Joao Gilberto, an Architect of Bossa Nova has Died in Brazil at Age 88

[+ WilliamM]

Note: Mr. Gilberto was also famous for cancelling performances, but I did see him once at Carnegie Hall in New York City. H e was alone on stage with dozens of lyric sheet ready at his feet. He never used them. I wish I had seen him in Rio in a small club. Magical performer.

 

 

 

 

João Gilberto, an Architect of Bossa Nova, Is Dead at 88

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Ben Ratliff

• July 6, 2019
  
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Starting with his 1958 single “Chega de Saudade,” Mr. Gilberto, in his late 20s, became the quintessential transmitter of the harmonically and rhythmically complex, lyrically nuanced songs of bossa nova (slang for “new thing” or “new style”), written by Antônio Carlos Jobim, João Donato, Vinicius de Moraes and others.

 

In the music he recorded from 1958 to 1961 — appearing on the albums “Chega de Saudade,” “O Amor, O Sorriso e a Flor” and “Joao Gilberto” — Mr. Gilberto took strains of Brazilian samba and American pop and jazz and reconfigured them for a new class of young Brazilian city-dwellers, helping to turn bossa nova into a global symbol of a young and confident Brazil.

 

 

 

 

The music gained particular popularity in the United States, spawning pop hits and even a dance craze. It brought Mr. Gilberto to Carnegie Hall and led to a Grammy Award, given to him and the jazz saxophonist Stan Getz, for a collaborative effort that was named album of the year for 1964 and that produced an enormous hit, “The Girl From Ipanema.”

 

Mr. Gilberto’s new synthesis replaced samba percussion with guitar-picking figures in offbeat patterns (called by some “violão gago,” or “stammering guitar”). It also conveyed interiority through a singing style that was confiding, subtly percussive and without vibrato.

 

“When I sing, I think of a clear, open space, and I’m going to play sound in it,” Mr. Gilberto said in an interview with the New York Times jazz critic John S. Wilson in 1968. “It is as if I’m writing on a blank piece of paper. It has to be very quiet for me to produce the sounds I’m thinking of.”

 

Mr. Gilberto was not much of a songwriter: He was both “less and more than a composer,” as the Brazilian singer and songwriter Caetano Veloso, an admirer, once put it. He was reclusive, rarely forthcoming with the news media and his audiences, and sometimes truculent onstage if his demands about sound were not met.

 

But his work became a sign of the relative prosperity, optimism and romance of Brazil during the period of Juscelino Kubitschek’s presidency in the late 1950s, and thereafter an ideal of musical restraint and mystery.

 

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João Gilberto do Prado Pereira de Oliveira was born on June 10, 1931, in Juazeiro, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia, the son of a local businessman and amateur musician, Juveniano de Oliveira, and the youngest of seven children born to Dona Patu, Mr. Oliveira’s second wife.

 

 

 

 

 

 

He was sent to boarding school in Aracaju, east of Juazeiro on the Atlantic coast, when he was 11, but left at 15 to play music, serenading locals under a tamarind tree in Juazeiro’s town square.

 

In his early years Mr. Gilberto had a strong, romantic voice, in the popular samba-canção crooning style. He left his hometown for Salvador, Bahia’s capital, in 1949, and a year later he was called to Rio de Janeiro by Alvinho Senna, guitarist for a young vocal quintet, Os Garotos da Lua (the Boys of the Moon), which had a regular performing slot on Rio’s Radio Tupi.

 

Mr. Gilberto was with Os Garotos only briefly, leaving the group in 1951. The next year, recording under his own name with a string section, no harmony vocalist and no guitar, he made a 78 r.p.m. single of rather mannered and old-fashioned samba-cançãos. It would be six years before he recorded again.

In the intervening period, he worked sporadically around Rio — accompanying the singer Mariza, recording commercial jingles, taking jobs in a few long-running nightclub revues. According to Ruy Castro’s “Chega de Saudade” (1990), a colorful history of the bossa nova movement, he also became a strange and marginal figure around town.

 

When he started refusing to work at clubs where he felt the customers talked too much, he entered a period of poverty, growing his hair long and wearing wrinkled clothes. Then a friend, the singer Luís Telles, brought him to the coast town of Porto Alegre and put him up at a respectable hotel; performing at a local nightclub, Mr. Gilberto gained a following.

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/06/arts/music/joao-gilberto-dead-bossa-nova.html

 

Complete Obit.

 

At Carnegie Hall in 1978. Gilberto is on the right hand side/

Edited July 8, 2019 by WilliamM

[+ azdr0710]

(though he was part of the group that wrote the song, no, I'm not going to post a "The Girl From Ipanema" video)

 

 

Edited July 8, 2019 by azdr0710