The quiet virtuoso who pioneered bossa nova

Holed up in a bathroom at his sister’s house in the late 1950s, João Gilberto made real the gentle swinging music that he heard in his head. The room’s tiled walls provided the perfect acoustics for the Brazilian musician to practice a whispery style of singing over jazzy, samba-ish finger-picked guitar. This smooth sound became known as bossa nova, or “new thing,” and it captured the romanticism and optimism of a rapidly modernizing Brazil. Gilberto’s hypnotic 1958 single “Chega de Saudade” (“No More Blues”) turned Brazil and the world on to the new style, sparking a bossa nova craze that reached its peak in 1963, when Gilberto collaborated with American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz on Getz/Gilberto. Album opener “The Girl From Ipanema”—featuring a sultry, subdued vocal from Gilberto’s then wife, Astrud—won the 1965 Grammy for record of the year. It is now thought to be the second-most-recorded pop song in history, after the Beatles’ “Yesterday.”

Gilberto was born in the northeastern Brazilian city of Juazeiro, the youngest of seven children, said The Times (U.K.). His father, “a well-to-do merchant,” sent Gilberto to boarding school at age 11, but the boy left at 15 to play music. Gilberto had a “strong, romantic voice, in the popular samba-canção crooning style,” said The New York Times. He worked sporadically in Rio de Janeiro but refused to perform in clubs if audience members dared to speak. Branded as difficult, Gilberto grew his hair out and smoked copious amounts of marijuana, leading to a stint in a psychiatric hospital. He eventually moved in with his sister and “found his sweet spot of artistic isolation.”

When Gilberto returned to Rio in 1957, he found a more receptive audience. “American jazz musicians adopted the new style,” said The Washington Post, and bossa nova was used to advertise everything from ice cream to haircuts. After a military coup toppled Brazil’s government in 1964, Gilberto went into exile in the U.S. and recorded a handful of albums before heading back to Rio in 1980. There, he lived a reclusive life, rarely opening his apartment door except for restaurant deliveries. “Maybe I would like to go back to when I was a boy,” he once said. “After that I learned too many things, and they came out in my music. So now I refine and refine until I can get back to the simple truth.”