Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (56 page)

Aloysio de Oliveira made another mistake with Elenco: he took exactly one year to launch his label in São Paulo, where the major bossa nova market had always been located. And by the time he did this, in 1964, São Paulo was already producing and recording its own bossa nova in copious quantities. It started with José Scatena’s RGE, which had always had Agostinho dos Santos, and then also signed Ana Lúcia, Manfredo Fest, Paulinho Nogueira, and the Zimbo Trio, and would later even acquire Tenório Jr., Wanda Sá, and Francis Hime, all from Rio. São Paulo also played host to the Brazilian branch of Audio-Fidelity, which recorded important albums with Alayde Costa, Milton Banana, and César Camargo Mariano’s Sambalanço Trio, and was the first to release Walter Santos and Geraldo Vandré on LP. Not to mention the small recording company Farroupilha, run by Tasso Bangel, which had Vera Brasil and Pedrinho Mattar and would gain phenomenal success with “Menino das laranjas” (The Little Orange Seller), written by Théo de Barros and released by the sensational Jongo Trio.

But the main conquest of bossa nova in terms of record sales—against which Aloysio had no hope of competing—was by Philips, from which he had resigned, and which was being mobilized by the man who had replaced him: Armando Pittigliani. In a swift and cunning move, Pittigliani had managed to round up Os Cariocas, the Tamba Trio, Sérgio Mendes’s Bossa Rio, Walter Wanderley, and Eumir Deodato and Durval Ferreira’s Os Gatos. Pittigliani had already “discovered” Jorge Ben in the Lane, recorded him, and his first record,
Samba esquema novo
(New Scheme Samba) sold one hundred thousand copies in two months in 1963. But Pittigliani’s greatest achievement was stealing Nara Leão away from Aloysio de Oliveira.

Nara Leão’s father, Dr. Jairo, was sitting on the sofa in the famous apartment with his legs crossed, reading the
Correio da Manhã
newspaper, when Nara informed him that she had just accepted Carlinhos Lyra and Vinícius de Moraes’s invitation to star in the show
Pobre Menina Rica
(Poor Little Rich Girl) at the Bon Gourmet restaurant. Dr. Jairo didn’t even so much as uncross his legs. He merely lifted his eyes from the newspaper and remarked: “Ah, you mean to say you’re going to become a common whore?”

Flávio Ramos, the owner of Bon Gourmet, remembered the episode. Nara’s father went back to his newspaper and Nara, deeply upset, withdrew to her room. But she had already made up her mind, and besides, she was tired of being protected and ordered around by everyone.

While she sang in apartments and at the bossa nova university shows, nobody paid Nara Leão much attention. She was, at most, an ornament who
was much loved by everyone—Menescal, Lyra, and of course, her fiancé Ronaldo Bôscoli. When the little gang began to turn professional at the end of 1960, they took it upon themselves to see to it that Nara didn’t. She had to retain her role as their “muse.” Ronaldo was unable to discern qualities as a singer in her, and he never hid this fact from her. The others felt that, given her slight frame, which was as fragile as a dragonfly, Nara should not get herself involved in the rat race without the scrupulousness of the semi-professional. And—to confim André Midani’s initial opinion—their preconceived ideas of her were so
belle époque
that they felt she wasn’t the kind of woman who ought to sing “at night.”

When the Maysa/Bôscoli scandal hit the headlines and Nara suddenly found herself without a fiancé, she decided that her committment to the gang had also come to an end. Hurt beyond belief by Bôscoli, she turned once again to her old friend Carlinhos Lyra, who was heading yet another gang of musicians. In 1963, he also changed his mind, and decided that Nara should sing. He had written a musical comedy with Vinícius whose title reminded one somewhat of a song written by Noël Coward in 1920, “Poor Little Rich Girl”; it featured a virtual treasure chest of great songs: “Samba do carioca” (Carioca’s Samba), “Sabe você?” (Do You Know?), “Pau-de-arara” (Flatbed Truck), “Maria Moita,” and “Primavera” (Spring), among others. They were going to put on the show at the Bon Gourmet, and Nara would be the original poor little rich girl.

Her father did nothing to stop her except grumble, and Nara appeared at the nightclub in the first part of that year—absolutely terrified at singing in front of an audience. It was no longer a matter of singing at home, or in auditoriums that were sometimes smaller than the living room of her apartment. And at the School of Architecture shows, where there were hordes of people, she hadn’t managed to make anyone out in the tiered seats. At the Bon Gourmet, she knew almost everyone sitting at those tables, and felt completely exposed on the little stage, even with Lyra and Vinícius at her side. Aloysio de Oliveira, the director of the show, had to use all his powers of persuasion: “You’re among friends, Nara,” he said. “Sing at the Bon Gourmet as you would at home.”

With a huge effort, Nara completed the three-week run. Flávio Ramos had a miserably half-empty house every night, and the show didn’t achieve even a mere shadow of the success that the concert with Tom, Vinícius, João Gilberto, and Os Cariocas had a few months earlier. “Nara couldn’t hold the audience,” remembers Flávio. “She wasn’t yet a professional.”

She began to date the avant-garde filmmaker Ruy Guerra, who would soon film
Os cafajestes
(The Scoundrels) with the famous scene in which Norma Bengell was naked for almost five minutes—which in those days was
a stretch of nudity just about as long as
Gone With the Wind
. Ruy Guerra was “left-wing,” like Carlinhos Lyra, who was more political with every passing day and who already spoke of bossa nova as if it were a thing of the past: “Bossa nova was destined to be short-lived,” he stated at that time. “It was merely a new musical format of repeating the same romantic and inconsequential things that we’ve been saying for a long time. It didn’t change the content of the lyrics. The only true path is nationalism. Nationalism in music isn’t the same as provincialism.”

The fact that Lyra had made this statement in November 1962 didn’t prevent him, just a few weeks later, from singing at Carnegie Hall. But on his return to Brazil, he was more inclined than ever to dedicating himself to learning all about the old
sambistas de morro
for whom he had finally developed a passion: Cartola, Nelson Cavaquinho, Zé Kéti. Suffused with ideological ammunition by his collaborating partner, Nelson Lins de Barros, Lyra invited them to his apartment in Rua Barão da Torre in Ipanema. The idea was to try and compose something in partnership with them. The journalist José Ramos Tinhorão, who continued to be the angel of doom for bossa nova, surprisingly participated in one of those gatherings and remembers being highly amused at seeing Lyra serving
cachaça
and beer to the
sambistas
—because “that’s what
sambistas
like”—while they themselves drank Scotch. “It didn’t occur to them that those older black men might also have liked whiskey,” laughs Tinhorão.

The results of those efforts to compose together were below standard, according to Tinhorão, because Nelson and Lyra’s musical language, whether they liked it or not, was too elaborate for Cartola and Nelson Cavaquinho. The only collaborative effort to emerge from those rivers of beer was “Samba da legalidade” (Lawful Samba), by Lyra and Zé Kéti—not coincidentally, the only one of the three
sambistas
who was not a real musician and was capable of merely contributing his autochthonous know-how. They ended up deciding that the best thing was every jack to his trade, although this would not prevent the almost unpublished compositions of the
sambistas
from being recorded in a modern style—that is, the bossa nova style. Which is what Nara immediately wanted to do.

The album
Nara
, recorded at the end of 1963 by Elenco, was not Nara’s recording debut, as is commonly held. Months earlier, she had sung on two of
the tracks on Carlinhos Lyra’s third and best album up until that point,
Depois do carnaval
(After Carnival). But for her own record, she would make the
sambistas
descend their hill. For months, it was her turn to gather Cartola, Zé Kéti, and Nelson Cavaquinho at the enormous apartment in Avenida Atlântica. She did not commit the same gaffe as Lyra and Lins de Barro, and appropriately served them whiskey, allowing them to at least bask in the sweet scent of bourgeoisie while she learned their
sambões
.

Aloysio de Oliveira, who was going to produce the album, didn’t like her choices at all. For him, bossa nova had fallen from the sky to feed the musical appetites of the urban and sophisticated consumer, but it had already been a supreme effort for him to sell music that was performed by singers “with no voice.” Now that he had finally gotten used to it, Nara, who had still less of a voice, was trying to exchange the pervasive themes of love and the sea for things related to slums and poverty, which were completely alien to the movement. But Nara insisted and recorded “Diz que vou por aí” (Tell ‘em I’m Going By) by Zé Kéti; “O Sol Nascerá” (The Sun Will Rise), by Cartola and Elton Medeiros; and “Luz Negra” (Black Light), by Nelson Cavaquinho.

Aloysio yielded and made the record, but in the text he wrote for the album sleeve he had to make an effort to disguise his dislike of Nara’s repertoire, which included songs that, according to him, “had nothing to do with bossa nova.” And—Aloysio observed—even when Nara sang compositions by those connected with bossa nova, she leaned toward compositions “with strictly regional tendencies,” like “Feio não é bonito” (Ugliness Is Not Beautiful) and “Maria Moita” by Lyra; “Berimbau” and “Consolação” (Consolation), by Baden Powell and Vinícius; “Nanã,” by Moacyr Santos, which did not yet have any lyrics; and “Canção da terra” (Song of the Land) and “Réquiem para um amor” (Requiem for Love) by the young Edu Lobo and Ruy Guerra—all with more than just a faint redolence of the slave quarters about them. Without realizing it, Aloysio had good reason to be concerned: that flirtation with Populism was going to end up ruining the poetry of the genre.

But when Nara’s album was released, bossa nova ended up taking to it fairly well. It was the conservatives who set Nara in their sights, accusing her of diluting the purity of authentic popular music by getting mixed up in it. The veteran musician Jacob do Bandolim (who had the reputation of being bad luck, and people knocked on wood whenever they spoke his name) despised her as a singer. And his son, the journalist Sérgio Bittencourt, started attacking her every other day in his bad-tempered column,
Bom dia, Rio
(Good Day, Rio) in the newspaper
Correio da Manhã
. He even initiated a byzantine discussion on whether or not Nara was a
sambista
and, to his surprise, she was defended by two unsuspected fans of the old guard: Lúcio Rangel and Sérgio Cabral. At the time, Bittencourt was accosted in the street by Zé Kéti:
“For God sake, stop this,” begged Zé Kéti. “She’s the only one who’s recording my music and that of Cartola and Nelson Cavaquinho!”

Shy Nara, who up until very recently still needed to be protected by her friends, was holding her own splendidly in those battles. We’re able to tell by checking her album of press clippings that she kept everything that was written about her, even the insulting articles, with the same pride that she kept the ones that praised her. The dragonfly finally emerged from her coccoon and dared to fly close to the neon lights. In January 1964, she survived a run at the almost uncivilized Bottles nightclub, and a few months later she went to Japan with Sérgio Mendes’s trio, Tião Neto, and Edison Machado. The trip was sponsored by Rhodia, a textile manufacturer, for the release of their fabric collection,
Brazilian Style
.

Before leaving for Japan, Nara and the trio posed for an extensive fashion spread in the magazine
Jóia
(Jewel), shot in Salvador, with Nara modeling the collection of garments. Her image up until that point, except for the fact that she was the “bossa nova muse,” was not that different from that of her big sister, Danuza, in the frivolous elegance department. But something happened to Nara in Tokyo, and she insisted on including “Diz que vou por aí” in her repertoire, the greatest hit of which was, of course, “The Girl from Ipanema.” Sérgio Mendes refused to pose—he didn’t feel comfortable playing Zé Kéti’s songs in a runway fashion show—and there was considerable friction between the two of them.