At a 1976 concert featuring American saxophone superstar Stan Getz and Brazilian singer and guitarist João Gilberto, Getz welcomed his partner to the stage in a tone of voice that reveals just how gobsmacked he remained by his genius. “The most individual singer of our time, a true originator,” he enthused. “His curious ability to sing warmly without a vibrato, his impeccable and inimitable rhythmic sense, his intimacy, all coupled to his wonderful guitar work, make him unique.” If that sounds dry, Miles Davis put it so: “Gilberto could sound seductive reading aloud from the Wall Street Journal.”
Despite being in close proximity to João Gilberto for over a decade by that point—onstage and in the studio—Getz is forever mystified by Gilberto: his voice, his attenuated pitch, his rhythmic sense, the space within the music that he birthed, bossa nova. And in a decade of increasingly louder and louder musical revolutions, Gilberto sat at the center of the most hushed one of all, now mistakenly perceived as quaint elevator music instead of the sophisticated and subtle paradigm shift that bossa nova actually was, a marriage between Afro-Brazilian rhythm and intricate Eurocentric harmonic concepts.
In 1964, Getz and Gilberto brought bossa nova to the American masses with their collaborative album Getz/Gilberto, and then the rest of the world, though everyone was well behind what had already transpired in Brazil—the modern equivalent of finding out the hottest sound in China is “Old Town Road”. When Gilberto cut his first solo record, Chega De Saudade, in Brazil in 1959, it ignited a flame in that country, a revolution in samba that completely transformed Brazilian music. “The kids could see themselves in that music,” Ruy Castro noted in his history of the music, Bossa Nova. Gilberto was an enigmatic singer, a subtle rhythmic player, and a lowkey guitar god, inspiring a new generation to sing and pick up a guitar, while gratefully also ending Brazil’s national obsession with the accordion. At home, Gilberto was an icon. “I owe João Gilberto everything I am today,” Caetano Veloso said. “Even if I were something else and not a musician, I would say that I owe him everything.”
But that wasn’t always the case. When he found himself dismissed from vocal group Os Garotos in the mid-’50s, Gilberto was broke and despondent. By the start of 1955, he found himself cut off by his parents and alienated from Rio’s music scene. People who saw him on the street saw a disheveled man with dirty shoulder-length hair, an unkempt beard, and a ruffled suit he had slept in, oft-seen talking to himself on the benches in front of the National Library. What followed is what Castro deemed a “solitary descent into his own personal hell,” as Gilberto left Rio a pauper, spent a few months in Porto Alegre, before arriving unannounced at his sister’s front door in Diamantina. Gilberto’s uncanny sense of timing was already evident: his sister had just given birth to a daughter and was convalescing at home. But she could see the fraught, fragmented state of her brother’s mental health and took him in anyway.
Over the next eight months, the music inside Gilberto’s head incubated in Diamantina, not that anyone else could hear it. He locked himself in his bathroom for hours at a time to practice. The hard tiles of the small room provided acoustics that allowed him to hear his guitar like never before. His guitar notes hovered in the air thanks to the natural reverb of the loo. There were no strummed chords, no fingerpicking or single note runs, but instead a swaying movement between the even bass notes thrummed with his thumb and a counter-rhythm in chords he plucked with his next three fingers. He would later say that this subtle rhythmic idea came from watching the Afro-Brazilian women of Juazeiro walking with laundry baskets on their heads, hips swaying. (But he would also be inspired by the waddling of ducks on another early number, “O Pato.”)
Amid the natural reverb of his acoustic guitar in the washroom, he also realized that by singing softly without any vibrato in his delivery, he could change his tempo at will, pushing and pulling against his guitar accompaniment in a curious new way. The sound moved to his nasal cavity as a hum rather than through his mouth, whispered more than projected outward. And at last Gilberto had him a captive audience, sneaking out in the early morning hours to serenade his newborn niece in her crib with this new sound that barely rose above a purred lullaby. But João’s mood swings wore on his sister after a few months, and he soon found himself back home, where his father was unimpressed by this so-called breakthrough: “That’s not music. It’s nyah nyah nyah-nyah nyah.” Gilberto was next checked into a sanitarium, but they found nothing wrong with him, and after a week, he was discharged.
When he returned to Rio, he sought out pianist/composer Antônio Carlos Jobim, who had gained international renown for his samba soundtrack to Marcel Camus’s Orfeu Negro, with songs written by Jobim with Vinicius De Moraes and performed with guitarist Luiz Bonfá. Jobim knew Gilberto as a singer, but was knocked out by his guitar playing, which “simplified the samba rhythm and left a lot of room for the ultramodern harmonies” he had been dabbling with in some new songs. Their first collaboration, “Chega de Saudade,” lit the fuse for the new beat of bossa nova, and a vital connection was made.
Translated as “No more blues,” the subtle fluctuations in Gilberto’s guitar and vocal timing suggested new patterns when laid atop Jobim’s complex sense of harmony, like an overlay of two sets of parallel lines that make a vast new array of complex patterns. Gilberto didn’t sing so much as sigh with malaise. It was a melancholia suited for the times, a Brazilian iteration of existentialism. Just as unrequited love might never be quenched, so it was with some of the songs, melodically and lyrically. There was always a dark shadow amid its elegant curves, harmonies that didn’t quite resolve as was expected. Gilberto’s sound shrugged; such was life.
Jobim penned three of the numbers on João’s debut album. He also served as the music arranger tasked with meeting Gilberto’s increasingly maddening demands, from needing a separate mic for his guitar and his vocals to needing 28 takes to get the pronunciation of the o in “Rosa Morena” just so. The recording studio was no bathroom.
Thanks to U.S. musicians like Quincy Jones and Charlie Byrd doing State Department tours of Brazil, Chega de Saudade trickled up to the States, with one Jobim tune on the album becoming a beguiling standout. Translated as “(Slightly Out Of Tune),” “Desafinado” resonated with jazz musicians of all stripes. In 1962 alone, Jones and Byrd both covered it, as well as Herbie Mann, Herb Alpert, and Chubby Checker. It was through Byrd that Stan Getz first heard this new Brazilian sound and was smitten.
Getz dominated jazz in the 1950s. The New York Times had deemed him “the poll winners’ poll winner,” topping every reader and critics’ poll imaginable that decade, never mind that the likes of Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Ben Webster were still in their prime while Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and Dexter Gordon were all on the rise. Such is the peril of a white man in the jazz world, and Getz was famously an unrepentant asshole. Upon hearing Getz had heart surgery, a longtime bandmate quipped: “Did they put one in?” By 1960, Coltrane finally topped Getz in the Downbeat poll, and Getz’s heroin and barbiturate addiction caught up to him, collapsing his marriage. A few years on, he needed a hit, and bossa nova gave it to him.
“The songs of Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim…arrived here when anemia and confusion were becoming noticeable in our music,” Getz said of his pivot to incorporate a Latin American musical form into a Black American one. No doubt he heard the sound of Ornette Coleman and Coltrane circa late 1961 and, like the rest of White America, feared where jazz was heading. With Byrd and a band of Americans, he cut Jazz Samba in 1962, and their version of “Desafinado” garnered a Grammy for “best jazz solo” and sold over a million copies. Getz and producer Creed Taylor strip-mined that sound: Big Band Bossa Nova followed six months later, which was then followed six months after that by Jazz Samba Encore!
In November of 1962, Getz finally got to meet Gilberto in person at a Carnegie Hall concert sponsored by Brazilian airline Varig and the cultural wing of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While that concert was a bit of a mess, it planted the seeds for a studio date in New York City four months later. This time, Gilberto brought up a Brazilian rhythm section that could actually play to his exacting demands. With Milton Banana on drums, Sebastião Neto on bass (though the album credits Getz bassist Tommy Williams erroneously), and Jobim on piano, Gilberto arrived with his wife of three years, Astrud, at A&R Studios on March 18th and 19th, 1963.
“Tom, tell that gringo he’s a moron,” an exasperated Gilberto said at one point in Portuguese to Jobim, who then translated for Getz: “Stan, Joao said to tell you that he’s always dreamed of making a record with you.” Getz may have already recorded multiple American iterations of samba and bossa nova, but his tone and rhythm were found wanting by Gilberto. Getz’s rhythm was stiff and unpliant, his tone much harder than the delicate, near ineffable filigree that João strove towards. The two men couldn’t even agree on which take of each tune was the best.
Despite the growing acrimony in the studio, the results were impeccable. While Gilberto eschewed vibrato, Getz’s horn emanated it on his solos, unfussy and cutting to the heart of each of the eight songs captured across two days. The group updates a few vintage sambas like “Doralice” and “Pra Machucar Meu Coração,” which had been huge hits in the 1940s, now cast in sophisticated, serious settings by Gilberto and Jobim. “O Grande Amor” is Getz at his smoldering best—it would remain in his repertoire long after he had worn out the album’s biggest hits.
While it had instantly entered the jazz canon and had been recorded by Gilberto, “Desafinado” gets a definitive reading here, with the attuned ears of producer Creed Taylor and engineer Phil Ramone capturing its indelible essence. Jobim penned the song with Newton Mendonça as a cheeky homage to all the tin-eared samba singers they had heard over the years: “If you tell me l’m out of tune, my love/You must know that causes me immense pain,” states its purpose clearly in the opening couplet.
Getz’s Grammy-winning version of it was not quite right, so the Getz/Gilberto version detunes it properly. The melody and harmony are in E-flat major, but the end of verse lines lie outside of that scale, the harmony sliding down in half steps that create a subtle dissonance and ending in a F7 b5. Gilberto’s delivery is smooth enough that only upon close listening do his vowels clang and feel off. (You can hear a clearer example of this approach in English, as on this version of Gershwin’s “’S Wonderful,” the held vowels sour and then subtly sweeten as the harmony finally aligns, like a foul ball just curling fair.) Easy as it sounds, in practice “Desafinado” is one of the trickiest songs of the 20th century, with no verse-chorus structure, running 74 measures long, featuring over 20 chords in the harmony, and full of subtle shifts that slide underfoot like the white sands of Ipanema Beach, leaving even the most sure-footed singer and player wobbling and off-balance.
And then there’s that girl in the distance who seems to just glide across the sands untroubled. Jobim and De Moraes used to sit at the Veloso café at Ipanema, smitten by a then 17-year-old Heloísa Pinheiro, who would walk by to wolf whistles on her daily stroll along the beach. They penned a song for a musical comedy in homage to her, but for just about every person who has ever heard “The Girl From Ipanema,” the female that forever springs to mind is Astrud Gilberto, João’s wife.
Of that Brazilian entourage in the studio those days, Astrud was the only one who spoke English fluently, and someone decided that “Ipanema” was a surefire hit, if only someone could render the lyrics into English. Astrud had sung in public only a handful of times and never recorded before. Despite being from Bahia, she would become the voice of said “Girl,” her voice forever associated with the song, its two male artists forever shoved to the periphery as her fresh, naif voice took center stage.
Much like Pinheiro, Astrud is both muse and a blank canvas for the projection of these men around her. Her slightly awkward delivery, her lack of polish professionalism, her flat vowel sounds, her curious messing up of the pronoun “he” instead of “me,” all add to its English as a second language charm. Despite the actual song opening with João’s purr of a voice—his onomatopoeic “jeem doon doon bleem gung gong” a delight of pure sound gibberish so percussive and wet it’s as if his mouth was brimming with water—it’s nearly impossible to remember his voice being there at all. In hi-fi dens, radio broadcasts, jukeboxes, and jazz lounges throughout the U.S., listeners could tune into the song and imagine a beautiful young girl beckoning to them from a warm, white sand beach south of the border, or else a lush tropical forest. When does pop not entince with such a sumptuous fantasy?
