Recently I went in search of a recording I remembered from almost fifty years ago. It was a collection of bossa nova tunes sung by the inimitable João Gilberto.
In 1976 I first met Ron Moore and we instantly struck up a friendship through our mutual love of music. Several times a week, Ron would show up at my door with a stack of records he wanted me to hear – I also had music in my collection I wanted to play for him, and that was a great way to learn new music.
It was on one of those nights that Ron handed me a recording and asked me to cue side one, track one – such great days when you listened to a full side of music at a time. No CDs back then.
The music started and I heard this very soft and dark voice accompanied by a guitar and bass. That evening, I learned about João Gilberto and my love for his subtle and thoughtful treatment of his own songs and those of Antonio Carlos Jobim was born.
Gilberto is often declared the father of bossa nova, a dance style which, in a sense, grew out of samba. As musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky points out, “Camargo Guarnieri gave a perfect stylization of urban samba in his third ‘Dansa Brasileira,’ otherwise known as the ‘Dansa Negra.’”
It all measures out when we see that Guarnieri was born in 1907, Jobim twenty years later, and finally Gilberto in 1931. Among these three we find the foundation of bossa nova.
Composer Carlos Franzetti ruminated on the genre during a recent conversation in our studio.
“I would say, yeah, the 60s were when bossa nova became a mainstream basically,” said Franzetti. “That was around the Kennedy administration. It was something that also, Jacqueline Kennedy had a lot to do with... they introduced a lot of bossa nova music into their parties and things like that, and it made the vehicle easier for people like Jobim and João Gilberto and Edu Lobo and later on, Ivan Lins, to become very popular. Also their songs were translated, especially Jobim songs by Gene Lees with very good translations of songs like ‘Corcovado,’ which was translated into ‘Quiet Nights and Quiet Stars’ and ‘Girl From Ipanema,’ of course, and later on, made famous with two albums that Frank Sinatra recorded.”
It's not all about the dance, though we do often hear the songs of Gilberto and Jobim played as instrumentals. However, that denies us the sensation of hearing Portuguese, yes, that other language used in Latin America, almost exclusively in Brazil.
This posed a problem for the Brazilian songwriters wanting to extend their music into every corner of the Americas: South, Central and North. The infectious rhythms carried the music outside of Brazil, but still, for those listeners wanting songs in the language they understood, some were feeling left out. Granted, one might point out the same disadvantage for songs in Spanish, but in truth, Spanish has become the United States’ second language. How many people in the U.S. speak Portuguese?
Gene Lees, one of our best writers about the music Alec Wilder considered “American Popular Song,” struck up a friendship with Gilberto and Jobim.
In Singer and the Song II, Lees writes: “The door opened, and a very handsome young man stood in the light from his living room. Jobim was then thirty-four. He invited me in.”
Lees was somewhat surprised at Jobin's cordial welcome – he had a reputation of being aloof.
Continues Lees: “João Gilberto sat on the sofa, curled around his guitar, singing…”
This was the beginning of a long partnership with Jobin as Lees was encouraged to write English translations for select Jobim songs. Out of this we can take any number of Jobim's or Gilberto's bossa novas, in Portuguese or English, into our Great Americas Songbook.
