Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (32 page)

After all, it was a living. But it didn’t matter what he played, because whatever the genre of music, Donato played for himself. Because of this, he drove double bass players and percussionists crazy, because they were unable to accompany him. His unsurpassed infatuation with Kenton made it difficult for him to be understood, which in turn caused problems with the awkward combos with which he was forced to play. It’s hardly surprising that he felt much more at ease playing in jam sessions, when he could get together with other musicians who were tuned to the same frequency—like at saxophonist Paulo Moura’s house in Tijuca, where he drank innocent
guaraná
, or at the home of the industrialist Everardo Magalhães Castro, in Leblon, where he drank Scotch. And especially during late nights at the Plaza, after the tiresome paying customers had gone home and only the musicians were left, playing and singing for one another for free.

It wasn’t as if Donato, contrary to most of his colleagues, experienced many financial difficulties. By all accounts, he had managed to convince his father that he was a lost cause and had softened him up, because he continued living at home with his family in Tijuca and never lacked a roof over his head, food, or clean clothes. This allowed him to become the most well-rested professional in Rio nightlife, at a time when young men like Baden Powell ran from one Copacabana nightclub to another with their guitars, trying to get in to play somewhere in order to earn enough money for their return fare to the suburbs.

It was a shame that the erratic nature of his career prevented him from settling in one place and establishing the kind of success for himself that was consistent with the reputation he had acquired among his colleagues. But it was even worse that perhaps thousands of his innovations as a musician were lost at those foolish dances, or at graduation parties where nobody was paying any attention. Almost nothing he played during that time in his life found its way into a record, and even became difficult to find second-hand. Paulo Serrano, the owner of Sinter, did everything he could, in his own way. In 1953, the year Donato recorded “Eu quero um samba” (I Want a Samba) with Os Namorados, Serrano convinced him to make an instrumental record of the song “Invitation,” by Bronislau Kaper, which was heard, amid sobs, on screen in the film
Invitation
, a Metro tearjerker starring Dorothy McGuire and the suave Van Johnson. Donato picked up his accordion and said:

“OK. Where’s the sheet music?”

“What sheet music?” replied Serrano. “Go to the movie theater and see the film.”

Donato went to the Metro-Passeio, in Cinelándia, and stayed for three consecutive showings of
Invitation
. During the second showing, he was no longer moved by the drama of the dying Dorothy being courted by the pious Van, who was paid to do so by her father. Ladies in the audience would dissolve into tears by his side, while Donato closed his eyes to hear “Invitation.” By the third showing, he was bursting with laughter at Van’s shameless role.

He learned the song and recorded the 78 r.p.m. (with “Tenderly” on the other side), producing that combination of accordion and clarinet that he had heard on Ernie Felice’s records. The end result was exceptional, not because it was a nineteen-year-old Brazilian musician, but because Ernie Felice himself could not have done any better. What happened to the record from there? Nothing. His friends, which included João Gilberto, Johnny Alf, Badeco, and a few other lucky people heard it. They were amazed, but their opinion was not shared by the masses.

In 1954, Paulo Serrano dragged Donato into the studio once again, this time to record his trio, preferably a piece of Brazilian music. Donato swapped his accordion for the piano and on one side played “Se acaso você chegasse” (If by Chance You Arrive), by Lupicínio Rodrigues, with an authoritarian air that must have frightened more than one professional pianist. Taking advantage of Paulo Serrano’s momentary distraction, on the flip side he recorded a song entitled “Long Ago and Far Away” by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin. Once again, the masses weren’t particularly moved. In 1956, Odeon allowed him to record an entire ten-inch album, “Chá dançante” (Tea-Time Dancing Party), produced by Jobim. But going by the record’s content (“Farinhada” [Manioc Flour Manufacturing], “Comigo é assim” [It’s Like That with Me] and “Peguei um ita no norte” [I Boarded a Ship in the North]), the tea must have been made of night-shade and the dance had to have been a
forró
. Donato must have concluded then and there that those records were a waste of time, because from that point on until the end of the decade, he only went into studios for the sole purpose of giving João Gilberto a fright.

That is, except for one occasion, and that happened when he recorded two tracks (this time playing the trombone) on the album
Dance conosco
(Dance with Us), released by Copacabana in 1958. It was a record with a dreadful cover and title that had nothing to do with the great music recorded on it. The tracks were a fantastic mambo, modestly entitled “Mambinho” (Little Mambo), and an instrumental version of his and João Gilberto’s samba, “Minha saudade” (My Saudade). His arrangements were so surprising that many people began to ask how many cards Donato had up his sleeves, should he decide to keep them rolled up.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t work hard, when he did work, that is. But at the same time he was developing as an instrumentalist and arranger, he was also living
up to his reputation as a crazy and irresponsible person, and all for the same old reasons: absences, tardiness, and an excess of additives. Bebop musicians also had the same image, but for some unknown reason it was more noticeable in the West Coast jazz players. The same thing happened with Donato, who probably wasn’t any crazier than the others, like the great trombonist Ed Maciel, or João Gilberto himself. Donato’s dubious fame reached its peak when he worked with Copinha’s orchestra at the Copacabana Palace. His tardiness was so frequent that, had the conductor docked his pay for each time he showed up late, Donato would have been in the red by the end of the month. So, instead of firing him (which any insensitive conductor would have done with any normal musician), Copinha found the perfect solution: for every two occasions on which Donato was late, only one was deducted from his salary. His colleagues adored him, because his fines were thrown into a collection box and then evenly distributed among the other musicians. Copinha wouldn’t make do without his accordion, even if only on rare and happy occasions.

Donato himself decided to give up the accordion to concentrate on piano, and merely played the trombone as a hobby. The story goes that he could no longer stand to drag his accordion around the nightclub circuit because this obliged him to avoid having a last drink, for fear of leaving it someplace. On one of those nights, he left the accordion in an unlocked car and it was stolen. He felt no compulsion to buy another and, as there was a piano in every nightclub he worked in, the dilemma was solved.

Donato might also have recounted that he stopped playing the accordion because he had exhausted the instrument’s possibilities, while the piano seemed to be an endless source of harmonic possibilities. And he wanted to be able to explore them, if he had somewhere to do so. He was becoming a musician whose head was somewhere up on the jazz map, but whose feet were firmly planted in the Caribbean, and whose hands had no preference for the music from any particular Brazilian region, contrary to the urban Rio thing his colleagues were into. This, as well as his reputation for being unreliable, began to shrink the market in which he was able to work to the size of a thimble. In 1959, no one wanted to hire him, and he even started finding it hard to be able to play for free at four in the morning.

His former colleague in Os Namorados, the guitarist Nanai, was working in Mexico and invited him to meet him in California for a two-week vacation. He went, and ended up staying for the next thirteen years.

The proofreader was off-key: Newton Mendonça becomes “Milton”

C
harlton Heston descending Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments under his arm—that was more or less the feeling that those who listened to João Gilberto sing “Chega de saudade” (No More Blues) for the first time got. Even those who already thought Jobim was modern, after the release of “Foi a noite” (It Was the Night) and “Se todos fossem iguais a você” (Someone to Light up My Life) got a shock. In less than two minutes, these two great songs became as outdated as “Ninguém me ama” (Nobody Loves Me)—relics of the
noir
romanticism of older men, who had lovers, not girlfriends, and whose souls were as stale and smoke-filled as the nightclubs in which they drowned their cuckolded sorrows. “Chega de saudade,” as was later eloquently described by conductor Rogério Duprat, was a “a kick up the backside to the bolero era.” João Gilberto’s new way of singing and playing guitar cast a ray of sunshine over everything, much more so than Dick Farney’s “Copacabana,” which had been released twelve years before. (Only twelve years, yet it felt like it had been when pterodactyls were still flying around.)

“Chega de saudade” offered, for the first time, a mirror to the narcissistic youth. The kids could see themselves in that music, as clearly as in the waters at Ipanema, which were much clearer than those at Copacabana. It was unknown at the time, but later it would be discovered that no other Brazilian record would awaken the desire in so many young people to sing, compose, or play an instrument, specifically, the guitar. And at the same time, it also put an end to the infernal national obsession with the accordion.

It seems hard to believe today, but that instrument dominated all facets of daily life. And what was even worse, it wasn’t the kind of accordion played by subtle masters like Chiquinho or Sivuca, and far less that of Donato—but the countrified accordion playing of Luís Gonzaga, Zé Gonzaga, Velho Januário, Mário Zan, Dilu Melo, Adelaide Chiozzo, Lurdinha Maia, Mário Gennari Filho, and Pedro Raimundo, adding up to a festival of
rancheiras
and
xaxados
that appeared to have transformed Brazil into a permanent June hoedown. And, destroying the myth that this was a phenomenon particular to cities in the rural regions, Mário Mascarenhas was threatening to put the best Brazilian musical talents to accordion music.

Mascarenhas was a
gaucho
based in Rio and virtually monopolized the manufacture of the instrument in the
country. He not only manufactured accordions by the thousands at his factory in Caxias do Sul, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, but also ran a network of “academies” in most of the state capitals. In the fifties, youngsters who were in any way rebellious, those who answered back, or those who risked flunking their exams in school had to study with Mário Mascarenhas as punishment. At the end of every year, he would promote a fearsome concert of “one thousand accordions” at the Teatro Municipal, gathering together all his students, teachers, and former students from the innumerable groups he had formed. (In 1960, he boasted that he had taught twenty-five thousand accordionists.) Mascarenhas’s popularity among Rio families wasn’t shaken even when his beautiful wife, Conchita, left him in 1956, claiming that he made her dress in “lascivious outfits”—Salomé, The Queen of Sheba, and even the Merry Widow—at their sacred retreat. It was a gas, but for society’s peace of mind, she returned home and afterward claimed that it was all a misunderstanding, although photographs of Conchita in those “lascivious outfits” appeared in the magazine
Revista do Rádio
and were a huge hit among her husband’s students.

Among the one thousand young accordion players in the 1957 class at the Teatro Municipal were none other than Marcos Valle, Francis Hime, Eumir Deodato, Edu Lobo, Ugo Marotta, and Carlos Alberto Pingarilho, all aged between fourteen and seventeen—and all hating being there. Marotta later became the vibraphonist for Roberto Menescal’s band (another former student of Mário Mascarenhas) and then turned himself into a much-sought-after arranger. Pingarilho also managed to survive the accordion and composed “Samba da pergunta” (The Question’s Samba) with Marcos Vasconcellos. But at the graduation party of 1957, the musical future of those young men appeared to reside in the bellows of what American humorist Ambrose Bierce called “an instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.”