It was with great sadness that SACEM learned of the death of Joao Gilberto on 6 July, at the age of 88.
Together with the composer, Antonio Carlos Jobim (1927-1994) and the songwriter Vinicius de Moraes (1913-1980), he created and popularised the bossa nova genre around the world.
Joao Gilberto was an alchemist: everything he touched turned into bossa nova, including old songs from the samba repertoire to Que reste-t-il de nos amours by Charles Trenet, É Luxo Só by Ary Barroso and Luis Peixoto (a samba from 1957) and Estate by the Italian composer Bruno Marino.
"He could play a song for eighteen hours in a row, until he had exhausted all its rhythmic and melodic possibilities. What attracted the world's attention to this kind of music was Gilberto's extraordinary chord sequences and his way of using his guitar like a percussion instrument, playing a complex game of hide-and-seek between his voice and his instrument", explained Miucha (1937-2018), his ex-wife and mother of their daughter, the singer Bebel Gilberto. And so, Joao from Bahia became "a kind of composer and orchestral arranger", explained Tom Jobim.
Before he composed Corcovado, Desafinado, and The Girl from Ipanema, Antonio Carlos Jobim started out as a bar-room pianist on the south side of Rio, where the golden youth admired Frank Sinatra and Dick Farney, the Brazilian crooner. On the radio, they would hear the unusual brand of samba of Bahian Joao Gilberto, born in the desert area of sertão nordestino, slowed right down and sung in a whisper. Meanwhile, Vinicius de Moraes, a great Brazilian poet and former diplomat, was working on his tragedy, Orfeu da Conceicao, a dark and popular Phèdre. He was looking for a stage designer and found the architect Oscar Niemeyer. He was also looking for a musician; that was to be Jobim. Meanwhile, Joao Gilberto had turned his back on the world and was shut away for months at a time, in his sister's house, working on his guitar. Together, Joao, Tom, and Vinicius would go on to write several hundred of the era's most popular songs, which would be performed by artists from all over the world.
The military coup of 1964 clipped their wings. Therefore, Tom Jobim, Sergio Mendes, and Joao Gilberto left for the United States and they made bossa nova an American history, thanks to the support of American jazz musicians, such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charly Bird. Back then, Joao Gilberto was married to a Bahian girl from Germany, Astrud Weinert Gilberto. She had never sung before but could speak English. Stan Getz asked her to sing on The Girl from Ipanema instead of her husband. In 1964, the album Getz/Gilberto, was released, produced by the "Pope of Pop", Phil Ramone. The album won four Grammy Awards, and was in the US charts for almost two years, almost as long as The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night.
In his book about the life of Joao Gilberto, Ho-ba-là-là, the German journalist Marc Fisher (2011) writes: "In Joao Gilberto we witness someone turning into music, becoming one with music, losing himself completely in music. Transcendental." An important work that emerged from this total immersion was "Joao Gilberto", also known as the "White Album", recorded in the United States in 1973, and "filled with silence, phantoms, spirits".
The album was produced by Wendy Carlos, a woman who was born as Walter Carlos on Rhodes Island in 1939. She underwent a sex change in 1973 and was a pioneer of electronic music. She used the first Moog modular synthesisers to record Switched-On Bach, which was a huge success in 1968, before going on to compose the scores for Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. Meanwhile, Joao Gilberto, a man with a stylish sensibility and an off-beat sense of humour, had become a follower of yoga and taken up meditation. Wendy Carlos was an eclipse photographer and a keen astrologer. During this period, Joao wrote Valsa, subtitled "How beautiful are the yogis". At 3 minutes and 19 seconds of "Da da, dadadadada ... ", it is one of the twelve songs that he wrote which were influenced by onomatopoeic sounds. The "White Album" is exceptional.
Véronique Mortaigne
Published July 11 2019