Music and Recording Features

Flawed
Bucketloads of complimentary things can be said about Astrud Gilberto's voice, but she wasn't technically a great singer. Her range was barely two octaves, her performances often shaky. In pop music, a certain degree of (let's say) limited vocal competence is not necessarily a hindrance to a successful interpretation. When Nico sang "All Tomorrow's Parties," or whenever Bob Dylan got nasal and mumbly, it didn't kill the song; in some ways, the flaws are an enhancement: Imperfections bring out the performer's humanity. But in classical music and to a lesser extent in jazz, technical prowess isn't optional, and Astrud didn't always bring the goods.

When recently I streamed a few of her concerts (footnote 3), I found them riddled with mistakes small and large. During her 1985 performance at Switzerland's Lugano jazz festival, for instance, when she sings Paulo Jobim's "Milky Way," she is reaching for notes by the second line. Pitch-wise, it falls apart so badly that I was grateful for the fast-forward button.

That she barely seemed to engage her vocal chords—almost everything was low-breath—registered as charming and sultry at the beginning of her career, but it became less so in later years, when her timid voice no longer matched her grown-up persona. The criticism of bossa's best-known singers centered on how freely they treated pitch. It's why he wrote "Desafinado" ("Off-Key"), a song in defense of that overly loose delivery. In translation:

How can I defend myself and make you understand that this is bossa nova, how it's meant to sound.

And what you still don't get and maybe never will is that singing off-key doesn't mean that you don't have a heart.

Jobim was aware early on that some of Astrud Gilberto's only really deep mark was "Ipanema"—one song, but what a song! None of her 16 studio albums are particularly groundbreaking, but they—most of them—are lithe and sensuous. And no one can deny that arrangers and artists as big as Gil Evans, Stanley Turrentine, James Last, and George Michael sought her out for collaboration.

Continuing influence
According to Performing Songwriter magazine, "The Girl From Ipanema" is the second-most-recorded pop tune in history, after the Beatles' "Yesterday." (Others claim that the top honor goes to George Gershwin's "Summertime," footnote 4) "Ipanema," certainly, has been everywhere from the get-go and has been featured in more than 50 movies.

Over time, the song gradually lost its cool—that is, its coolness. It went from cutting-edge jazz to easy listening and ended up practically as muzak. In the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers, the musicians played by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd ride an elevator in Chicago City Hall, remaining perfectly unperturbed while a gaggle of police officers chases them. An instrumental version of "The Girl from Ipanema" emanates from the elevator's tinny speakers, reduced to a kitschy earworm, the ultimate anti-blues.

But the song's familiarity obscures the fact that it once sounded special and foreign. "The Girl From Ipanema" took bossa nova from a style appreciated, outside Brazil, by only a few jazz cognoscenti, to a genre whose breezy, sensual tunes are whistled the whole world over.

Bossa's influence and longevity are indisputable. Various jazz stars explored its rhythmic and harmonic possibilities—not just Getz but Cannonball Adderley, Oscar Peterson, Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Smith, and others. Soon, elements of the genre crept into the work of pop music's A-list, including the Beatles ("And I Love Her") and the Beach Boys ("Busy Doing Nothin'"). Sérgio Mendes and his band Brasil '66 recorded "Mas que Nada," a song that reached radio ubiquity throughout the late 1960s. Jobim became a household name. Frank Sinatra recorded an entire album of Jobim songs (1967's Francis Albert Sinatra & Antônio Carlos Jobim). So did Ella Fitzgerald, in 1981 (Ella Abraça Jobim).

Bossa nova still pops up in unexpected places. Sérgio Mendes and the Black Eyed Peas collaborated on a new version of "Mas que Nada" in 2006; it appeared on the album Timeless, which charted in a dozen countries including the US. And when I spent an evening listening to Ryuichi Sakamoto's music after his untimely death in March, I happened across Casa, a 2001 record he made with Jacques and Paula Morelenbaum, a Brazilian cellist-and-vocalist couple. Sakamoto cheekily weaves his soundtrack theme from "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" into the bossa beats, then does the same with Chopin's "Etude in E Minor." The genre is nothing if not adaptable.

What is its continuing appeal? Charles Waring, a music essayist, believes it's that bossa nova excels in "hushed intimacy, poetic lyrics, alluring melodies, and mesmerizing rhythms. ... It possesses an ineffable quality that just seems to epitomize coolness, transcend time, and transport the listener to another place."

For me, despite years of listening to João Gilberto, Luiz Bonfá, Jobim, and others, in some ways the genre remains a mystery. There's a Ween lyric, from the song "Pandy Fackler," that goes, She was almost in a coma, from doing the bossa nova.

I identify with that. That near-comatose state could be the result of either spiritedness and physical exhaustion or its polar opposite. While there's excitement in the percussive guitar plucking and the natural swing and sway of the beat, bossa nova also conveys a muted melancholy that borders on languidness. It's soothing and serene. You're as likely to want to dance to it as to sink into your midcentury Eames chair and let the music wash over you as you drift off to sleep. It's lovely, and I can think of no other genre that does that.

---

Footnote 3: Via Amazon's Stingray DJazz channel, $6.99/month.

Footnote 4: See tinyurl.com/2pr8yvbn.