Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (55 page)

The story that Astrud’s participation in the record was incidental is another tale that has been repeated with tremendous sincerity since its occurrence, especially after the seven-inch disc with “The Girl from Ipanema” sold two million copies. And in fact, it’s too good of a story not to tell the grandchildren. The singer’s wife, who up until then had only ever sung within the safe confines of their own home, was invited to sing on one of the tracks and became a worldwide success overnight, even more so than her husband. In the old days, Hollywood paid writers to invent stories like that.

In fact, the only incidental aspect of Astrud’s participation in the record was the fact that nobody there, except for her and perhaps João Gilberto, knew that this was going to happen. In Astrud’s mind, the idea of recording professionally wasn’t new. It wasn’t for nothing that she had rehearsed exhaustively with João Gilberto for her participation in the
Night of Love, a Smile, and a Flower
performance at the School of Architecture, two years earlier, and that he, usually so demanding, had deemed her ready to sing in public—and had even accompanied her. It’s more than likely that she would have continued to perform at other amateur bossa nova concerts, had they taken place. (The
Night of Love, a Smile, and a Flower
was the last of its kind, and from that point on, the gang broke up to concentrate on turning professional.)

The fact is that, on the second day of recording the
Getz/Gilberto
album, Astrud insisted to João Gilberto and Stan on participating in “The Girl from Ipanema,” singing the English version. João tried to redirect the conversation, but she persisted and was backed up by the others. Creed Taylor thought a female voice would sound good and it wouldn’t be a bad thing for someone on that album to sing in a less exotic language. Jobim had already heard Astrud sing before and knew that she could handle it; and Stan, quite frankly, wasn’t very interested. João Gilberto gave in and after four or five takes, even got excited about her participation.

The track ended up being very long (five minutes, fifteen seconds), and included João’s part, in Portuguese; Astrud’s entrance, in English; Getz’s solo; Jobim’s piano solo; and Astrud’s return with Getz to finish. It didn’t matter that it was so long, if it was going to be an album aimed at the jazz market, with no aspirations to making the Top Forty. Taylor liked the end result so
much that he suggested repeating the formula on the last track left, “Corcovado.” But something must have been on his mind, because he asked them to make it a little shorter, and “Corcovado” ended up being four minutes, fifteen seconds.

Getz/Gilberto
lingered in Creed Taylor’s drawer for months while he made up his mind what to do with it. It wasn’t the first record he had made that brought Stan Getz together with Brazilian musicians. In February, he had recorded
Jazz Samba Encore!
, uniting Stan and Luiz Bonfá, with Jobim on piano, and, on six of the tracks, Portuguese vocals provided by Maria Helena Toledo, Bonfá’s wife. It was an excellent album, much better than the one Getz had recorded with Charlie Byrd, but unfortunately, not even the exclamation point in the title managed to stir up much interest in potential buyers. He didn’t want the same thing to happen with
Getz/Gilberto
.

The more he listened to it, especially the two tracks with Astrud, the more Taylor convinced himself that it would be foolish to sell it merely as a prestigious album. At the end of the year, Taylor did what reason dictated he do, although it broke his heart: he wielded the scalpel and excised João Gilberto’s vocals from “The Girl from Ipanema.” In doing so, he cut out one minute, twenty seconds and shortened the length of the track to three minutes, fifty-five seconds, leaving it an appropriate length for being played on the radio. He packaged it as a single, released it under the recording label’s Latino collection, and crossed his fingers. Nobody knows why these things happen, but the single containing just Astrud’s voice helped to make the album a huge success, and brought it a collection of Grammys and lots of money in the bank for everyone involved. Well,
almost
everyone.

Nara Leão, with Zé Kéti (left) and Nelson Cavaquinho at the famous apartment, swaps bossa nova for the music of the “past”

Collection of Nara Leão

I
n 1961, Aloysio de Oliveira found a live cockcroach inside his drawer at Philips. “Oops!,” he exclaimed, slammed the drawer shut, and decided to leave. It wasn’t the cockroach, evidently, that led him to resign his position as artistic director of the recording company just one year after leaving the same job at Odeon. He had left Odeon because they had gotten rid of Sylvinha Telles, as well as Lúcio Alves and Sérgio Ricardo, with whom he had been developing a nucleus of modern, adult singers. But Odeon preferred to just keep João Gilberto. So he went to Philips, taking Sylvinha and Lúcio with him, and started doing the same thing there, but he felt he had no professional freedom. The cockroach merely reinforced his decision. The ideal solution would be to start his own label, at which he could reunite that entire crowd of talented people without a home base who were connected to bossa nova.

His resistance to singers “with no voice” had begun to crumble with an album he had produced at Philips shortly after his arrival:
Bossa Nova Mesmo
(True Bossa Nova), performed by the gang that hung out with Carlinhos Lyra after his split with Ronaldo Bôscoli. Almost nobody on that album could sing, including Vinícius de Moraes, who was making his first record. But the result was excellent, and André Midani was perhaps right when he said that they should take advantage of what the young gang had to offer.

The result of those ruminations that filled Aloysio de Oliveira’s mind was the small label Elenco, which he spent the year of 1962 organizing, while producing shows for Flávio Ramos at the Bon Gourmet. Aloysio’s original idea was for Elenco to be a label within a recording company, in order to ensure guaranteed marketing and distribution. He sent a proposal to CBS, but they weren’t interested. As he wasn’t particularly keen on approaching either Odeon or Philips, he decided to start it up anyway, in partnership with Flávio Ramos, manufacturing the records at RCA Victor. Ramos contributed the capital, his administrative experience, and his spacious apartment in Rua Marquês de Abrantes in the Botafogo neighborhood, to serve as the temporary office and rehearsal site of the recording company. Aloysio contributed his ideas, his dedication, and a gang that would follow him wherever he went.

Once the label was up and running and the first titles had been released, the two partners quarreled and Ramos withdrew his investment. The money could be obtained from another source, but now Aloysio was left to care of the business side of things, for which his capacity was zero. André Midani described him as “a master—but only inside the studio.” And that must really have been the case, because against all adverse factors, he made Elenco the only Brazilian recording company whose records were sought out in stores for the label alone. Buyers would habitually ask store clerks, “Has Elenco released anything?”

They had good reason to ask because during the three years (1963–1966) that Elenco was directly under Aloysio de Oliveira’s leadership, it produced or released almost sixty records, featuring Jobim, Sylvinha Telles, Dick Farney, Lúcio Alves, João Donato, Sérgio Mendes, Sérgio Ricardo, Baden Powell, Roberto Menescal, Quarteto em Cy; first albums by Nara Leão, Edu Lobo, Rosinha de Valença, Sidney Miller, and even Billy Blanco as a singer; recordings of live shows by Maysa, Lennie Dale, Vinícius, and Caymmi; a series of collaborations, such as those of Caymmi and Jobim, Vinícius and Odette Lara, Sylvinha and Lúcio Alves, Dick Farney and Norma Bengell; and extremely successful comebacks by old guard singers, like another album by Mário Reis, and an exceptional one by Cyro Monteiro singing compositions by Baden and Vinícius. Sometimes Aloysio slipped up on an idea that seemed good at first but didn’t work out, such as recording Carlos Lacerda, who was governor of the Guanabara state at the time, reading his own translation of Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
—the surplus of which still, years later, remained piled high in the bathroom of Elenco’s tiny office on Avenida Presidente Antônio Carlos, in the Center.

Elenco’s records could be recognized at a distance by their sleeves: they were always white (with only two or three exceptions), with Chico Pereira’s black-and-white photographs processed in high contrast by the art director, César Villela. To theoreticians, this style of album cover—economical, no-nonsense, without fanfare, just like the music printed on the disc itself—was revolutionary. Chico Pereira attributed their economical appearance to a pure and simple lack of funds. On one of the most amusing album sleeves published by Elenco,
Surf Board
, Menescal’s musicians appear dressed as acrobatic water clowns. But there was no money with which to buy the costumes, so they had their picture taken in their underwear—and César Villela drew their nankeen outfits on over their photograph.

According to Chico Pereira, Elenco’s record sleeves would have been more colorful than those of Odeon, had they had the resources. But like it or not, the high-contrast photos ended up becoming a bossa nova trademark, and the other recording companies shortly followed suit. (Philips was the first, with Tamba Trio’s records, followed by RCA and RGE.) Even more serious than the lack of resources, however, was the lack of information on the
covers. Aloysio, in trying to do everything, didn’t always remember to give due credit on the album sleeves—for which he himself wrote the texts. It was commonplace for the list of musicians that made up a singer’s backing band to be missing, and sometimes he would even distractedly omit the name of his main collaborator: the assistant artistic director José Delphino Filho, a man who was capable of finding a tuba or bassoon player at three in the morning at the slightest whim of one of the arrangers, generally Lindolfo Gaya.

Elenco did not have any staff to handle publicity. Aloysio himself wrote the press releases, mimeographed them, licked the envelopes, and mailed them to the newspapers and magazines. He was eventually assisted in this task by the young Guilherme Araújo, who would later become an important show business entrepreneur. It was also down to Aloysio to burn the midnight oil in the Rio-Som studio, equalizing and mixing the delicate combinations of voice and instruments. He wouldn’t allow anyone to do anything that he knew—or even didn’t know—how to do.

Nobody at Elenco had a contract, not even the artists. They all received royalties, which would have been a major bonus had Elenco’s records sold millions of copies. But this wasn’t the case. The initial production run was two thousand copies, and the recording company’s greatest fear was that one of its records would be successful enough to reach the ten thousand mark and they would have no way of meeting demand. Some of them hit the goalpost—
Vinícius e Caymmi no Zum-zum
(Vinícius and Caymmi at the Zum-zum),
Dick Farney & Norma Bengell
—but none of them actually made it into the net. But it was irrelevant whether Elenco cut two or ten thousand records, because they had no way of getting their records to their customers. In 1963, the distribution networks in effect today did not exist, and it was down to the recording companies themselves to distribute the records, practically door-to-door. The unabashedly popular Continental, for example, even had salesmen who rode on the backs of mules, distributing records as far afield as the Goiás boondocks. It was already enough of a challenge for Elenco to get its records to the downtown Rio stores, never mind those of other cities.

This problem was also experienced by another courageous little label at the time, Forma, run by Roberto Quartin, which was mounting an ambitious project. Its records were strictly luxury items, with thick double sleeves illustrated with modern artwork and title graphics, such as
Coisas
(Things) maestro Moacyr Santos’s impressive album,
Novas estruturas
(New Structures) by Bossa Três, and
Inútil paisagem
(Useless Landscape) Eumir Deodato’s first official record. Forma ended up having to cut costs and go back to a more traditional style of cover, although its albums continued to present a challenge, such as
Os afro-sambas
(The Afro-Sambas), by Baden and Vinícius.