For a brief period in the late Fifties and early Sixties Brazil could do no
wrong. The economy thrived, the arts flourished and Pelé inspired the
national football team to two World Cups. The visionary architect Oscar
Niemeyer oversaw the design of the country’s futuristic new capital
Brasilia, and Rio De Janeiro was the most glamorous city in the world. The
soundtrack to this golden age was bossa nova; that lilting, sophisticated
blend of jazz and samba that is all about being cool, having fun and falling
in love, preferably under the swaying palm trees of Ipanema.
“Bossa nova is a vision of Brazil as it should have been,” says the singer
Joyce, who is organising a bossa nova 50th birthday concert at the Barbican
that will feature the style’s originators and its new exponents. “We should
have been a wonderful, democratic country. Instead we had 21 years of
military dictatorship, something we are still paying for. So bossa nova
represents a different way of life; a culture more sophisticated than the
one we have today.”
I’ve come to Rio’s zona sul, the glamorous part of the city
sandwiched between the hillside favelas and shimmering white beaches, to
discover what bossa nova means to modern Brazilians. The answer, it seems,
is not much. Despite being Brazil’s most successful musical export – Astrud
Gilberto’s rendition of Antonio Carlos (“Tom”) Jobim’s The
Girl from Ipanema won an audience the world over with its easy melody
and seductive image of a carefree, beautiful young Cariocan – bossa nova
doesn’t carry much weight in a city where the rougher styles of samba and
funk reflect a tougher, more violent climate.
“People simply don’t know about bossa nova here any more,” says Joyce, who
started her singing career as a teenager in the late Sixties. “It is the
greatest contribution from this country for world peace because it is
positive, not materialistic, and it puts people in a good mood. It is a
product of this city, so it is strange that a new generation is hardly aware
of it.”
It’s time to seek out some of the founders of bossa nova, to discover more
about the climate in which such casually sophisticated songs as Jobim’s Desafinado
and Marcos Valle’s Summer Samba (So Nice) grew and
flourished. The guitarist and composer Carlos Lyra, who lives in the heart
of upscale Ipanema, was a teenager when he started performing. Along with
the guitarist Roberto Menescal, Lyra was one of the gilded youths holding
late-night music sessions at the Ipanema apartment of the 14-year-old singer
Nara Leao, learning to sing and play in a quiet new style so as not to wake
her sleeping parents. One theory goes that bossa nova was born as a result
of this restriction.
“Bossa nova is the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie,” says Lyra, a handsome
white-haired man now in his sixties. “Brazilian music in the Fifties was
loud and dramatic, with lots of vibrato and lyrics about drinking yourself
to death because a girl doesn’t like you. We didn’t want that. We wanted to
sing about love and beauty in a way the girls would understand, and we
wanted to do it softly, with a lot of sophisticated harmonies. Everybody
hated it.”
On being sent João Gilberto’s debut record, Osvaldo Gurzoni, the director of
the São Paulo-based record label Odeon, is reputed to have said: “Is this
the shit they are sending us from Rio now?” Then he smashed the record on
his knee.
Lyra became a master of the bossa nova guitar technique of playing only two or
three chords in a way that is deceptively difficult. “The goal is to reduce
all the complicated syncopated rhythms of samba on to the guitar,” he
explains, “and that is very hard for you.”
I think “you” could roughly translate as “inelegant gringo”.
“We play this music every day, just like we go to the beach every day,” says
Vinicius Cantuaria, one of the younger members of the bossa nova pantheon
due to perform at the Barbican. “It is in our blood. A bossa nova guitarist
should be like a great footballer, looking effortless as he scores a goal.”
The undisputed king of the bossa nova guitar is João Gilberto. His 1958 single Chega
De Saudade is widely credited as giving birth to the bossa nova boom,
and he appears to have become increasingly odd ever since. He now lives in
isolation in the Rio district of Leblon, never giving interviews and walking
out on audiences if he hears mutterings during performances. Will he be
playing at the Barbican, I ask Joyce. “I didn’t even ask him,” she replies.
“He would ask for a crazy amount of money and he might not even turn up. I
met him when I was performing in Mexico City in the Seventies, where he was
living at the time. He came to visit at my hotel and stayed for three days
without sleeping, eating, going to the bathroom, talking, anything. All he
did was play guitar.”
There is no way that Gilberto will agree to talk to me – or anyone else, for
that matter. Even his daughter Bebel, a successful singer in her own right,
has claimed that she has to pass notes under his door to communicate with
him.
A more sociable, if equally eccentric, father of bossa nova is the pianist
João Donato. Donato moved to Mexico in 1959, making him absent for the bossa
boom, but before leaving he worked in the nightclubs along Copacabana’s Beco
das Garrafas (Bottles Alley), so named because it is claimed that residents
of the apartments above would throw bottles at the musicians below to shut
them up. (The musicians learnt to play quietly as a result, so goes another
legend, and bossa nova was born.)
According to Donato, who now lives next to the sea in the quiet neighbourhood
of Urca, bossa nova was something that “just happened when João Gilberto,
Tom Jobim and I saw each other almost every day, because we had nothing
better to do. We ended up making a certain style of music based on all the
different things we liked.
“But then I left Brazil because nobody liked what I did. They said it was too
modern, and my music did not fit in with the samba that was played in the
nightclubs. In Brazil they just want something happy; something simple with
lots of rhythm. With bossa nova the treasure was hidden in the bottom of the
sea. It was only when people from other countries played the songs that
people in this country started taking notice of it.”
Donato, who will be joining Joyce at the Barbican, is confident that bossa
nova will be with us for ever because it is based on such perfectly
constructed songs. “When I go to Japan I ask them why they like it, and the
answer is always the same: ‘Because it makes us feel good.’ It brings some
kind of sunshine into the winter of our lives.”
The evening after speaking to Donato I go to a nightclub in the neighbourhood
of Botafogo for a concert by Joyce’s daughter, Clara Moreno, who is
performing with the guitarist Celso Fonseca. Their performance is
sophisticated, easy, and marginal to the culture of modern Brazil. “Bossa
nova is still the most important Brazilian music, even if it isn’t the most
popular,” says Fonseca after the concert. “Brazil used to be called the
country of the future. That future never came, but bossa nova is still the
music of the future. It is timeless and forward-looking.”
It is hard to equate the carefree, urbane sounds of bossa nova with the vast
economic and social problems that plague Rio, but it is a reminder of what
the city and its people are capable of achieving.
“The middle classes in Brazil are massacred now,” claims Lyra. “Professors,
teachers, doctors are poor while the bankers and the aristocracy get richer.
This is why bossa nova is not communicating with the people: culture and
learning in Brazil is no longer valued.”
Sitting in the Garota De Ipanema bar, however, where Jobim and Vinicius De
Moraes watched the girls go by, it’s easy to understand how bossa nova
represents all the best things about Rio: grace, beauty, humour and what the
Brazilians call saudade – a melancholic but pleasant kind of blues.
There’s only one thing left to do: seek out the original Girl From Ipanema. It
turns out she is called Helo Pinheiro and was a privileged teenager who
spent her days going to and from Ipanema Beach in the early Sixties. When
the song – and bossa nova – became an international sensation in 1963
Pinheiro’s father refused to allow his daughter to capitalise on it. So she
waited until she was 42 before finally making the most of her status as the
subject of Brazil’s most famous song – by posing for Playboy.
50 Years of Bossa Nova, Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891), on May 26 2008
