João Gilberto, a father of bossa nova
João Gilberto, one of the primary creators of bossa nova, the intimate Brazilian music that became a major cultural export, has died. He was 88.
His son, João Marcelo Gilberto, confirmed the death on Facebook.
Starting with his 1958 single “Chega de Saudade,” Gilberto became the quintessential transmitter of the harmonically and rhythmically complex, lyrically nuanced songs of bossa nova, written by Antônio Carlos Jobim, João Donato, Vinicius de Moraes and others.
In the music he recorded from 1958 to 1961 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 symbol of a young and confident Brazil.
His new synthesis replaced samba percussion with guitar-picking figures in offbeat patterns and conveyed interiority through a singing style that was subtly percussive and without vibrato.
Gilberto 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 prosperity, optimism and romance of Brazil during the period of Juscelino Kubitschek’s presidency in the late 1950s, and an ideal of musical restraint and mystery thereafter.
João Gilberto do Prado Pereira de Oliveira was born in 1931, in Juazeiro, Bahia, the son of a local businessman and amateur musician, Juveniano de Oliveira, and the youngest of seven children born to Dona Patu, Oliveira’s second wife.
He was sent to boarding school when he was 11, but left at 15 to play music, serenading locals.
In his early years Gilberto had a strong, romantic voice. He left his hometown for Salvador in 1949, and a year later he was called to Rio de Janeiro by Alvinho Senna, guitarist for Os Garotos da Lua, a young vocal quintet with a regular performing slot on Rio’s Radio Tupi.
He was with Os Garotos briefly before leaving in 1951. The next year, recording under his own name, he made one 78 rpm single of samba-cançãos: “Quando Ela Sai” on one side, “Meia Luz” on the other. It would be six years before he recorded again.
In the intervening period, he worked sporadically around Rio — accompanying singer Mariza, recording commercial jingles, taking jobs in nightclub revues. According to Ruy Castro’s “Chega de Saudade,” a history of the bossa nova movement, he 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. A friend, singer Luís Telles, brought him to Porto Alegre and put him up at a respectable hotel; through his performances at a local nightclub, he gained a following.
After about seven months Gilberto moved to Diamantina, where his older sister Dadainha lived. This was where he found his spot of artistic isolation, cloistering himself in his sister’s house.
It was there, Castro wrote, that Gilberto’s sound took shape. As much as he liked self-assured performers, his own sound seemed to shrink from the light; it was an inversion of the popular bolero-like style that had dominated Brazilian popular music since the 1930s.
In a 1971 interview, Gilberto cited Dorival Caymmi’s 1955 song “Rosa Morena” as one inspiration during this formative period: “I felt that the way other singers prolonged the sounds ended up hurting the natural balance of the music. By shortening the sounds of the phrases, the lyrics fit perfectly within the beats and ended up floating.”
After a short and unhappy detour to Bahia, Gilberto returned to Rio in 1957, and his fortunes changed. He was introduced to Antônio Carlos Jobim, who was working as a staff arranger for Odeon Records; Jobim heard Gilberto’s guitar rhythm and had ideas for how it could be applied to his unfinished song “Chega de Saudade.”
That song was first recorded in May 1958 by Elizete Cardoso, with Gilberto on guitar. This was the first great example of bossa nova guitar style.
“He imitated a whole samba ensemble,” guitarist Oscar Castro-neves would later tell Chris Mcgowan and Ricardo Pessanha, authors of the 1998 book “The Brazilian Sound,” “with his thumb doing the bass drum, and his fingers doing the tamborims and ganzás and agogôs” — the tambourine, metal shaker and bell of a percussion group.
Bossa nova was featured in the soundtrack of the 1959 French-brazilian film “Orfeu Negro” (“Black Orpheus”), which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.
The album “Jazz Samba,” by saxophonist Stan Getz and guitarist Charlie Byrd, was strongly influenced by Gilberto’s recordings; released in 1962, it eventually reached No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, and Gilberto traveled to New York in November 1962 for an appearance at Carnegie Hall.
With Astrud Weinert, whom he married in 1959, Gilberto took up residence in the United States in 1963. He collaborated with Getz on the album “Getz/ Gilberto,” which included the Jobim-de Moraes song “Garota da Ipanema,” sung by both Astrud (in English) and João (in Portuguese); released as “The Girl From Ipanema,” the song won the 1964 Grammy Award for record of the year.
After divorcing Astrud and marrying singer Heloísa Buarque de Holanda, known as Miúcha, in 1965, Gilberto moved to Weehawken, N.J., and then to Brooklyn. In 1970 the couple relocated to Mexico. He then returned to the U.S., where he stayed until returning to Brazil in 1980. (Gilberto and Miúcha separated in the mid-1970s.)
In 2004, Gilberto had a daughter, Luisa Carolina, with his manager, Cláudia Faissol. Survivors include Luisa; his son, João Marcelo Gilberto, from his marriage to Astrud; and daughter, Bebel Gilberto, a singer, from his marriage to Miúcha.