a corner of the booth.

  “He has eyes of steel,” Jobim later remarked. “And he also has a gypsy’s eyes—he never forgets a face.”

  “Shut the door!” yelled Sinatra, before starting to sing. Raising his voice a semitone appeared to make any subordinate present recoil. It was popularly held that Sinatra wasn’t surr
ounded by “yes men”—when he said “no,” everyone around him also said “no.” A trombonist allowed the slide of his instrument to slip mere millimeters out of sync, and Sinatra noticed. The man practically dove under his music stand. In describing his memories of that night, Aloysio de Oliveira later said that, in Sinatra’s presence, everyone “was under the absolute control of his personality.” Is that a fact? There was at least one man there who appeared not to fall under the spell of The Voice: drummer Dom Um Romão, whom Jobim had asked to borrow from Astrud Gilberto in Chicago. Cornyn, on the album sleeve, described him as appearing to be “simultaneously alert and polished.” In Brazil, Dom Um was, together with Edison Machado, the most jazzy of the bossa nova drummers. There, accompanying Sinatra and Jobim, he muted the bass drum with a cushion and was playing as softly as Milton Banana had for João Gilberto—as he had been told to do.

  According to Aloysio de Oliveira, Jobim was “nervous,” which he admitted. It was a normal state of mind among musicians within earshot of Sinatra. But Jobim wasn’t that nervous.

  After all, he had already recorded several times with João Gilberto.

  Jobim ran into the Sunset-Marquis and invited everyone up to his suite. On the morning of the first day of recording, several of his friends had arrived from Brazil with Aloysio: Oscar Castro-Neves, Marcos Valle and his wife Ana Maria, and The Girls from Bahia. Jobim brought a tape from the studio containing the first recorded tracks: “Dindi,” “Corcovado,” and “Inútil paisagem.” They were all astounded. It had to be heard to be believed—and he was delighted. The victory was not just his, but for the whole of bossa nova as they had secretly conceived it, a million dreams ago.

  Sinatra was singing softly, as bossa nova required. So softly, in fact, that he could not be heard outside the walls of the studio. Meanwhile, Ipanema, in Rio, was filled with other sounds: a babel of protests during song festivals, physical fights for first place and for big money prizes, booing contests and cacophonous electric guitar music filling auditoriums—little music and too many arguments. Bossa nova, feeling like a fish out of water, picked up its stool and its guitar, and slipped away unnoticed.

  Fortunately, it had somewhere to go: the rest of the world.

  VinÌcius de Moraes, Dorival Caymmi, and Jobim

  Manchete Press

  Epilogue

  What Happened to Them

  Turn on the radio in New York, Montreal, Paris, Tokyo, or Sydney, and you’ll hear bossa nova. On disc, the piano of Antonio Carlos Jobim and the voice or guitar of João Gilberto live on aboard airplanes, on ships, in bars, elevators, and waiting rooms, and played live, in concert halls, theaters, school gymnasiums, stadiums, and even at the beach in Rio, for audiences of thousands. It has been going on this way for almost forty years. According to official figures, “Garota de Ipanema” (The Girl from Ipanema), by Jobim, runs cheek by jowl with “Yesterday,” by Lennon and McCartney, in terms of performances by the millions, and “Águas de março” (Waters of March), also by Jobim, was cited as one of the century’s ten best songs by critic Leonard Feather.

  A large part of the classic bossa nova production is available on CD in Japan and Europe—in the case of the latter, not always on authorized releases. Collectors from all over the world visit secondhand record stores in Rio and São Paulo in search of original albums, often looking for those with sleeves in perfect condition. Months later, those discs reappear on CD (with a sleeve, inside cover, and label identical to those of the album) in large stores in London or Barcelona. Bids at international auctions for the original album release of Canção do amor demais (Song for an Excessive Love) (Elizeth Cardoso’s record from 1958, on which João Gilberto’s guitar beat was heard for the first time, on the track “Chega de saudade” [No More Blues]) reached US $500, before it was re-released on CD in 1998.

  There isn’t a single American orchestra or vocalist from the classic era that hasn’t recorded bossa nova: Tony Bennett, Nat “King” Cole, Perry Como, Vic Damone, Billy Eckstine, Johnny Hartman, The Hi-Los, Jackie & Roy, Al Jarreau, Johnny Mathis, Mark Murphy, Bobby Short, Mel Tormé, Frank Sinatra (of course), Rosemary Clooney, Dardanelle, Doris Day, Blossom Dearie, Ella Fitzgerald, Eydie Gormé, Peggy Lee, Julie London, Carmen McRae, Helen Merrill, Anita O’Day, Sarah Vaughan, Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner, Earl Hines, Stéphane Grappelli, Percy Faith, Enoch Light, Billy Vaughn, Herb Alpert, Ray Anthony, The Ray Charles Singers, John Williams & the Boston Pops, you name ‘em. And contemporary singers like Susannah McCorkle, Karrin Allyson, Joyce Breach, Ann Burton, Rebecca Kilgore, Kristin Korb, Yvonne Roome, Daryl Sherman, and the Nancy Marano–Ed Montero duo have all included bossa nova standards in their repertoires. Others have incorporated a bossa nova beat into their renditions of American standards. Just about everyone on the face of the earth, bar Mother Teresa of Calcutta, seems to have recorded bossa nova at least once Fortunately, Antonio Carlos Jobim lived to witness almost all of this. Jobim died of a heart attack at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York on December 8, 1994, following surgery for bladder cancer, just a few weeks before his sixty-eighth birthday. For Brazilians, his death had the equivalent impact of “the felling of an entire forest,” as his friend, filmmaker Arnaldo Jabor, put it.

  In recent years, he had become a household name, as beloved on a worldwide scale as in his home country. Every year, he received tributes and honorary degrees in cities from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv to Tokyo, which allowed him to perform frequently with his own Banda Nova, a highly-polished instrumental-vocal ensemble composed of his sons and the sons of his friends. A college of music was founded in São Paulo in his honor. In 1992, the Escola de Samba Mangueira (The Mangueira Samba School) paraded in the Rio Carnival with its four thousand participants singing a samba in tribute to him—with the shy Jobim himself perched on top of a float, four meters above the ground, terrified of falling and receiving a standing ovation from the crowd in the stands.

  I spoke with him for the last time just two weeks before his death. Jobim was sitting at his usual table at the Plataforma restaurant, in the Leblon neighborhood of Rio, where he went every day. He appeared happy and carefree, although he was aware of the seriousness of his condition. Since the publication of the Brazilian edition of this book, in 1990, I had returned several times to his beautiful home in upper Jardim Botânico, with a breathtaking view of the beaches, mountains, and lagoons of Rio. In his last years, Jobim gradually slowed his work pace but sat at his piano daily (he had two grand pianos in his studio), hunched over a song for months. One of his last compositions was “Piano na Mangueira” (Mangueira Piano), the final rendezvous between traditional samba and bossa nova. His last recording might well have been the track “Fly Me to the Moon,” a duet with Frank Sinatra on the record Duets II.

  Like Jobim, many other big names in bossa nova have died in the last twenty years: lyricists Vinícius de Moraes, Ronaldo Bôscoli, and Marcos de Vasconcellos; producer Aloysio de Oliveira; female vocalists Maysa, Elizeth Cardoso, Nara Leão, and Elis Regina; male vocalists Dick Farney, Lúcio Alves, Agostinho dos Santos, Luiz Roberto (of Os Cariocas), Luiz Henrique, and Wilson Miranda; percussionists Milton Banana, Edison Machado, Victor Manga, and Rubens Bassini; pianists Luiz Eça and Tenório Jr.; organist Walter Wanderley; and maestro Radamés Gnatalli.

  On the other hand, many others are still active and some (following a period of ostracism brought about by the conquest of the Brazilian market by rock) have even relaunched their careers in the nineties. Guitarists Roberto Menescal and Baden Powell, composer Carlos Lyra, the vocal ensemble Os Cariocas, singers Alayde Costa and Claudette Soares, pianist Luis Carlos Vinhas, and many others have been working more than ever. The singer and actress Norma Bengell became a movie director. Pianists and composers João Donato and Johnny Alf have finally been recognized as two of the great pioneers of bossa nova and have received due tributes, recording prolifically. The composer and singer Marcos Valle was rediscovered in England and the Netherlands, where he has become a sensation. Singer Leny
Andrade frequently performs in New York. Many Brazilian musicians have now taken up permanent residency in the United States: pianists and arrangers Sérgio Mendes, Eumir Deodato, Oscar Castro-Neves, and Don Salvador; singers Astrud Gilberto and Flora Purim; arranger Moacyr Santos; percussionists Airto Moreira, Dom Um Romão, and Hélcio Milito; among many others. The quality of their work paved the way for innumerable Brazilian musicians, many of whom aren’t necessarily associated with bossa nova, like Tom Zé, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Gal Costa, to become known to the American public.

  João Gilberto returned to Brazil in 1980, after an eighteen-year absence. As is his style, he moved quietly into a hotel suite in Leblon, Rio de Janeiro, which he has since rarely left. He has never been sighted dining out, he never goes to bars, he doesn’t attend shows or go to the movies, and there is no record that he ever visits friends. Compared with his reclusive lifestyle, there are Tibetan monks who lead social lives worthy of being written up in the gossip columns. He has gone back to making great records, and when money is tight, to doing shows, at which he refuses (with good reason) to sing if the sound system isn’t up to his minutely exigent standards. On records and in his performances, he has managed to combine bossa nova classics with the hits that he heard over the loudspeakers of his home town, Juazeiro, in Bahia.