Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (4 page)

Other dances would come and go, including that of New Year’s Eve, 1949, and Joãozinho sang at many of them. His voice was powerful enough to be heard throughout the dance hall, and it didn’t matter if the audience joined in. With a good microphone, his every
tremolo
could be heard—which, together with being perfectly in tune, was one of his specialties. Joãozinho’s voice wouldn’t exactly shatter crystal, but then that of Orlando Silva, the object of his greatest admiration, did not achieve that extreme, either. And Orlando was even sensational in sambas and
marchinhas
, as he would prove at other Carnivals with his recordings of “Jardineira” (The Gardener), “Jurei, mas fracassei” (I Broke My Promise) and “Meu consolo é você” (You Are My Solace). When they called him “the new Orlando Silva,” Joãozinho swelled with pride, because that’s exactly what he wanted to be.

He was now living for music to the exclusion of all else. His guitar became almost a part of his body, and one of his pastimes was to sit in the window of his home in Praça da Matriz, singing to girls who walked past in their frilly dresses. Some songs had lyrics that bore an impudent message, such as “Um cantinho e você” (In a Corner with You), a current hit of Dick Farney’s. But the messages, if they were even understood, were received in
fun by the girls because Joãozinho, despite being continually surrounded by female friends, had never had a real girlfriend in Juazeiro. If he had been able to, he would have dated Ieda, the prettiest girl in town—a
gaúcha
whose father, a civil servant, had been transferred there. Ieda had blonde hair and green eyes, and she inflamed the desire of all the boys. She liked Joãozinho to serenade her at her window, but when it came to choosing a boyfriend, she opted for a young man named Charles, over whom the other girls squabbled. The boys of Juazeiro envied Charles and, given that they could not beat him in the game of conquests, spitefully branded him a fool and tried to show him up in the only way they knew how, with their songs and guitar playing.

The guitar fit Joãozinho’s reserved character like a glove. Not that he was shy; his friends from Juazeiro describe him as anything but. If he had been, he wouldn’t have opened up to the point of sighing and telling the group, “I would like to marry a ballerina …” Nor would he have stood at the microphone of the sound system and dedicated his songs to the girls of the town. On the contrary: he was witty, talkative, and could be delightfully devilish, as when he attributed those dedications to other boys who already had girlfriends, forcing them to explain themselves, and enjoying seeing them get into trouble. However, the arrival of a stranger in the group was enough to make him hide behind his guitar. Without realizing it, he began to turn his instrument into a shield, to prevent the world from getting too close. Luckily, the world rarely went to Juazeiro.

His father was not at all happy about Joãozinho playing the guitar. His plans for Joãozinho involved him becoming a doctor, engineer, lawyer, or other serious professional. And if he didn’t become any of the latter, then he would inherit the company, together with his brother. Mr. Juveniano had still not realized that Joãozinho was not made for the world of business or academics. And among other idiosyncratic characteristics, Joãozinho was the least religious in a family of pietists and devotees. Not even Dadainha, the eldest sister and the only one with any kind of influence over him, managed to drag him into “The Unfinished Symphony.” (Years later, Joãozinho would embrace his faith to the point of crossing himself before entering an elevator. But in Juazeiro, he seemed very removed from those kind of concerns.) Joãozinho’s absence at church put his father in a very awkward position with the other children, but what truly bothered him was that Joãozinho wanted nothing to do with anything that wasn’t his guitar.

In an attempt to bring him into line, he stopped giving him the usual small change for the cinema, jujubes, and other children’s treats. This created a problem for Joãozinho, who then had no money to buy cigarettes (having taken up smoking) or even worse, strings for his guitar. Any other child would have conformed under such paternal pressure. But he was saved by the
unhesitating solidarity of his friends, who set aside money from their monthly allowances and took up a collection in order to subsidize his guitar string purchases—and thus, the evenings in Juazeiro continued to be lulled by his renditions of “Naná.”

However, as if the pressure from his father weren’t enough, Juazeiro was beginning to feel too small for Joãozinho. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday in June 1949, he felt ready to leave and move far away with his voice. The first step would be to travel to Salvador, where he would sometimes go, by train, with his cousin Dewilson. The trip took twenty-four hours by train, with an overnight stay in Senhor do Bonfim, and they would take bananas to eat on the journey. During these trips to the capital, he would restrict himself to strolling through the city and coveting the radio station buildings from afar, without having the courage to actually go in and say that he was a singer. After all, he had no idea whom to ask for. But he had several important cousins living in Salvador, like Jovino, Alípio, and Yulo. When he went to live there, they would help him with the only thing he needed: to get into one of those radio stations. His voice would do the rest.

During the last guitar sessions beneath the tamarind tree, once he had decided to leave Juazeiro, Joãozinho was in a euphoric mood, and throwing his arms wide in anticipation of what awaited him in Salvador, he announced to his friends, “Champagne, women, and music, here I come!”

And he went.

But João Gilberto knew from the beginning that he would not stay long in Salvador; he was on his way to Rio de Janeiro.

The little green wallet: the passport to proximity to the inaccessible gods

I
n the summer of 1949, the natives were restless in the land of Carnival. The
cuícas
rumbled in the streets of Rio in February, and the knobs of the Philcos were already catching fire to the sounds of that year’s hits. Every three minutes, National Radio would pound out “Chiquita bacana” by Emilinha Borba and “General da banda” by Blecaute. Not even the deaf were spared the carnage. And this wasn’t even one of the worst Carnivals: some sambas and
marchinhas
were fun, like the euphoric “Que samba bom!” (What Great Samba!), the risqué “Jacarepaguá,” and the surly “Pedreiro Waldemar” (Waldemar the Stonecutter). There were dozens of other songs, written to last about as long as the effects of an inhaled squirt from a Rodouro ether atomizer at the Hotel Quitandinha dance in Petrópolis, but that, nevertheless, people learned and sang. The samba schools were for the samba dancers, not the tourists, foreign or domestic. And given that television didn’t exist, no one stayed at home like couch potatoes, merely experiencing the bizarre chaos vicar iously. They went out into the streets to have fun; during the first two months of the year, the entire city of Rio de Janeiro was a Carnival with a cast of millions (to be exact, 2,377,451 participants, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics in 1950).

Put that way, it sounds fantastic, but for those who didn’t like samba and hated Carnival, it could be hell. That summer of 1949, for example, a gang of young men and women from Tijuca, in the Zona Norte (Northern Zone) of Rio, had better things to do than to parade around the Carnival King. They were very busy restoring, painting, and decorating a 1,500-square-foot basement at 74, Rua Dr. Moura Brito. It wasn’t exactly a basement, but the ground floor, with a separate entrance, of a two-story house, the residential part of which was on the second floor. The girls were named Joca, Didi, and Teresa Queiroz, were aged between fifteen and seventeen years old and, like all their friends,wore ponytails, checkered skirts and knee socks, and swooned over Robert Taylor. The three bobby-soxers studied at the Instituto Brasil–Estados Unidos (Brazilian-American Institute), were cousins, and lived in their family’s two-story house.

They hosted a work party for their neighborhood friends and transformed the basement: they waxed the parquet floor; they lined the ceiling with a green-and white-striped canvas; they created a makeshift minibar with an old Norge refrigerator filled with supplies of Crush, Guará, and Coca-Cola; and—most importantly—they papered the walls with record sleeves, clippings from
Life
and
O Cruzeiro
magazines, photos, and anything else connected with their favorite singers, Frank Sinatra and his Brazilian counterpart Dick Farney. (Later, the décor would be further improved with a huge poster of the two idols—together!)

By the entrance, Joca, Didi, and Teresa hung the framed musical scores of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” and João de Barro and Alberto Ribeiro’s “Copacabana,” cut in two, forming a rectangle. The two songs were symbols of
that era. “Night and Day,” first recorded in 1932 by Fred Astaire, would become almost the exclusive property of Sinatra in the forties and, combined with his collection of bow ties, had been one of the main causes of female fainting fits during World War II. (Those who are less than a hundred years old might not believe it, but Frank Sinatra
was
a sex symbol in those days. He was also so thin that when he walked around on stage with the microphone in his hand—he was one of the first singers to do this—he had to be careful not to disappear behind the cord.) And “Copacabana” was the song that shot Brazilian Dick Farney to fame, proving to nonbelievers that it was possible to be hip, romantic, and sensual in Portuguese, without the operatic raptures of Vicente Celestino.

There was a reason for the excitement of Joca, Didi, and Teresa and their friends: the basement was being overhauled in order to become the headquarters of a fan club—the first in Brazil.