Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (2 page)

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.

Led by two extremely articulate young singer-songwriters, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, the late-sixties pop movement known as
tropicalismo
(or
Tropicália
) seemed at first glance to fly in the face of everything bossa nova was about. Voraciously eclectic, the
tropicalistas
threw rural accordion music, outdated torch songs, jingles, Stockhausen, and the howl of machinery into their mix of sounds, often combining them to jarring effect in a single song. Most provocative of all, they even took up the electric guitars of
ye-ye-ye
, despised as imperialist noise by their artistic peers.
Tropicália
was, in short, an affront to the decorum bossa nova had made an art of, and it was booed off more than one stage by audiences who took it upon themselves to defend bossa nova’s lingering standards of good taste.

And yet, in interview after interview, Veloso and Gil insisted they had come not to bury bossa nova but to carry on its modernizing work. Although they regularly cited the Beatles as an influence, they invoked more often the name of João Gilberto, in whose voice and guitar they still heard the sounds of an undiscovered country. For them, though, that country was no longer the Brazil of a space-age, First World future. It was a Brazil that looked its contradictions squarely in the face—its sophistication and its barbarity, its First
World dreams and its Third World lives—and made something beautifully, arrestingly true out of them. What the
tropicalistas
were doing, as they saw it, was simply taking the quiet clash of realities in Gilberto’s hypermodern roots music and amplifying it. They were taking the suave humor in the Gilberto/Jobim hit “Desafinado” (Off-Key)—a winking apology for those whose sense of harmony diverges from the norm—and turning it into a celebration of cultural dissonance in all its forms. Or as Veloso once put it, in a song critical of those who would reduce bossa nova to a set of formal rules: “The truth is that we learned from João forever to be out of tune.”

As it happens, the
tropicalistas’
reinvention of bossa nova is one chapter of the story that you won’t find in this book. But just knowing something of its terms may add to the pleasure of reading what is rightly
Bossa Nova
’s heart, soul, and narrative backbone: the unlikely rise of João Gilberto from hopeless dreamer to his current stature as one of the great geniuses of pop-song history. Castro deftly mythologizes the five-year-long
via crucis
of nervous breakdowns and quasi-homelessness that led to Gilberto’s discovery of the sacred beat, shaping it into a saga that thrills all on its own. But its thrills are that much deeper if you picture Gilberto pursuing not just a beat, or a style, but a more perfect feel for the shape of an imperfect modernity.

That, after all, is something American listeners can surely relate to. And that, finally, is what this book teaches us: not just who
really
invented bossa nova, but why we need to start hearing it as more than just a mood. Lord knows we’re ready to. Rock’s claim on the future of popular music expired some time ago, and amid the scramble of new, competing claims, there are inevitably some that look to the immediate pre-rock past for inspiration. Thus it is that lounge lovers, jazz revanchists, and other kindred camps, God bless them all, have begun the long-overdue rethinking of bossa nova’s banishment to the background. But the process remains far from complete. For while there’s nothing wrong with loving bossa nova for its leopard-print retro charms or as a souvenir from jazz’s last real brush with mass appeal, we’ll never really know what bossa nova can offer us until we find out what it offered Brazilians. And that, perhaps, is nothing more or less than what the last century’s greatest art usually offered: the bumpy contradictions of modern life made plain and, if we’re lucky, beautiful.

Julian Dibbell

March 2000

Juazeiro, 1948

The loudspeaker that hung from one of the posts on Rua do Apolo in Juazeiro, Bahia, played “Naná,” sung by Orlando Silva, at least three times a day. The record sleeve said 1948, and “Naná,” a slow foxtrot by Custódio Mesquita and Geysa Bôscoli, was an old hit from 1940. But Mr. Emicles, the owner of the sound system, wasn’t particularly concerned about playing the latest music sensations. He played the records he liked to listen to through his speakers, and only now and again would he make concessions to the enduring patience of his audience—the entire population of Juazeiro—and go to Salvador to buy new records. Fortunately, Mr. Emicles’s taste in music was as wide and varied as a rainbow. Among the featured attractions in his repertoire were “Song of India” by Tommy Dorsey; “Caravan” by Duke Ellington; “Siboney” by Gregorio Barrios; “Musica proibita” (Forbidden Music) by Carlo Buti; “Ménilmontant” by Charles Trenet; “Cambalache” by Francisco Canaro; and “Dream Lover” by Jeanette McDonald. No radio station in Juazeiro—if Juazeiro had had a radio station—could have done better.

And, of course, Mr. Emicles’s program also included a lot of Brazilian music: “Bolinha de papel” (Little Paper Ball) by Anjos do Inferno (Hell’s Angels); “Onde o céu azul é mais azul” (Where the Blue Sky Is Bluest) by Francisco Alves; “Boogie-woogie na favela” (Boogie-Woogie in the Slums) by Cyro Monteiro; “Ave-Maria no morro” (Ave Maria on the Hill) by Trio de Ouro (Gold Trio); “A primeira vez” (The First Time) by Orlando Silva; “Adeus, batucada” (Goodbye, Batucada) by Carmen Miranda, and “O samba da minha terra” (Samba of My Land) by Dorival Caymmi. Except for brief intervals for the transmission of mass, and commercial announcements, Mr. Emicles’s squeaky sound system filled the air in Juazeiro all day long with music of all genres, from all eras, which was torture for some—especially at night, when Mr. Emicles booked a local band to play live.