Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (51 page)

During the first performances, Vinícius retained his diplomatic decorum, properly dressed and drinking little, just as the Itamaraty had asked him to do. By the end, he was turning up in casual clothes and didn’t bother to count the number of shots he consumed, which was when he gave his best performances. (Which, of course, weren’t as relaxed as the ones he would later give, once he no longer worked for the Itamaraty.) The show owed much of its success to the novelty of being able to see the poet-diplomat-composer singing publicly for the first time.

The show made the magazine covers, and was showered with praise in all the newspapers. People would book for two or three nights a week; nobody was content with the mere forty-five minutes that the show lasted. Food and
beverage service was suspended during the show, and everyone listened with rapt attention.

The loudest noise was the sighs of the entrepreneur Alberto Faria, and some shriek or other from a socialite—usually, “How beauuutiful!”—when Jobim, Vinícius, João Gilberto, and Os Cariocas performed (for the very first time ever) “Garota de Ipanema” (The Girl from Ipanema).

Five of the greatest bossa nova classics debuted at the Bon Gourmet show: “Só danço samba,” by Jobim and Vinícius; “Samba do avião” (Song of the Jet), by Jobim; “Samba da benção” and “O astronauta,” both by Baden and Vinícius—and the last, by order of performance on stage, “Garota de Ipanema.” On the night they debuted, nobody knew what would follow when Jobim played a few bars on the piano and João Gilberto sang: “Tom, what if you were to sing a song / That could tell us / What love is?”

To which Tom replied: “Hey, Joãozinho, I wouldn’t know how / Without Vinícius to write the poetry …”

The poet then picked up the theme: “In order for this song to happen / It needs to be sung by João …”

To which João Gilberto, unbelievably modestly, replied: “Ah, but who am I? / I am nothing without you. / It would be better if all three of us sang …”

And all three chimed in: “
Olha que coisa mais linda, mais cheia de graça …
” (“Tall and tan and young and lovely …”)

It was a key moment in everyone’s lives—a moment that would be repeated night after night, for forty-five days, until nobody would even remember that other songs also debuted during that show. And they were far less likely to have remembered that “Corcovado” (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars), “Samba da minha terra” (Samba of My Land), “Insensatez” (How Insensitive), “Samba de uma nota só” (One Note Samba), “Se todos fossem iguais a você” (Someone to Light up My Life) and, with Os Cariocas, “Devagar com a louça” (Go Easy with the China) were also performed. Luckily, the entire show was recorded, and in fact, on more than one night—this time by the lawyer Jorge Karam, someone else who was obsessed with the technical aspects of sound and with bossa nova. The combined recordings on those tapes would make a fantastic album, if the participants would allow it to be released.

The run time of the show at the Bon Gourmet was probably bossa nova’s greatest moment in Brazil. It succeeded in saving the music at a time when the innovative status of the movement was rapidly declining, during which it was being abandoned for other types of music with more commercial appeal.
It was a show organized by Aloysio’s staff (not even the newest member, Baden Powell, was given a place, despite being Vinícius’s collaborating partner), and nobody there suspected that the older gang was on the verge of breaking up. In the introduction to “Samba da benção,” the poet described Jobim as “a dear collaborating partner, who has traveled with me through so many songs, and still has so many yet to travel.” Without a doubt, there truly were, but they remained firmly entrenched in the realms of wistful nostalgia, because following that fantastic production run in 1962, the two did not compose together again.

The reason given by both for this was their travels. In fact, at the end of the year, Jobim went to New York and only returned sporadically; and Vinícius returned to serve once again in Paris, although this did not prevent him from continuing to write with Baden Powell, Carlinhos Lyra, Moacyr Santos, and, briefly, Edu Lobo. It was the end of the Jobim-Vinícius partnership, although their friendship stretched out over thousands of drinking sprees yet to come. But if indeed they had to stop working together, there couldn’t have been a greater swan song than one of the last songs they wrote together: “The Girl from Ipanema.”

It’s already been explained, but people find it hard to accept the truth: Jobim and Vinícius did not write “The Girl from Ipanema” in the Veloso bar (today called Garota de Ipanema), which was on the street that used to be known as Rua Montenegro and is now Rua Vinícius de Moraes, at the intersection with Rua Prudente de Moraes (no relation). It was never the duo’s style to write music sitting at a table in some bar, although they had probably spent the best hours of their lives in them. Jobim composed the melody meticulously on the piano at his new home in Rua Barão da Torre, and it was originally intended for a musical comedy entitled
Blimp
, which Vinícius already had worked out in his head but not yet committed to paper.

Vinícius, in turn, had written the lyrics in Petrópolis, near Rio, as he had done with “Chega de saudade” six years earlier, and it took him just as much work. To begin with, it wasn’t originally called “Garota de Ipanema,” but “Menina que passa” (The Girl Who Passes By), and the entire first verse was different.

As for the famous girl, Jobim and Vinícius did in fact see her pass by as they sat in the Veloso bar, during the winter of 1962—not just once, but several times, and not always on her way to the beach but also on her way to school, to the dressmaker, and even to the dentist. Mostly because Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, better known as Helô, who was eighteen years
of age, five feet, eight inches tall, with green eyes and long, flowing black hair, lived in Rua Montenegro and was already the object of much admiration among patrons of the Veloso, where she would frequently stop to buy cigarettes for her mother—and leave to a cacophony of wolf-whistles.

The song was released at the Bon Gourmet show in August. The first artists in Brazil to record it were Pery Ribeiro at Odeon and the Tamba Trio at Philips, both in January 1963, in order to keep both recording companies happy. (Claudette Soares managed to record it next.) And in May of the same year, 1963, Jobim himself released the song in the United States on the first record he made there,
The Composer of “Desafinado.”
After that, in just the first two years (which were also the first two years of Beatlemania), “Garota de Ipanema” was recorded more than forty times in Brazil and the United States, among which were recordings by Nat “King” Cole, Peggy Lee, and Sarah Vaughan.

The girl, Helô, whistled the song daily on her way to the beach, without realizing that she had been its inspiration. Although she must have already begun to suspect something because, since 1962, two well-informed young men from
Fatos & Fotos
(Facts & Photos) magazine—reporter Ronaldo Bôscoli and photographer Hélio Santos—spent every waking moment pestering her to allow them to photograph her on the beach, wearing one of those new bikinis that at the time seemed daring, but that today would make do for manufacturing several parachutes. They ended up succeeding, but only after the girl’s father, a hard-line army general, assured himself of their honorable intentions. It was only three years later, in 1965, when Helô was twenty-one and engaged to be married, that Jobim and Vinícius revealed to her—and to the paparazzi—who she really was.

There followed a veritable stampede, which generated a mixture of pride and anxiety in her father and her fiancé: everyone wanted to meet the “tall and tanned and young and lovely girl from Ipanema.” Rio was celebrating its fourth centenary that year, and no one was considered more appropriate than Helô to be the official symbol of the city, dressed in public school uniform. Her father and her fiancé would not permit it. Two years later, in 1967, Brazilian Cinema decided to film
Garota de Ipanema
—and who would be better suited to playing the title role, sunbathing in a bikini beneath the Rua Montenegro sun? But once again, her father and her now husband placed themselves firmly between Helô and the eyes of the rest of the world.

The song continued to inspire universal fantasies about the mythical girl, but the years passed and the world, weary of fighting, decided to get on with life and pursue other interests. In fact, it had almost forgotten about the affair when, twenty-five years after that evening in the Veloso bar, the world was
finally able to appreciate, this time
au grand complet
, the attributes of the original Girl from Ipanema: in the May 1987 edition of Brazilian
Playboy
. But, you know, twenty-five years isn’t exactly twenty-five days.

“This is great music, Mr. Oliveira. I’m going to take it back to my country and make it a hit,” exclaimed the American disc jockey, Felix Grant, enthusiastically at the Bon Gourmet during the running of the Jobim-Vinicius-João Gilberto show.

It would have been great if Grant had done just that, but had he been listening a little more carefully to the what the other disc jockeys in his country were playing, he would have realized that in August of 1962, bossa nova was a far cry from being the best-kept secret in the world. In 1959, the year that bossa nova burst onto the Brazilian music scene, Sarah Vaughan, Nat “King” Cole, and Billy Eckstine were in Brazil—and Vaughan, at least, had heard bossa nova. In 1960, Lena Horne and Sammy Davis, Jr. went over there, and not only did Lena sing “Bim-bom” at the Copacabana Palace and smooch with João Gilberto, but Sammy Davis was accompanied, at the Record Theater in São Paulo, by Hélcio Milito and his
tamba
, the percussion section that would be the leading feature of the Tamba Trio. But the most important visit in 1960 was that of the least famous musician: guitarist Charlie Byrd. He came, heard, and took bossa nova back to the United States with him.

At the end of that same year, the American record company Capitol released the album
Brazil’s Brilliant João Gilberto
in the United States (
O amor, o sorriso e a flor
in Brazil). In May 1961, it was Tony Bennett’s turn to go to Brazil to perform. And he went already “in the know.” At a gathering at the home of entrepreneur Flávio Ramos, the future owner of Bon Gourmet, Bennett and his musicians listened to Luizinho Eça’s technical dissections of bossa nova’s beat and rhythmical division. One of them, double bass player Don Payne, took the records and gave advice to his friend, saxophonist Stan Getz. At the same time, Reprise released the album
The Hi-Los Happen to Bossa Nova
, which already included English versions of “Chega de saudade,” “O pato,” “Chora tua tristeza,” “Outra vez,” and eight other bossa novas.

In July 1961, a battalion of jazz enthusiasts converged on Rio and São Paulo for the American Jazz Festival, and the after-hours fraternization with bossa nova musicians was not restricted to drinking and joint-smoking marathons. One of the visitors, Herbie Mann, had spent the last two years hanging out on the beaches of California with João Donato and learning this and that about bossa nova. Mann was the first American jazz musician to
record an album in Rio using local musicians. So when Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd recorded “Desafinado” in March of 1962 and sold an unbelievable one million copies, the United States had already more than done its homework on the matter.