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

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Castro, Ruy, 1948–

  [Chega de saudade. English]

  Bossa nova: the story of the Brazilian music that seduced the world / by Ruy Castro.

  p. cm.

  Includes discography (p. 337) and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55652-494-3

  ISBN-10: 1-55652-494-3

  1. Bossa nova (Music)—Brazil—History and criticism. I. Title.

  ML3487.B7 C39 2000

  781.64—dc21

  00-031749

  Cover design: Joan Sommers Design

  Interior design: Mel Kupfer

  ©2000 by A Cappella Books and Ruy Castro

  All rights reserved

  First English-language edition

  Published by A Cappella Books, an imprint of

  Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, IL 60610

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55652-494-3

  ISBN-10: 1-55652-494-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2

  First published in Brazil by Companhia Das Letras

  ©1990 by Ruy Castro

  Translated by Lysa Salsbury

  Foreword ©2000 by Julian Dibbell

  This book is dedicated

  to my daughters,

  Pilar and Bianca.

  Note to the Reader

  At the end of this book a brief glossary will be found containing all musical and other Brazilian terms and names not defined in the text. For place names in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, see the maps on pages xxiii–xvi.

  Contents

  Introduction and Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Prologue: Juazeiro, 1948

  Part I: The Great Dream

  1. The Sounds That Came out of the Basement

  2. Hot Times at the Lojas Murray

  3. Battle of the Vocal Ensembles

  4. The Mountains, the Sun, and the Sea

  5. Torchy Copacabana

  6. The Gang

  7. In Search of the Lost Self

  8. The Arrival of the Beat

  9. One Minute and Fifty-Nine Seconds That Changed Everything

  10. “Desafinado” (Off-Key)

  Part II: The Long Holiday

  11. Bossa Nova Goes to School

  12. Colorful Harmonies

  13. Love, a Smile, and a Flower

  14. It’s Salt, It’s Sun, It’s South

  15. Bossa Nova for Sale

  16. “Garota de Ipanema” (The Girl from Ipanema)

  17. A Bite of the Apple

  18. The Armed Flower

  19. Shuttle Service

  20. The Diaspora

  21. The World as an Exit

  Epilogue: What Happened to Them

  A Select Bossa Nova Discography

  Glossary

  Index

  Introduction and Acknowledgments

  This is the story of bossa nova, and the young men and women who made the scene when they were between fifteen and thirty years old. It is also a book that aims to be as factual and objective as possible. It is clear that, as it was written by someone who has been listening to bossa nova music since it was given its name (someone who refused to conform when Brazil began to favor other exotic blends of music), a measured dose of enthusiasm has been added to the recipe—without the expression, I hope, of any bias, either in favor of or against, the path taken by any one participant. But human beings, like albums, have A and B sides, and the utmost effort was made to reveal both.

  In order to compile this historical narrative, firsthand information was sought from the protagonists, assistants, and key players of each event described herein, cited in the list of acknowledgments. All important information was checked and rechecked with more than one source. The nature of certain pieces of information made it impossible to categorize them as originating from an “interview which took place on day X, in city Y, with Such-and-Such,” because this would transgress the ethical precept of safeguarding the anonymity of the source. However, even when it appears simple to figure out the source or sources for any piece of information, the responsibility for divulging them is mine. Sources who didn’t mind being identified are mentioned within the body of the text.

  I think it important to note that I listened to all the recordings mentioned in the text, including extremely rare first records by Os Garotos da Lua (The Boys from the Moon), João Gilberto, João Donato, and Johnny Alf. I also had access to private tape recordings of João Gilberto, the first bossa nova performances in universities, the Bon Gourmet show, and a complete recording of the 1962 Carnegie Hall bossa nova concert.

  Writing this book was facilitated by my prior acquaintance with several bossa nova celebrities, but it would not have been possible without the generosity and interest of more than a hundred people. For eighteen months, from January 1989 to August 1990, they patiently participated in long interviews, providing information, ransacking drawers, clarifying dates, locating records, copying tapes, tearing photos out of their albums, drawing maps, and giving detailed descriptions of homes, bars, and boats. Many of these interviews required three or four sessions, and almost all of them were granted in person, in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo—but there were also hundreds of phone calls to Salvador, Juazeiro, Porto Alegre, Vitória, Belo Horizonte, and even Lisbon. A few interviewees were consulted only by telephone and, without even meeting me, provided valuable information. Others went to the trouble of replying to me in writing. My most heartfelt thanks to all of them. They were, in alphabetical order by last name:

  Elba and João Luiz de Albuquerque; the late Lúcio Alves; Walter Arruda; Badeco of Os Cariocas; Billy Blanco; the late Ronaldo Bôscoli; Candinho (José Cândido de Mello Mattos); Heitor Carrillo; Achilles Chirol; Walter Clark; Luís Cláudio; Carlos Conde; Umberto Contardi; Haroldo Costa; Cravinho (Aminthas Jorge Cravo); the late Ivon Curi; Sônia Delfino; Reinaldo Di Giorgio Jr.; João Donato; Chico Feitosa; Juvenal Fernandes; Laurinha Figueiredo; Luvercy Fiorini; Janio de Freitas; Moysés Fuks; Paulo Garcez; João Gilberto; Sheila and the late Luís (“Chupeta”) Gomes; Christina Gurjão; Oswaldo Gurzoni; Júlio Hungria; the late Antonio Carlos Jobim; Jorge Karam; Alfonso Lafita; the late Nara Leão; Jacques and Lídia Libion; Paulo Lorgus; Carlos Lyra; the late Edison Machado; Tito Madi; Mariza Gata Mansa; Emília and Pacífico Mascarenhas; João Mário Medeiros; Acyr Bastos Mello; Cyrene Mendonça; Roberto Menescal; André Midani; Miéle; Miúcha; Paulo Moura; Álvaro de Moya; Tião Neto; Paulo César de Oliveira; Laura and Chico Pereira; Carlos Alberto Pingarilho; Armando Pittigliani; Nilo Queiroz; José Domingos Rafaelli; Álvaro Ramos; Flávio Ramos; the late Alberto Ruschel; Wanda Sá; Sabá; Maurício Sherman; Jonas Silva; Walter Silva; Raul de Souza; Mário Telles; José Ramos Tinhorão; Marcos Valle; David Drew Zingg; Ziraldo.

  It is impossible to adequately express my gratitude to the following for the information they provided on the early João Gilberto: Belinha Abujamra, Miécio Caffé, Ieda Castiel, Clovis Moura, Merita Moura, Dr. Giuseppe Muccini, Dr. Dewilson de Oliveira, and Dona Dadainha de Oliveira Sá, all from Juazeiro, Bahia. Paulo Diniz, Dr. Alberto Fernandes, Glênio Reis, and the late Dona Boneca Regina told me about his days in Porto Alegre, and Oswaldo Carneiro, Henrique Fernando Cruz, and Maria do Carmo Queiroz provided decisive information on the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club.

  I also owe special thanks to Leon Barg, of Curitiba, for his fabulous collection of 78 r.p.m.s; Sérgio Cabral; Ricardo Carvalho, for providing his dedicated research on Vinícius de Moraes; Al
mir Chediak; Isabel Leão Diégues, for allowing access to her mother Nara’s files; and Arnaldo de Souteiro, who seems to know everything there is to know about the international development of bossa nova. And many thanks to friends like Rita Kauffman and the dear, late Giovani Mafra e Silva, whose help in Rio was invaluable to this book, as well as to Alice Sampaio and Sueli Queiroz, in São Paulo, for many personal reasons.

  Foreword

  “Stop telling stories,” said Dionne Warwick in the midst of a 1966 visit to Rio de Janeiro. “Everybody knows it was Burt Bacharach who invented bossa nova.” She actually believed this, evidently, but don’t be too quick to snicker. Her notion of the music’s origins may have been all wet, but at least she had one.

  For the rest of us Americans, as a rule, bossa nova is a music laced with meaning but void of history. We locate it historically, if we do, not within any context of its own, but as a scene in one of our favorite pop-cultural narratives—a brief Brazilian seduction on the eve of a much more momentous British invasion. In the role of seductress: “The Girl from Ipanema,” composed by Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim, sung with unnerving cool by Astrud Gilberto, fortified by Stan Getz’s throaty sax, and anchored by the telegraphically syncopated guitar of Astrud’s husband, bossa nova icon João Gilberto. Hurling itself to the top of the charts in early 1964, that brilliant single charmed the U.S. public into one last fling with jazzy sophistication before Beatlemania decreed the reign of rock’s vulgar beauty. It was a melancholy farewell to Camelot, to the pop ideal of urbane elegance, and inevitably, to bossa nova’s own short moment at the center of our attention.

  That’s not to say Americans didn’t fall hard for that sweet, soft sound. In fact, the bossa nova craze in the United States was longer and deeper than snapshot memories suggest. The new Brazilian sound had, after all, been making major incursions into the American pop scene for years before the Brits made theirs: the soundtrack from the popular 1959 Franco-Brazilian film Black Orpheus, for instance, gave American audiences an early taste of bossa nova’s gliding groove, and Getz and Charlie Byrd’s 1962 hit version of the bossa anthem “Desafinado” upped the dosage. In the wake of Getz’s phenomenally successful collaborations, bossa nova records became an obligatory pit stop on the career path of every sixties pop singer from Elvis (“Bossa Nova Baby”) to Eydie Gormé (“Blame It on the Bossa Nova”). Jazz musicians got the message, too. Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Zoot Sims, Quincy Jones, Herbie Mann, Cannonball Adderley, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Wes Montgomery, George Shearing, Oscar Peterson—all made bossa nova albums, many of them perhaps only too aware that the warmly inviting Brazilian import represented cerebral modern jazz’s last chance at staying on the pop radar.

  But by the end of the sixties there was no denying that the chance had passed. Rock and the counterculture it rode in on had decisively staked their claim on popular music’s future, and from where they stood bossa nova could only look like a desperate rearguard action, a last grasp for relevance by a doomed culture of Rat Packers and other hep-talking Mr. Joneses. Left for dead, bossa nova instead faded quietly and imperishably into the background. Without ever quite drawing attention to itself, “The Girl from Ipanema” spent the next few decades becoming one of the most-performed songs in the history of recording, rivaled only by the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” Bossa nova was everywhere, if you listened for it. Its breathy, minimalist vocalisms, arty chord changes, and sly, shuffling beat simply slipped into pop’s global circulatory system and became what they have remained: a free-floating signifier of intercontinental savoir faire.

  We hear it at a distance now, with ironic affection or with distracted pleasure. It is a mood for us, a namelessly familiar scent of knowingness and calm, and if it even occurs to us that it comes from someplace, the place we think of first is not a real one. It’s that imaginary world of jet-setting, highball-drinking ease that went up in a Chesterfield haze when the sixties caught fire.

  This book is not about that place. For Brazilians, bossa nova comes from another lost world—a world far more historically concrete for them, and one whose legacy they have never, to this day, ceased striving to come to terms with. The effort continues here, with clarity and wit. In these pages, Ruy Castro has rendered a rich and engaging portrait of the world that invented bossa nova, and no one who reads this book can fail to come away with a deepened sense of what—and how much—that invention has meant to Brazil.

  Still, accustomed as we are to hearing bossa nova as background music, American readers may struggle at first to see in it the depth that Castro does. You may find yourself wondering just how such pretty little tunes could have shaken up Brazil’s popular culture as much as they evidently did—which is as much as rock shook up ours. You may wonder just what set of historical circumstances could have conspired to place a music so radically quiet at the heart of Brazil’s noisiest cultural debates. You may look for explanations, and you will find them, ultimately, in the sheer aesthetic drama of the story Castro has to tell. But it couldn’t hurt to know a little bit of the background, too, before you start.

  In Brazil, the late 1950s—during which the bossa nova movement emerged from the nightclubs and apartments of middle-class Rio and thrived—were a time of unprecedented and almost painfully precarious national optimism. After decades of coups, dictatorships, and civil wars, the country at last had a democratically elected, technocratically oriented president in office, the energetic Juscelino Kubitschek. The economy was relatively healthy, and an ambitious program of national modernization was underway. Brazil’s first domestic car, the tiny Romi-Isetta, was tooling down the highways. A brand-new capital city, the dazzlingly modernist Brasilia, was rising from the red dirt of the country’s hitherto desolate central plains. Brazil, it seemed, stood poised to finally leave its perennial semidevelopment behind and step into a future of sleek, high-capitalist urbanity.

  And nothing proclaimed the imminence of this change like bossa nova. Its serenely syncretic style—turning classic samba into an almost Mondrian esque construction of clean, angular melodic lines and daringly off-kilter rhythms—was the most self-assured bid for modernity Brazil’s musical culture had ever produced.

  Which was saying a lot. For if the country had long been an economic laggard, in musical terms it had always more than held its own. Samba—rooted in a mix of Afro-Brazilian party rhythms and nineteenth-century ballroom dances like the polka, the tango, and the habanera—had by the thirties grown into an advanced music-industrial infrastructure easily as productive as its American counterpart. Boisterous, march-step sambas moved the crowds at Carnival time, while the rest of the year was ruled by “samba-songs” and other forms of balladry, sung by suavely natural voices like radio star Orlando Silva’s and shaped by the refined yet lively sensibilities of orchestra leaders like Radamés Gnattali and the legendary Pixinguinha. Kept percolating by steady influences from the American pop machine and the richly musical Brazilian hinterlands, midcentury commercial samba was a graceful, cosmopolitan product—a splendid example of modern pop-cultural design.

  And even so, when bossa nova hit the airwaves, it did so with the force of epiphany. Young urbanites, in particular, heard the first bossa nova single—João Gilberto’s classic 1958 version of Tom Jobim’s “Chega de Saudade”—as a kind of annunciation. Jobim’s melodic sophistication, in itself, was startling enough. The song’s labyrinth of unfamiliar, postbop intervals sounded beautifully simple and yet, as at least one radio call-in contest proved, was tough for even the hippest young listeners to reproduce. But what really caught people’s attention was the gently dizzying interplay between Gilberto’s voice and his guitar. Shamelessly unadorned by vibrato or emotion, that voice danced with breathtaking precision around the quiet beat of the guitar, which in turn danced unpredictably around the conventional rhythms of the samba. A generation of Brazilians listened raptly. The record sounded like a message from an undiscovered country, daring them to come discover
it.

  And come they did. But the Brazil conjured up by Kubitschek’s bold initiatives, Brasilia’s bold shapes, and bossa nova’s bold sounds never quite materialized. When Kubitschek left office in 1960, the inflationary side effects of his big-ticket projects were already getting out of hand. More significantly, the broad hopes of improvement that had flowered during his term were running head-on into the hard wall of Brazil’s bleak class structure, leading precipitously toward open confrontation between reformist and conservative political groups. When it finally came, the confrontation was over before it began: in early 1964, just as “The Girl from Ipanema” was cresting the U.S. charts, the Brazilian armed forces shut down the civilian government, establishing a military regime that was to last another twenty years.

  By then, the bossa nova movement had effectively run its course. Its most important figures—Gilberto and Jobim—continued to work the territory they had mapped out together at the start, and both went on to produce some of their finest music in the years that followed. But the rest of bossa nova’s original coterie—younger musicians like Nara Leão, Carlos Lyra, Ronaldo Bôscoli, and Roberto Menescal, who had caught the wave that “Chega de Saudade” set in motion—dissolved into carping factions of radicalized folkies and smug aesthetes, caught up in the political crosswinds of the moment and in the creative impasses any artistic breakthrough ultimately reaches. They’d lost touch with the energy that made the movement move, and so had Brazilian audiences, who turned their attention to newer sounds—among them, not surprisingly, a homegrown version of rock, known locally as ye-ye-ye.

  But if it no longer made sense to speak of bossa nova in anything but the past tense, that’s not to say it was no longer spoken of. The anonymous retirement that awaited it in the rest of the world was not to be its fate at home. Various aesthetic camps disputed the right to carry its banner, all with more or less legitimate claims to do so. But in the end, the group that ultimately preached most passionately in bossa nova’s name was in many ways the most improbable of its disciples.