Since I am just now beginning my analog-to-digital conversion project, I thought it would be cool to offer some commentary along the way. Here’s the first installment.
This Grammy-winning album was a landmark in the jazz and pop music worlds back in the 1960s. It launched the singing career of Astrud Gilberto, spawned a bossa nova craze in the USA, and bolstered the careers of sax player Stan Getz, Brazilian guitarist Jõao Gilberto and Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Jobim. The melodies on this disk should be familiar to any jazz fan, and probably most casual listeners of “cool jazz.”
I was seven when this disk was released, so of course I picked it up many years later. Taking Portuguese in college and rooming with a jazz trombonist had a lot to do with my decision to buy it. Besides, the tunes were just cool.
The backstory behind the album goes something like this. Charlie Byrd, who had visited Brazil and discovered this new musical genre created by Jobim, Jõao Gilberto and others, told Getz to visit Brazil and check out the bossa nova. In short order, Byrd and Getz cut a bossa nova album for Verve in 1962. A year later, Getz on tenor sax, composer Jobim on piano and Jõao Gilberto on guitar and vocals, recorded Getz/Gilberto. Jõao only spoke Portuguese, and the guys decided they had to have someone sing English versions of Jobim’s lyrics for the US market. So, as the story goes, Jõao persuaded his wife, Astrud, who knew English, to sing on a couple of tracks.
Astrud had no vocal training or experience at the time. Were she on American Idol now, Simon would rip into her lack of stage presence and overly casual singing style: breathy, sometimes off-key, sometimes lagging behind the rhythm. She sounds like she is softly singing along with the radio while working in the garden. But Astrud “felt” the music, and despite her lack of formal technical chops, her casual singing style fit the bossa nova to a T.
On the first track, the classic “The Girl from Ipanema” (A garota de Ipanema), Joao does the Portuguese version, then, after he, Getz and Jobim play a few bars, Astrud sings the English version as if you and she are sitting in a cafe while she tells you the story of this unrequited love. It’s intimate. She’s singing to you, not the whole audience. Her rendition of “Corcovado,” on the B-side, is just as appealing. No wonder the album launched her international singing career. She holds your attention.
Regarded as a lyrical master of the tenor sax, Getz played with many of the great big band and jazz musicians of the 1940s and ’50s. In 1962, he and Byrd cut a hit album, Jazz Samba, that spawned a bossa nova craze in the US, and netted Getz his first Grammy. But it was his collaboration with Jobim and the Gilbertos in ’63 that made Getz a household name outside jazz circles. [This site has a great profile of Getz' checkered career.]
Jobim, Jõao Gilberto and others had developed the bossa nova style from the national genre, the samba. They removed the heavy percussion of the samba — familiar to visitors to Carnaval — and added more jazz-inspired chord changes and melodies, creating what we would now call “easy listening” jazz. The Getz collaboration made Jobim and Gilberto international stars. Already a hit in Brazil, the bossa nova sound now exploded in the USA, influencing pop, jazz, movie- and TV-theme music. The tunes on the Getz/Gilberto disk have been covered so many times by so many entertainers that the mind reels.
In short, this album is a must-have for any fan of good music. It’s great to hear it all over again.
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This album has been re-issued on CD. Get it here:
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