Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (8 page)

Lúcio Alves, six years younger than Dick, was perhaps the first Brazilian cult singer. Everyone who heard him on Rádio Tupi as the lead singer of his group, Os Namorados da Lua, was enchanted and believed that no one else had heard of him—as if he weren’t on the air, and as if radio transmission weren’t free and available to anyone who had a radio. Within a short time, he had so many such fans that the composer Silvino Neto dubbed him “the singer of the small multitudes”—in contrast to Orlando Silva, who belonged to “the real multitudes.” Orlando, by the way, was Lúcio’s hero; not knowing English, Lúcio felt a greater connection to Brazilian music than Farney felt. But like all young singers of his generation, he was also unable to escape American influences. The model for Os Namorados da Lua, of which he was the crooner, guitarist, and arranger, was a fabulous American vocal ensemble, the Starlighters. And as the lead singer, Lúcio was magnificent in adapting Crosby’s tricks, and later those of Haymes, to his style of singing sambas.

Lúcio, a prodigy, at fourteen years of age, founded Os Namorados da Lua in 1941. By growing a little mustache, he looked much older, and consequently was able to perform with the band during those lean years at the Atlântico and Copacabana casinos, which contracted the biggest names in Brazilian music. During the 1940s, Os Namorados da Lua competed with Anjos do Inferno for recognition among vocal ensembles, but in contrast to the latter, who had a successful track record, they only managed to get one song into the charts: the very same “Eu quero um samba” (I Want a Samba) by Janet de Almeida and Haroldo Barbosa, that had betrayed Donato in the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club. But vocal ensembles are born to die, and the closure of the casinos was the kiss of death for many of them, so Lúcio disbanded the group in 1947 and launched a solo career. He was doing well singing solo, but in early 1948, at twenty-one, he also decided to go to the United States as a member of the Anjos do Inferno, who had gone to Mexico and sent for him to join them on an American tour.

Léo Vilar was the leader of the Anjos. He had taken the group on tour but while on the road had married a Cuban woman and left. Lúcio was invited to replace him in New York. The Anjos were not only capable, they were also ingenious. From the start, they landed contracts with high-class nightclubs, like the Blue Angel and Reuben Bleu, singing risqué songs in Portuguese,
such as “Doralice,” “Bolinha de papel” (Little Paper Ball) and “Eu sambo mesmo” (I Really Samba). They managed to do this despite working completely illegally, as far as the American Department of Immigration was concerned. They weren’t to blame in the slightest for the fact that the name under which they performed in the United States—Hell’s Angels—later became associated with a far less musical kind of group.

Under the wing of the Anjos do Inferno, Lúcio had everything he needed to be happy in America. The Anjos were paid, met their bills promptly, and had work in several cities. In New York, Lúcio became friends with Dick Farney, who in Rio had merely been an acquaintance, both personally and musically. Dick was right at home in New York and introduced Lucio to Stan Kenton, Billy Eckstine, Nat “King” Cole, and other idols. Lúcio was slack-jawed during these introductions, but could never manage to utter a single sound. He did not feel at home and preferred not to venture too far from the Somerset Hotel on 46th and Broadway; at least, not until he met and became inseparable from Jorge Aminthas Cravo (Cravinho) a wealthy young man from Bahia who was studying business administration at the University of Syracuse, close to New York. During Lúcio’s breaks, the two of them would wander down 52nd Street, which was the hottest music neighborhood in Manhattan, and sometimes it was as if they were in Copacabana.

Cravinho encouraged him to record an acetate disc in a record store that was looking for a crooner for Tex Beneke’s orchestra. Lúcio resisted, but recorded “Too Marvelous for Words,” whose English lyrics he had been carefully taught by Cravinho. Beneke heard the recording and apparently liked Lúcio. Perhaps he even gave instructions to contact him. But Lúcio didn’t want to wait. At the end of 1948, before he had even been away from Brazil for a year, he caught a DC-4 back to Rio, justifying his decision by saying: “I missed the beans.”

But he did not regret it. He returned to claim his small-time celebrity status as a solo vocalist and guru of vocal ensembles at the Lojas Murray. And as we know, he even had a fan club.

There was an electrical appliance and record store by the name of Murray, at the corner of Rua Rodrigo Silva and Rua da Assembléia, a few yards away from Avenida Rio Branco, in the center of Rio. Although its name was the Lojas Murray (the Murray Stores), it didn’t have a single branch to justify such optimism. But anyone who walked through its doors at the end of the afternoon, on any day of the week, would witness such pandemonium on the mezzanine floor that they would swear that the greatest record sales in Rio
commerce were taking place right there—and only a small part of the commotion could be attributed to the presence of the stars of the Vasco da Gama soccer team, the city champions in 1949 and the nucleus of the Brazilian team in 1950, who hung out there regularly.

In fact, the Murray didn’t sell that much, given the comings and goings of people that frequented the store. The mezzanine floor saw daily gatherings of fan club members; protagonists of vocal ensembles, who were numerous; any musician who liked jazz, among whom was a man who commanded the utmost respect from everyone, the guitarist Garoto; journalism and radio celebrities like Sérgio Porto, Sylvio Tullio Cardoso, Paulo Santos, and Eustórgio de Carvalho, a.k.a. Mister Eco; future journalists such as Ivan Lessa, José Domingos Rafaelli, and Carlos Conde; and jazz enthusiasts by the dozen, divided by category—fans of the New Orleans style, swing, bebop, and the modern jazz of the “cool” school. The Murray was the largest importer of records in the city, but few could afford the new American 10-inch LPs. Most people went there to exchange ideas or 78 r.p.m.s, and to enjoy the free soundtrack of new records that arrived at the store, played by two sales clerks, Jonas and Acyr, who were both just as crazy about jazz.

The Murray owners began to take exception to the window-shoppers’ debates on jazz styles because a large part of the time, the real customers—those who actually bought the records—could not reach the counter, nor attract the attention of the sales clerks. Jonas and Acyr were always very busy arbitrating discussions on, for example, Sarah Vaughan’s superiority over Ella Fitzgerald, during which Sarah’s recording of “Black Coffee” would be played up to five times in less than an hour, against the same number of plays of Ella’s “How High the Moon.” Fitzgerald’s fans argued that Vaughan merely
seemed
better because her voice in “Black Coffee” was backed by Joe Lippman’s Kenton-style arrangements, which were clearly influenced by Pete Rugolo, and that was just not fair.

Well, if that was the case, the records had to be played again, because the conversation would move on from being about the singers to a debate over the arrangements. Consequently, stacks of Kenton records were taken off the shelves, placed on the turntable, and the discussion would start over. The discussions would become heated, with each litigant attempting to speak louder than the others and everyone wanting to make himself heard, while on the record that was playing, Kenton would encourage the brass section (five trumpets, five trombones) to play louder and louder. It was chaos. The manager of the store, Mr. Álvaro, fearing a conflagration, would run up the stairs to the mezzanine and ask them to keep their voices down. The discussion would die down, with Sarah winning by several points over Ella, but would be
resurrected on the following day, this time with a debate between the fans of Jo Stafford and those of Dinah Shore.

Besides the passion for supreme idols such as Sinatra, Kenton, and Vaughan, everyone who frequented the Lojas Murray was crazy for American vocal ensembles. The best-loved groups were the Pastels, the Starlighters, the Modernaires (who got their start singing with the Glenn Miller orchestra and then continued on their own, when Miller took that plane), the Pied Pipers (who had done very well in breaking from Tommy Dorsey), and the Page Cavanaugh Trio. The young people listened to them avidly, and managed to identify the finest nuances of harmony on those 78s even though the sound quality was terrible. There was no shortage of records by these particular groups at the Murray. Unfortunately, this was not the case for the records of another group, which, although they hadn’t recorded much, were the band that the gang really liked: the Mel-Tones, headed by Mel Tormé. His recordings of “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” accompanied by Artie Shaw’s orchestra, and “Bewitched,” backed by Kenton’s men, made the boys sit up and listen. Consequently, no one understood when, during that era, Tormé disbanded the Mel-Tones to pursue a solo career. There were those who vowed never to forgive him for breaking up the best vocal ensemble on the planet.

It is hardly surprising that, being a part of that harmonious universe, everyone at the Murray dreamed of only one thing: being part of a vocal ensemble. Some of them already were, like Jonas Silva and Acyr Bastos Mello, the store’s counter clerks. Together with arranger Milton Silva, guitarist Alvinho Senna, and tambourine player Toninho Botelho, they were Os Garotos da Lua (The Boys from the Moon). It wasn’t a coincidence that the name sounds familiar: the Garotos appropriated not only part of the name, but also many of the ideas of Lúcio Alves’ recently disbanded Namorados da Lua—which in turn had acquired the same lunar inspiration from the name of Aloysio de Oliveira’s Bando da Lua (Band of the Moon). (There was a moon epidemic among those vocal ensembles: there was also a group called Vagalumes do Luar [Moonlight Fireflies], although they only twinkled occasionally.)

Os Garotos were considered the most Brazilian of the groups—not because they were from the arid northeast part of the country but because, contrary to the rest, they did not sing many American songs. That is, they didn’t sing them in English. But they had nothing against Inaldo Villarim’s Portuguese lyrics for “Caravan” and “In the Mood,” which he recorded in 1946, or Haroldo Barbosa’s for the highly popular “All of Me” and “The Three Bears,” his hits on Rádio Tupi. And they weren’t in the slightest bit embarrassed about reproducing, note for note, the Page Cavanaugh Trio’s ultra-cool arrangements of the latter two songs.

Os Garotos da Lua had been on the scene since 1946. After a lean start in Rio, they were contracted by Tupi to fill the void left by the Namorados da Lua, and they were promoted almost all day long on the program
Parada de sucessos
(Hit Parade), fearfully headed by the conservative samba old-timer Almirante. They had almost no freedom. One night, they were singing an arrangement by Cipó of “Feitiço da Vila” (Village Witchcraft), which had been strongly influenced by Stan Kenton. Almirante, who was listening to the program at home over dinner, jumped up in the middle of eating his soup and burst into the radio station with his napkin around his neck, ordering them to erase the arrangement so that “no one will ever sing that again.”

Like all groups under contract to a radio station, Os Garotos da Lua did not have an easy time. In addition to the normal obligations to continually revamp their repertoire, they had to be prepared for any emergency situation, such as composing a song on a desired theme, clothing it with one of their complicated arrangements, rehearsing it exhaustively, and then singing it on the air, live and learned by heart—and to be ready to do all this from dusk till dawn. How on earth they managed to fulfill the request, to the letter, was a mystery: none of the Garotos could read music. But once they had become accustomed to eating two meals a day, they resolved to give their all to Tupi, to continue satisfying this habit.

Competition was fierce, and at one point there were more vocal ensembles in Rio than radio stations, recording companies, and nightclubs capable of absorbing them. Almost all of them came from the north, and they appeared to descend in swarms, like locusts. Even with Anjos do Inferno and Bando da Lua touring outside Brazil, there weren’t enough microphones to accommodate Quatro Ases e um Coringa (Four Aces and a Joker), Titulares do Ritmo (The Counts of Rhythm), Vocalistas Tropicais (The Tropical Vocalists), Trio Nagô (Nagô Trio), Grupo X (Group X), Quarteto de Bronze (The Bronze Quartet), Os Trovadores (The Troubadors), Os Tocantins, the previously mentioned Vagalumes do Luar, the Quitandinha Serenaders, and of course, Os Cariocas. Some of those names might today have a rustic sound to them, but don’t be misled: most of them produced the best Brazilian popular music during those post-war years. All of them wanted to be modern, and for this reason, they kept very closely in touch with the best of what was being done by vocal ensembles in the United States.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to be good to succeed in this game of chance—discipline also counted. This is what shattered the ambitious aspirations of a group called Os Modernistas (The Modernists), who tried to band together in 1950 to become a type of Brazilian Pastels.