Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (23 page)

Luís Telles took João Gilberto all around Porto Alegre wearing a very short, brown Prince of Wales overcoat which he took from his closet and gave to him. He started by taking him to the Clube da Chave, the first respectable nightclub in the city—that is, one that couldn’t be called a brothel. In fact, it was the hangout of artists and carousers, in Rua Castro Alves, with a name that was obviously borrowed from its famous Rio counterpart. On his first night at the Clube da Chave, João Gilberto offered to accompany a curvaceous Argentine singer named Noélia Noel, in the famous bolero “Juguete” (Toy). João Gilberto riddled the bolero with so many different harmonies that the singer was delighted. Ovídio Chaves, the club’s owner, who wrote the popular “Fiz a cama na varanda” (I Made My Bed on the Porch) was unable to resist, and gave him a key to the place. Now João Gilberto had a fixed place to hang his hat every night in Porto Alegre.

Despite not being famous (in fact, until then, no one had heard of him), João Gilberto changed the life of the city, or at least its nightlife. The music-lovers of Porto Alegre, used to going to bed early, started to adapt their schedules to his. The Clube da Chave became a mandatory meeting place, because at any moment, Joãozinho might make an appearance with his guitar—and this could happen at, say, three in the morning. But he didn’t always sing. Sometimes he just talked—and how!—to a respectful and attentive group. Within a short time, some of the regulars were inspired to swap their harsh
gaucho
accent, which sounded like the revving of an engine, for a poor affectation of the relaxed Bahian dialect, in order to try and speak like him. There were even those who started to think like him, which meant firing off a series of mystical, poetic, “deep,” and generally incoherent utterances.

Influenced by Luís Telles, everyone in the city started calling him Joãozinho. For a while, he went back to
being
Joãozinho, as he was in Bahia. He bumped into two friends from Juazeiro, the
gaúchas
Belinha and Ieda, who had returned to their hometown. His sudden congeniality with both people he knew and people he didn’t was unlimited and he delighted even the children. On the day he turned twenty-four, June 10, 1955, his new and many friends in Porto Alegre threw a surprise birthday party for him. They took him to the house of Mrs. Boneca Regina, an elderly lady who already thought of herself as his mother, and as he walked into the darkened living room, they switched on the lights and sang “Happy Birthday to You.” Joãozinho was touched beyond belief, and could only say “Thank you so
much, thank you so much.” He had never felt as loved in all his life—and had no idea what he had done to deserve so much affection from a group of strangers.

No one understood why, but, with the exception of “Solidão” (Solitude) by Tom Jobim and Alcides Fernandes, which he heard on the radio with Nora Ney, João Gilberto would never complete a song at the Clube da Chave —he always stopped in the middle. (And he never even started “Fiz a cama na varanda” [I Made My Bed on the Porch], although doing so might have flattered the owner.) One night, he explained why: he didn’t like his guitar, and besides, it was a steel-string. If he could, he planned to get a new guitar with nylon strings, which were becoming popular. The Clube da Chave leapt into action and, under the organization of Luís Telles and two other friends, the lawyers Paulo Parreira and Alberto Fernandes, they took up a collection and gave him the new instrument.

On the night of the formal presentation, João Gilberto thanked everyone profusely, strummed a few chords and—oh!—decided he didn’t like the guitar. “I don’t know, there’s something about it …,” he tried to explain.

The Clube da Chave patron did not take offense. The following day, they returned to the store and exchanged it for another, which João himself picked out. With the new guitar, he began a veritable marathon of performances at the homes of local society families and at the Bar do Treviso in the public market square. Telles also took him on Adroaldo Guerra’s show on Rádio Gaúcha and promoted a concert of his at the Clube do Comércio. This all inspired João to perform at a dance at the Bento Gonçalves club, singing with a local group. He was introduced as “an artist from Rádio Tupi, in Rio,” but that only yielded polite applause. It would have been a different matter had he been with Rádio Nacional.

A few months before, in Rio, if he had been contracted for what he believed he was worth and sold at market price, the purchaser would have suffered an enormous loss. In the meantime, however, his value had started to appreciate. Luís Telles introduced him to the old pianist and professor Armando de Albuquerque, one of the jewels of
gaucho
music, a serious man who was friends with Radamés Gnatalli. Albuquerque, who wasn’t someone who usually sang people’s praises, listened to the young man and was enraptured. He perceived that he was distressed, in search of something modern that he himself was unable to define. João Gilberto would visit him at his home in Rua Lobo Gonçalves, and the two of them would play for hours, each discovering with his own instrument the delicate beauties of Lamartine Babo and Francisco Matoso’s waltz, “Eu sonhei que estavas tão linda” (I Dreamed You Were So Beautiful). Or João Gilberto would ask Albuquerque to play, innumerable times, “Canção da Índia” (Song of India).
He was astonished to learn that it was a composition by the Russian Rimsky-Korsakov. He had always thought that it had been written by Tommy Dorsey.

For Joãozinho, there didn’t seem to be anything else to do in Porto Alegre, other than be the beneficiary of local affection. However, even there, stories were beginning to circulate that would haunt him forever. It was said, for example, that the chambermaid who cleaned his room at the Majestic Hotel was constantly finding tangerine peel under his bed. No matter how often she threw them away, they would reappear the next day. Joãozinho explained to her that he had been putting them there in order to attract ants “to keep him company.” When other stories of the same kind began to circulate, part of the fascination he inspired started to become folklore. Luís Telles realized it was time to take him away from Porto Alegre.

Telles had to go back to Rio to try and reorganize the Quitandinha Serenaders, and he couldn’t leave Joãozinho in Porto Alegre. At the same time, he didn’t want him back in Rio again, exposed to the same old temptations and liable to sink back into the depression that had poisoned him. He knew that Joãozinho had an older sister—Dadainha—living in a city called Diamantina, in Minas Gerais. Dadainha’s husband, Péricles, was a highway engineer and had been transferred there to work on the construction of a highway. From what Joãozinho had told him, Dadainha was the only relative he had whom he could actually listen to. She would be the ideal person to put him up for a while, with the added advantage that, as she lived in Minas Gerais, his family in Bahia would not pester him.

Diamantina, in the west-central part of Minas Gerais, had been in the headlines recently as the hometown of the Social Democratic Party candidate for the Presidency of the Republic, Juscelino Kubitschek. Kubitschek had everything he needed to win. His primary adversary, General Juarez Távora, of the National Democratic Union, lost votes every time he made a speech. It would be a fun place to spend some time. Now all Telles had to do was to convince Joãozinho.

To his surprise, Joãozinho liked the idea. They would go to Rio and, as soon as he felt up to the journey, he would leave for Diamantina. When he left Porto Alegre, Joãozinho also left some broken hearts behind—among them, at least one married one.

Luís Telles took João Gilberto back to Rio and set him up in his apartment in Lido. On the ground floor of the building there was a popular bar, O Ponto Elegante (The Chic Meeting Place), but João Gilberto was not one of its regular
customers. One month was enough for his happiness in Porto Alegre to go up in smoke, and he returned to awakening compassion in whoever saw him. And, inevitably, he went back to making purchases in Lapa. In order to prevent the situation from continuing in perpetuity, Telles was emphatic in telling him that he should go and stay with Dadainha, in Diamantina, as soon as possible. Joãozinho got the message.

Telles gave him some money, and he went to the old bus station in Praça Mauá, bought a ticket, and got on a bus—which ended up going to the wrong city. The ticket he had bought was for Lavras, also in Minas Gerais, and he only realized his mistake when he arrived in that city, more than two hundred and fifty miles from where he wanted to be, and found out that no one knew his relatives Péricles and Dadainha. He had also forgotten to bring his sister’s address.

But he didn’t give up, and arrived in Diamantina in September. Dadainha was more surprised to see him than if Juscelino Kubitschek himself had knocked on her door. Joãozinho had neglected to write to her to inform her of his arrival. Dadainha had just had a baby, daughter Marta Maria, which usually requires one’s exclusive attention. But the fragmented state of her brother’s emotional health was so apparent that she took him in with all the affection she could muster. She didn’t know what to do to relieve his depression, and Joãozinho was unable to adequately translate his distress into words. But she gave him what she had to give: a home, food, love, and what would afterward prove to be essential, peace and seclusion. It was what he needed to get his head together.

João Gilberto spent eight months in mountainous Diamantina, until May 1956. No one ever saw him on the street, but the city was not unaware of his presence. Gossipmongers commented that there was a “weird guy” at Péricles and Dadainha’s house, who spent the entire day in his pajamas, playing the guitar, and didn’t even venture out onto the sidewalk. Juscelino won the election, there had been a fabulous street party in Diamantina, and the “weird guy” hadn’t even gone outside to take a look at what was going on. Joãozinho didn’t just stay in the house, he locked himself in his bedroom with his guitar and only emerged to go to the bathroom, where he would also closet himself for hours—with his guitar. His sister took his meals up to wherever he was. In the early morning, he would be seen tiptoeing down the corridor in his socks, on the way to Marta Maria’s bedroom, to sing and play his guitar softly next to the child’s crib.

During that whole time, only one person in Diamantina decided to go looking for him, and it wasn’t exactly a local: a young student from Belo Horizonte, very tall and thin, named Pacífico Mascarenhas. His parents were the owners of a powerful textile industry in the region and he was there on
vacation, sorely missing performing with his musical group in Belo Horizonte. When he heard about the “guy who plays guitar,” Pacífico thought he might have found a soul mate and went to Dadainha’s house. She called Joãozinho in his room, and to her surprise, he came into the living room to meet the young man. They talked for a while, and João Gilberto played a few things, but did not sing. The exchange yielded nothing. Pacífico left, promising to come back, and never did. (Two years later, he met João Gilberto again in Rio, but he encountered a completely different person.)

A maelstrom of thoughts buzzed around in João Gilberto’s head during his exile in the mountains. His life started to pass before his very eyes, like a movie, with a soundtrack that had been written by the best and most ambitious musicians of his generation. He spent the first weeks in silence, rehashing old memories that hurt at the slightest touch of his mind. It was apparent by the anguish etched in his face, which he could not hide from those who saw him. But something ignited a spark in him because suddenly he started playing his guitar day and night, shut up in his room, as if seized by some kind of obsession. At first, nothing he played made much sense, he would repeat the same chord a zillion times, each one almost perfectly identical to the next, except when he added his voice.

He discovered that the acoustics in the bathroom were ideal for listening to both himself and the guitar. All those floor and wall tiles, infused for years with steam and humidity, created a kind of echo chamber—the chords reverberated and he could measure their intensity. If he sang more softly, without vibrato, he could speed up or slow down at will, creating his own tempo. To do this, he needed to change the way he projected, using his nose more than his mouth. His mind was like a radio whose dial was spinning apparently at random, tuning in to everything he heard and loved. The natural enunciation of Orlando Silva and Sinatra. Dick Farney’s velvet tone and style of breathing. The timbre of trombonist Frank Rosolino with Kenton’s orchestra. The soft enunciation of the Page Cavanaugh trio, Joe Mooney, and Jonas Silva. The colorful harmonies of the vocal ensembles—how was it possible to use one’s voice to alter or complete the guitar’s harmony? Lúcio Alves’s phrasing—only Lúcio would phrase backward, delaying himself. It was possible to speed up and slow down in relation to the rhythm, as long as the beat remained constant. Johnny Alf’s syncopated beat on the piano and, particularly, João Donato’s on the accordion—how would that sound on the guitar? The new João Gilberto was being reborn from those experiences.