Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (58 page)

In December 1964, Nara admitted to earning a salary of 1,100,000 cruzeiros a month on the
Opinião
show, plus eleven percent of the profits, and that wasn’t counting the revenue from her album with Philips and payment for television appearances—for which she had suddenly become the artist most in demand. (For the sake of comparison, pop-star Roberto Carlos, who was the highest-paid singer in Brazil at the time, was said to earn 2,000,000 cruzeiros per month in record sales, and 300,000 cruzeiros per performance.) Nara wasn’t doing at all badly—especially given that none of the bossa nova gang earned even a fraction as much.

The
Opinião
show had many consequences in addition to pulling Nara out of her apartment and making the bossa nova gang green with envy. It turned her into the “muse of protest songs,” at a time when the new college generation desperately needed something of that genre. Regardless of whatever happened, the newspapers wanted her opinion on it. Nara gave interviews on the Pill, the Pope, cancer, the Dominican Republic, and the Pierre Cardin line. In May 1966, she told the Rio newspaper
Diário de Noticias
that “the militia might understand cannons and machine guns, but they don’t have a clue about politics.” In the same interview—exhibiting almost unprecendented courage for the era—she called for the eradication of the Brazilian army, the deposition of military leaders in positions of power, and the return of the country to the leadership of the people. And, in a slap-on-the-wrist style criticism, she said that “our Armed Forces are useless, as they demonstrated in the last coup, during which the mobilization of troops was hampered by a few punctured tires.” Wow!

It’s not hard to imagine the nervous state of mind this statement inflicted on Marshal Artur da Costa e Silva, the Minister of War at the time. He had already had similar problems with the bold
Correio da Manhã
columnist, Carlos Heitor Cony, who had poked fun at his uniform, condemning it to the moths, as well as branded him a blockhead, saying that he probably got around by swinging from a vine. And now this girl was insulting the Army like that, talking about punctured tires. (The militia must have taken Nara’s comment to heart because shortly afterward they helped themselves liberally to
the Union budget to buy new tires and to properly equip the Army.) Costa e Silva wanted to detain her under the new National Security Law, and the intellectuals came running in Nara’s defense. Poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote an eloquent column, columnist Sérgio Porto dubbed her “the Joan of Arc of the samba,” and poet Ferreira Gullar wrote: “Boy, don’t mess / With a certain Nara Leão / Because she’s armed / With a flower and a song.”

Nara defined herself at that time like this: “I’m the bravest woman I know. In private, you can call me Nara
Coração de Leão
(Nara the Lion-Hearted).”

Singer-guitarist João Gilberto, pianist João Donato, drummer Milton Banana, and bassist Tião Neto at the Bussoloto, in Viareggio, Italy, 1963. This hilarious tour featured probably the greatest bossa nova small combo ever—and they never even recorded together

Collection of Tião Neto

W
hile for some in 1964 the world was going up in smoke, for others the atmosphere continued to be one of peace and birdsong. The singer Wanda Sá, nineteen years old, Roberto Menescal and his musicians, and sound engineer Umberto Contardi arrived in the studio on time one day. They were going to record “Inútil Paisagem” (Useless Landscape), by Jobim and Aloysio de Oliveira, the last track on Wanda’s debut album,
Vagamente
(Vaguely), for RGE. The studio was closed and empty, although it was an ordinary Wednesday. But Contardi had a key, and they let themselves in. Now all they were waiting for were the string instrument musicians. Hours went by and nobody came. This struck them as very odd; violinists are a serious-minded breed, almost always middle-aged, and they live by the clock. Wanda and Menescal gave up waiting and recorded the song with those present. On leaving to go back to Copacabana, they noticed an unusual commotion in Campo de Santana square downtown, and an uncommon upheaval at the Central do Brasil train station. As they passed through the Flamengo neighborhood, they saw the Students’ National Union headquarters being set on fire. The musicians hadn’t turned up because the General Workers’ Confederation had decreed a general strike and there was no public transportation. It was April 1, 1964, and they didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on. (President João Goulart was merely being ousted by the military.)

Menescal had been, up until then, one of the most influential figures in bossa nova, as a composer, musician, and producer. He had recorded three almost consecutive albums with Elenco, and his ensemble was practically omnipresent—and uncredited—accompanying singers on innumerable other albums produced by him. When bossa nova split into two opposing “left” and “right” factions, Roberto Menescal became an important ally to be won over. “We need to write
engagée
music,” Geraldo Vandré told him. “The militia are arresting and torturing people. The music has to alert the people to what’s going on.”

“In the first place, I don’t believe any of that stuff,” replied Menescal, who was decidely detached from events. “And second, the purpose of music is not to alert people to anything. That’s the job of the regiment’s bugle.”

Politics were the last thing on Menescal’s mind, trailing miles behind his real concerns with flippers, aqualungs, and wetsuits. But the creation of a left-wing faction in the group that still went around calling itself bossa nova—Nara Leão, Carlinhos Lyra, Sérgio Ricardo, Geraldo Vandré, Edu Lobo, Ruy Guerra, Gianfrancesco Guarnieri—alienated the others and automatically pushed them to the right, for the plain and simple fact that they continued to be exclusively interested in making music. (The worst were those who insisted on living in deliberate ignorance, like Bôscoli, Jobim, and Aloysio de Oliveira.) Only Vinícius had managed to establish a makeshift bridge between
the two factions and was able to pass from one to the other with great agility. Nobody was interested in João Gilberto’s opinion and, in any case, by 1964 he had already been out of Brazil for quite some time.

The new batch of composers arriving on the scene (actually, bossa nova’s second generation) were also more concerned with harmonies than discord. They were Marcos Valle, Francis Hime, Dori Caymmi (Dorival Caymmi’s son), Eumir Deodato, and Nelsinho Motta—almost all of them set free from Mário Mascarenhas’s accordion by the bossa nova shows at the School of Architecture or at the Catholic University, which they had enthusiastically attended as groupies. The exception was Edu Lobo, who appeared to be very serious and played a kind of
social
music (a label he didn’t care for), although it was of an exceptional standard. Affinities were established naturally: Marcos Valle, Francis Hime, Dori Caymmi, and Eumir Deodato felt closer to Jobim and Menescal; Nelsinho Motta felt closer to Ronaldo Bôscoli; and Edu Lobo to Vinícius and the leftish Teatro de Arena gang. Theater music had always been one of Edu Lobo’s interests, and since 1962 he had been trying to get experience in the musical genre and even, in partnership with Guarnieri and Boal, composed the songs for
Arena canta Zumbi
(Arena Sings Zumbi), a play about slavery that debuted in May 1965 in São Paulo.

At the time, the album from
Arena canta Zumbi
could only be heard as partisan propaganda and, even then, with difficulty. But several of Edu’s songs, like “Zambi,” “Upa Neguinho,” and “Estatuinha” (Little Statue) would escape that bondage and gain freedom in the voice of new singer Elis Regina, accompanied by a bossa nova beat. The play itself was a masterpiece of simplemindedness and demagogy, but its playwrights Boal and Guarnieri stated that they were “discovering” Brazil and practicing an “impure art” that dealt with unpleasant issues like slavery, work, and
liberty
. Naturally, the only concern the gang had was using the issue of slavery to talk about the military dictatorship, using the “ideology of poverty” and making bossa nova feel, in comparison, like a sort of society smile.

Marcos Valle, who was twenty-one years old in 1964 and one of the bossa nova youngsters who used to get together at Lula Freire’s apartment in Copacabana, was one of the first to object to the kind of Populism that the others wanted to authoritatively impose upon him. His first songs, written in 1963 with his brother Paulo Sérgio, like “Sonho de Maria” (Maria’s Dream), “Amor de nada” (Empty Love), “E vem o sol” (Here Comes the Sun), “Razão do amor” (Reason for Love), and “Ainda mais lindo” (Even More Beautiful) were along the lines of the love-sea-flower theme that his former beach companion, Nara, was now rejecting. When Nara gave her infamous interview, Marcos felt personally slighted. And he watched with alarm as that kind of acrimony spread among other bossa nova musicians who, like him, were only
familiar with impoverished northeast Brazil through picture postcards—and who, up until recently, had shared his fascination for the love-sea-flower theme. What Nara and the others were proposing was a return to the most backward and reactionary folk music traditions imaginable—as well as being exclusive: they would not allow their friends to write any other type of music.

Marcos and Paulo Sérgio Valle didn’t hesitate. They opened up the piano and pounded out a response (aptly entitled “The Response”) which they hoped would show how they felt about it: “If anyone tells you that your samba is worthless / Because it speaks only of peace and of love / Don’t listen to them, because they don’t know what they’re saying / They don’t understand happy sambas.// Samba can talk about the sky and the sea / The samba that people can sing is the best / Enough of hunger, people already have that in their lives / Why make them sing about it, too?// But the time has come to be different / And those people / No longer want to know / About love.// Talking about land on the sands of Arpoador / Isn’t helping those who are poor / Talking of the slums while living in a house that faces the sea / Won’t help to improve anyone’s life.”

The implacable and unsuspicious José Ramos Tinhorão didn’t disagree with a single comma, but according to Marcos, they suffered reprisals: Edu Lobo and other old friends didn’t talk to them for a while. To prove they weren’t kidding, Marcos and Paulo Sérgio immediately followed suit with a series of songs that were even more closely aligned to the love-flower-sea theme: “Gente” (People), “Seu encanto” (The Face I Love), “Samba de verão” (Summer Samba), “Os grilos” (The Crickets Sing for Ana Maria), “Batucada surgiu” (Batucada Emerged), “O amor é chama” (Love Is a Flame), “Deus brasileiro” (Brazilian God), “Tudo de você” (All of You), “Vamos pranchar” (Let’s Surf), and “Preciso aprender a ser só” (If You Went Away). But even they were unable to hold out indefinitely and, three years later, in 1967, they also swapped their traditional steel-string guitars for folk guitars and went to the boondocks, with “Viola enluarada” (Moonlit Guitar). Even for two genuine bossa nova musicians like them, it was difficult to flee from the wave that was transforming stages into soapboxes and any song into protest.

Ironically, soon afterward, a singer told them that they had a song she wanted to record. The song was “A Resposta” and the singer was Nara Leão. “I change my mind every couple of hours,” Nara explained.

At the beginning of 1964, unaware of the uproar surrounding bossa nova on the domestic front, Creed Taylor released Getz/Astrud’s “The Girl from Ipanema” single and the complete
Getz/Gilberto
album in the United States.
During the whole of the previous year, when the record had lain dormant in a drawer, a lot of things had happened. Tom Jobim had finally recorded his own album,
The Composer of “Desafinado”
—just piano and guitar, no vocals, which was an astute decision by Creed Taylor in order to safeguard Jobim’s reputation in the United States. In place of his voice, they added the string instruments of the German arranger Claus Ogerman, who, following instructions to save money and Jobim’s good taste, would establish a standard for this kind of arrangement in future bossa nova records. The album received the five stars that
Down Beat
magazine awarded first-rate albums, and the music critic Pete Welding lamented the fact that they did not have a higher star rating to confer upon it.