Once upon a time there was the muscular saxophone of Stan Getz, the delicate piano of Tom Jobim and the guitar and calm voice of Joao Gilberto. Sixty years after the recording of the Getz/Gilberto album (Verve Records), the album that would project bossa nova as a musical phenomenon throughout the world, championed by the song Garota de Ipanema performed by a then unknown Astrud Gilberto.
A few months earlier, in November 1962, a group of Brazilian musicians had performed at Carnegie Hall in New York; among them, Joao Gilberto, Tom Jobim, Sergio Mendes and Agostinho dos Santos –the voice of the film Black Orpheus that has popularized the song Manha do carnaval–, in a musical evening that is announced as Bossa Nova (New Brazilian Jazz). Jazz musicians such as Gerry Mulligan, Coleman Hawkins or Stan Getz himself, who has published the album Jazz Samba together with Charlie Byrd, sponsor the new Rio rhythm twinned with jazz.
With its rhythmic richness, beautiful harmonies and sophisticated modernity, the Brazilian rhythm has fascinated American musicians who welcome this tropical relative of jazz. After the golden age that names such as Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk or John Coltrane have brought, jazz finds new experimental territory for its renewal and, without a doubt, for a greater popular projection. The bossa nova can boast of its simplicity to reach the public ear as well as its musical virtuosity.
Four years ago, the song Chega da saudade, composed by the Vinicius de Moraes and Tom Jobim tandem and sung by Joao Gilberto, was the revelation, the beginning of what would become known as bossa nova. As the critic and musicologist Zuza Homem de Mello points out in his biography of Joao Gilberto, “with his capacity for synthesis, like someone who seeks the essence of each song, Joao delivers a rhythmic and melodic fluidity in his interpretations that nobody imagined that existed (…) Chega da saudade had the ability to change almost everything that was considered unbreakable in Brazilian music”. Still in their teens, Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque cannot escape the spell of the song and Gilberto’s voice that will mark their careers. “The bossa nova took us away,” writes Veloso in his memoir Verdad tropical. “My intelligence delighted in monitoring that radical process of change in culture.”
Among the virtues of bossa nova was its ability to reinterpret other styles, melodies by Cole Porter or Gershwin, which with the new rhythm did not lose their identity and were reborn as contemporary ballads. Musicians and record producers are dragged by the carioca fever. Among the producers who best know how to see the originality of the phenomenon is Creed Taylor of the Verve Records label. Only a year before he had managed to sell a million records with the bossa nova Desafinado, performed by Stan Getz. Taylor will talk about the recording of the Getz/Gilberto album of magical moment with the meeting in the studio of Joao Gilberto and Tom Jobim. “Stan, as always, did a take for each song, Jobim the same, it was all easy, except for the effort required to get Joao Gilberto to come. He was locked in the hotel room.
Despite the disagreements between Getz and Gilberto during the recording –the two musicians will not play together in the studio–, the end result is a luminous album, a breath of fresh air into jazz territory with its refined, serene sound. Joao Gilberto’s intimate voice acts as a counterpoint to Getz’s saxophone improvisations interpreting Jobim’s songs or old sambas by Dorival Caymmi and Ary Barroso. The recording ends up being joined by Astrud Gilberto, wife of Joao Gilberto and who, despite her little musical experience, interprets the song Garota de Ipanema in a youthful style and close to her husband, now turned into The girl from Ipanema. The success of the song will end up representing an idyllic Brazil in the imagination, a tropical paradise, the eternal summer where that girl walks along the beach of Rio de Janeiro. For the new dictatorial government that was established in 1964, without a doubt an excellent soundtrack.