Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (53 page)

At the meeting between the musicians and Sidney Frey, shortly before the show, Sérgio Mendes had announced, “I get to either open or close the show. And I’m not accompanying anyone.”

For someone who had spent the entire flight clutching a string of rosary beads, feeling that New York was a vast distance away compared to Niterói (across the bay), Sérgio Mendes’s business acumen was in overdrive. Sidney Frey felt it most appropriate for him to open the show. The grande finale–style closing would be down to—surprise, surprise!—João Gilberto. After all, it was to hear him that the audience boasted such illustrous names as those of Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Erroll Garner, and Herbie Mann.

They were among three thousand people who, according to calculations, packed Carnegie Hall. Another estimated thousand were forced to stay outside on that exceptionally rainy night in New York, November 21, 1962. Estimates vary as to the percentage of Brazilians in the audience. To Tom Jobim, who was on stage with hundreds of spotlights shining in his eyes, everyone looked Brazilian. To the
O Globo
journalist Sylvio Tullio Cardoso, who was also there, there were perhaps five hundred Brazilians at the very most. But what difference does it make anyway, when most of the audience, Brazilian or otherwise, were unable to hear a large part of what was played that night? This was despite the presence of a veritable “forest of microphones”: there were five for Audio-Fidelity alone, as well as those of CBS,
Voz da América
(Voice of America), the US Information Agency, the BBC,
Rádio Europa-Livre
(Free Europe Radio) (transmitting to Moscow), and even Rádio Bandeirantes, the only Brazilian broadcasting station present. All of the microphones worked well except for the internal sound microphones of the
theater itself. Frey’s team, overly preoccupied with recording a disc of the show, had paid little attention to this particular detail.

The balcony audience (U.S. $2.80 per seat) heard the show better than those in the front stalls (U.S. $4.80 per seat) because they weren’t competing with the noise from the five thousand cups of coffee being served by IBC (Brazilian Institute of Coffee) in the vestibule, from which the clatter of saucers and spoons occasionally echoed throughout the show. All of the mishaps with the sound were almost opportune, serving to disguise to a certain extent the innumerable slipups and mistakes that the artists and technicians made during the show—that afterward would be expanded upon at length with sadistic satisfaction by the Brazilian press when referring to the “bossa nova disaster” at Carnegie Hall.

Today, some of those slipups and mistakes are hilarious. Almost all the singers tried to speak English with the audience, giving New York a very poor impression of the standard of education at Brazilian colleges. Normando Santos started singing “Amor no samba” (Love in Samba) into a disconnected microphone. When it was signaled to him that he could not be heard, he stopped, and right when the microphone came on, he could be heard asking, “No hear? No hear?” Caetano Zama, not satisfied with merely executing a few dance steps, sang something called “Bossa Nova in New York,” in a language that was very similar to English, but that only the Brazilians in the audience managed to understand—especially when he referred to a country named “Brey-zil.” And Roberto Menescal flubbed the Portuguese lyrics to “The Little Boat” so badly that he never sang anymore, not even in the shower—a wise decision, considering that, prior to the Carnegie Hall concert, the only place he had ventured to sing a little was in Nara Leão’s apartment.

Tom Jobim was perhaps the most concerned of them all. After Luiz Bonfá, he was the oldest performer on stage—he would be thirty-six in two months. Until then, he had never been out of Brazil, but had spent his life dreaming of the night that he would finally perform on stage in New York. He was also the one who stood to lose the most from failure (either his own or that of the show), because his songs were already circulating widely in America through the voices of several of his old idols. And to his complete despair, the night was already turning out exactly as he had feared: a group of talented but amateur kids, risking the reputation of a great musical genre as a result of their inexperience.

And that was without counting the nonsense that had already taken place. Bola Sete, Carmen Costa, and José Paulo performed “In the Mood,” with Bola Sete playing the guitar on his shoulders—what on earth did that have to do with bossa nova? A band of percussionists did a juggling act with
tambourines during Bonfá’s set. All that was missing was a Bahian woman dressed in carnival costume throwing candy to the audience. And just a few minutes before, an American security guard the size of a closet had almost come to blows with Carlinhos Lyra in the wings, on catching him red-handed, smoking beneath a “No Smoking” sign. And had Carlinhos considered starting a fight, he could even had ended up in the electric chair, Jobim imagined.

That was the basis of his reluctance to board the plan in Rio that morning. His wife Teresa didn’t want him to go either. His friend, the columnist Fernando Sabino, frog-marched him onto the plane practically by force, and once he was airborne Sabino had to promise him that the plane would not crash. Jobim’s fear now was not that the plane would come crashing down, but that his career would. Sabino understood: “You’re going to succeed, Tom. Starting tonight, the entire world is going to hear you.” Well, a good part of the world was already hearing him, because “Desafinado” had already been recorded eleven times in the United States that year alone—and one of those recordings, the one with Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, had sold one million copies. But Sabino’s natural instincts shone like a lamp when he referred to that night. The following morning would see a new Antonio Carlos Jobim.

However, when his time on stage at Carnegie Hall came, Jobim found he was all thumbs at the piano. He walked on to a resounding welcome, but Agostinho dos Santos, who had sung Jobim’s own composition, “A felicidade” (Happiness) shortly before, was a hard act to follow. Tom sat down at the piano, brushed back the lock of hair that was falling over his right eye (and that immediately fell back over the same eye), and began to sing “One Note Samba” and—even worse than Menescal with “The Little Boat”—totally messed up the lyrics. The words simply wouldn’t come to him, as if he had forgotten them back at the Veloso. He only managed to get back on track with the line “
E quem quer todas as notas / Ré, mi, fá, sol, lá, si, dó
” (And whoever wants all the notes / Re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do) and from that point on managed to sing the lyrics to the end, including in English. Delirious applause.

Jobim started the second song, “Corcovado” (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars) even worse, getting the key wrong. But it was then that Antonio Carlos Jobim truly began to come into his own. He stopped the music, made a gesture to Menescal and Milton Banana, who were accompanying him, that indicated
“hold on a second,” and with great aplomb, started again—and played and sang it all the way through, without making a single mistake, in both English and Portuguese. He just about brought Carnegie Hall to its knees. Jobim got up from the piano, tripped over a microphone as if he did that sort of thing every day, bowed, and tried to exit the stage, but was called back by the thunderous applause. He then said, in the best English of the night, with the exception of that of the Master of Ceremonies, the critic Leonard Feather: “It’s my first time in New York and I’m very, very, very glad to be here. I’m loving the people, the town, everything. I’m very happy to be with you.”

For someone who had never been out of Brazil, his command of English was almost
too
perfect—and for someone who had seemed so shy, his self-confidence from that point on was indeed impressive. Perhaps everyone had been mistaken about his apparent fragility, when all was said and done. Perhaps, up until that moment, Jobim had even misled himself.

But nobody made that mistake with João Gilberto. He had also come to Carnegie Hall on business. The show had barely begun, and he was still dressing while the first artists were performing, when he noticed the crease in his pants: it didn’t run parallel to the side seam. He called council member Mário Dias Costa over and showed him: “Look, Mario. It’s not straight. I can’t go on like this.”

João Gilberto had good reason to be concerned. For a guitarist, a straight trouser crease was as important as his right shoe being polished to a mirror-like shine. Pianists didn’t need to bother about that because their legs and shoes were concealed beneath the piano, but guitarists sat there perched on a stool, and people notice that kind of thing. And besides, when João Gilberto played, he bounced his knee in time to the music. A crease that did not run parallel to the side seam of his pants would mean that when he stretched his leg out to one side, his pants would hang wrong, which, in his imagination, would end up compromising the whole image of Brazilian music abroad.

João told all of this to Mário Dias Costa. Mário thought about this unexpected problem and realized that João might be right, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He asked the vice-consul, Dona Dora Vasconcellos, for help. More experienced in the etiquette and customs of the city, Dona Dora knew that the pants had to be ironed, and the problem was going to be getting hold of an iron in Carnegie Hall at that hour. With great effort, they managed to locate the theater seamstress—there was always one on duty to mend curtains, sew buttons onto the shirts of tenors after a particularly enthusiastic note, and things like that. She and Dona Dora managed to force open the door
to the ironing woman’s room, and as the latter had already gone home, grabbed the iron, and, right then and there, while Carlinhos Lyra was on stage singing “Influência do jazz” (Jazz Influence), the Brazilian vice-consul herself ironed João’s pants while he waited in his dressing room in his underwear.

Now sporting an impeccably ironed crease in his pants, João Gilberto was called onto the stage at Carnegie Hall by Leonard Feather. He came on with his guitar, a #3 Romeu, which had been loaned to him by Billy Blanco. For the first time during the show, the photographers and cameramen surged forward. Americans were the most anxious to hear him play, and he knew this better than anyone, although his humble manner made it seem otherwise. It was merely a matter of style. Sidney Frey, sitting in Carnegie Hall’s sound booth, didn’t frighten him any more than Mr. Emicles, the owner of the sound system in Juazeiro. In fact, he frightened him rather less.

The technicians doubtfully adjusted the microphones, and João waited for complete silence. Then he sang “Samba da minha terra” (Samba of My Land) accompanied by just Banana on drums, and “Corcovado” (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars) and “Desafinado” (Off-Key) accompanied by Jobim on piano. He received tremendous applause from those that were able to hear him, but the impression he made on Peggy Lee, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and other artists in the boxes was incomparably greater than on the ordinary people in the audience—who continued to hold the opinion that the high point of the show had been Agostinho dos Santos, with Bonfá on guitar, singing “Manhã de carnaval” (A Day in the Life of a Fool).