Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (14 page)

It might have been possible to live in Copacabana and not encounter any of that, but Antônio Maria would go to the liveliest places in the neighborhood at the dead of night. Besides, that’s what they paid him for. In his description, “men urinated unhurriedly in the doorways of bars and delinquents would harass defenseless passersby, just a few meters away from policemen who, instead of intervening, would pick their teeth and guffaw rudely.” Every building had “an average of fifty windows,” behind which were concealed, according to his accounts, “three instances of adultery, five of ‘love by the hour,’ six of unmarried sex, and only two of couples who had been married before God or a judge.” It appeared that nothing was happening behind the other thirty-four windows, but “it was only a matter of waiting for the evening papers: they would describe shootings, murders, burglaries, divorces, and suicides.” And if that weren’t enough, there was always a water shortage.

From 1948 to 1964, Antônio Maria wrote a very popular column in several Rio newspapers (
Diário Carioca, O Jornal, Última Hora
, and
O Globo
). In his daily update on the Zona Sul nightlife (or that of Copacabana, given that Ipanema had been practically annexed by it, and the nightlife in Leblon was so dead that there were doubts of its existence), Maria described a suffocating and claustrophobic
noir
environment, where love lives were like the lyrics to a tango with a
samba-canção
beat. He must have known what he was talking about because if you were to summarize the content of his own songs, you would soon be convinced that nobody loved anybody else, and that if Maria were to die tomorrow, no one would miss him. People felt like dregs that others tossed out, and you could be sure that if Maria quarreled with a woman at five past three in the morning, just five minutes later it would already be too late for reconciliation. That’s life. At least, that’s what his lyrics said.

But, after all, it can’t have been that bad because Antônio Maria, a Pernambuco native, lived in Copacabana for practically the entire time he was
in Rio. And he spent a large part of that time inside bars, nightclubs, and restaurants, from Leme to Posto 6, and became somewhat of a legend in many of them. He had an open, witty, and generous character, but he could also be rowdy, tempestuous, and difficult—especially after his tenth whiskey. Not everyone liked him, but most people wouldn’t dare confront him face-to-face. This was hardly surprising: Maria was six feet two inches tall, and carried a very stout 285-pound frame of muscle and fat. But his presence on the radio and the power of his column were far more intimidating, being capable of creating or destroying reputations. There was a time when his disapproval of an artist or show inevitably signified its untimely death.

The first half of the 1950s in Rio were the Antônio Maria years. His presence was reflected in the lives of the people, even when he didn’t know what he was doing, which wasn’t unusual. He gave the impression that, if he were on board a ship and leaned to one side to scratch his back, the entire vessel would tip over. He did this when he hinted about Jonas Silva’s situation with Os Garotos da Lua and they had to send for João Gilberto, who would soon change the course of all popular music.

At Rádio Tupi, Maria wasn’t just the director of the Production Department. He also provided soccer commentary, wrote comedy programs, produced daily chronicles, and wrote the music and lyrics for advertising jingles. When television began, he soon conquered the screen with his great height and weight, barely leaving any room onscreen for others. In 1951, he was the focus of the most expensive transaction in Brazilian radio up until then, when he left Rádio Tupi and went to Rádio Mayrink Veiga for fifty thousand cruzeiros a month, an unheard-of amount. No singer, not even Francisco Alves, earned a salary like that, and Francisco Alves had a much better voice.

As he also controlled the newspapers, Antônio Maria could dictate the tastes of the era at will. Naturally, to the will of his own tastes. And that was for the rhythm that was created when samba and ballad were caught in bed together; the
samba-canção
, although there were suspicions that the child’s father was the bolero and conception had occurred at a moment when samba had been otherwise occupied. Maria did not invent the
samba-canção
, which had already been fighting for a spot in the limelight since the beginning of the forties. But he championed its cause, especially when he started to produce examples of it as a composer. He had the good fortune to burst onto the scene at the beginning, in 1952, with “Ninguém me ama” (Nobody Loves Me), for which he did everything: he wrote the music and lyrics, did the promotion, chose the singer, and even gave his friend Fernando Lobo a partnership in the whole deal.

“Ninguém me ama” did a lot for a number of people. It launched Antônio Maria as a composer. For Nora Ney, who sang the song, it started her career.
Recently departed from the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club, Nora had done very well in heeding Dick Farney’s advice to change her name (Iracema Ferreira) to something more artistic. It gave young evening piano players, like Tom (Antonio Carlos) Jobim and Newton Mendonça, a path to follow when they became composers. And for an even younger generation—that of Carlinhos Lyra, Roberto Menescal, and other fifteen-year-olds in 1952—it was also important for providing contrast. For them, “Ninguém me ama” was what they
didn’t
want to do.

Although the song’s success kept him in whiskey for several years, even Antônio Maria got fed up with it, because he could no longer go into nightclubs without the resident crooners starting to sing it, in an effort to ingratiate themselves with him. At one of these clubs, The Michel, when the pianist, on catching sight of him, started playing the opening bars, Maria jumped in ahead of the singer and parodied his own lyrics, singing: “Nobody loves me / Nobody cares / Nobody calls me / Baudelaire.”

The omnipresent quality of Antônio Maria’s music gave one the impression that he composed a great deal. In fact, he produced very little: around sixty songs, even if you count the
frevos
,
dobrados
, and
maxixes
that his friends charitably raved about. But when Maria got it right, he did it in style, which is what almost always happened in his partnerships with Ismael Netto, the leader of Os Cariocas. Maria and Ismael made ten songs together, of which “Canção da volta” (Returning Song) and “Valsa de uma cidade” (City Waltz) were more than enough to carve their names in bronze. In the latter, reporter-turned-lyricist Antônio Maria used a documentary style, which would later be adopted in bossa nova by his future nemesis Ronaldo Bôscoli.

By a cruel twist of fate, these and other songs were dubbed, for posterity, “the music of Antônio Maria,” when they were clearly written by Ismael Netto, with Maria providing the lyrics. The importance of Ismael’s contribution to Brazilian popular music as a harmonizer has yet to be recognized, but in his time he was a prodigy. In 1948, when Os Cariocas exploded with the constellation of voices in “Adeus, América” (Goodbye, America) and left other vocal ensembles open-mouthed with astonishment, Ismael was twenty-three years old. No one believed that he hadn’t received any formal music training. But he hadn’t, and from that point on, he certainly didn’t need it. Nor would he have time for it, because he died in 1956 at the age of thirty-one.

He soon became a legend at Rádio Nacional when it was realized that he could re-create with his voice, for conductor Radamés Gnatalli, the instrumental breaks that the orchestra played to accompany Os Cariocas on one of the programs for
Um milhão de melodies
: “The trombones go like this, the string section like that.” No one doubted that Ismael was capable of this, but what was unheard of was the amount of trust Radamés put in the young man.
Another of his practices, which completely astonished Nacional’s composers, was the ease with which he could dissect a complicated vocal arrangement of some popular American group, like the Pied Pipers, and distribute the voices of Os Cariocas to reproduce exactly the same sound—merely to show that if he wanted to, he could do it.

Os Cariocas owed a large part of the quality of their music to the musical discipline of the group, which was enforced by Ismael, although he could have been a poster boy for the undisciplined. He liked to hit the bottle in a big way, and it was often a miracle that Ismael and his English metallic-blue Jaguar made it in one piece to Avenida Prado Júnior, where he lived.

His sheer size, which reminded one of the old cartoon character Alley Oop, might have explained his resistance, but it wouldn’t allow him to live forever. At the end of 1955, he had barely recovered from hepatitis when he went straight to Zica’s Bar and sank several beers with gin chasers, apparently indifferent to the fact that his liver was sending him a letter of resignation. To everyone’s surprise, it wasn’t liver failure that killed him. The following year, he caught pneumonia and fell into a coma in the hospital, dying within half an hour. Ismael had been unaware that he was diabetic.

The great specter in Antonio Carlos Jobim’s life, after the payment of his rent, was his fear of contracting tuberculosis. According to his family, all musicians ended up like that, especially late evening pianists. There could have been many causes for this, but the main ones must have been the continual opening and closing of nightclub doors, the starch from dress shirts in contact with one’s chest, the content of the glasses on top of the piano, the packs of cigarettes smoked while playing “Tea for Two,” the chatter of people who frequented those places, the completely miserable pay that one received for one’s work, and the fact that the schedule completely threw off one’s body clock, preventing one from going to the beach and from arranging to have lunch and dinner with people who worked from nine to six.

There was a great deal of myth surrounding TB among pianists, but in actuality, people only remembered the singer Vassourinha and the composers Noel Rosa, Jorge Faraj, and Newton Bastos as victims of the nocturnal plague—and none of them played the piano. Be that as it may, it was not for the purpose of taking such risks that Jobim had invested the cream of his youth hunched over Villa-Lobos, Debussy, Ravel, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, and Custódio Mesquita. And besides, he was already becoming tired of staring at his plate of steak and eggs at the Far West Bar, in Posto 6, where he would see the sun rise daily, after finishing work at the club.

All nightclub pianists would suffer more or less the same torment, but Tom (as everybody called him) felt especially close to one colleague: his childhood friend Newton Mendonça. The two had known each other since Tom’s family had moved from Tijuca to Ipanema in 1927, before he had even blown out the candle on his first birthday cake. When Tom arrived in Ipanema, Newton was already there. He was born in Rua Nascimento Silva, exactly seventeen days after Tom. Since they had become friends, wearing the same little sailor outfits and catching measles at the same time, the two had lived almost parallel lives. Together with a few other friends, they even formed a harmonica group.

Being neighbors, they were the beach bums of Rua Joana Angélica and fishing partners at the Rodrigo de Freitas lake, hanging out catching birds on Cantagalo hill. Both studied piano as children. And both had absent fathers: Tom’s father, a poet and employee of the Palácio do Itamaraty (the Brazilian Foreign Affairs Ministry), left home shortly after his birth and died when Tom was eight years old; Newton’s father, an Army captain and a French and English teacher, conspired against the dictator Getúlio Vargas and was imprisoned by the police. (Newton studied at the Military College and received his high school diploma in 1945 as the “orphan of a living father,” which is what they called the children of imprisoned military personnel who had been incarcerated for political reasons.) When Getúlio was deposed that year, Newton’s father was freed and then died shortly after of a heart attack, and his family lost what they had.

Like Tom, who dropped out of his architecture course before it even began, Newton abandoned his studies and went to work. His sister became a manicurist. Newton started as an interpreter in Galeão airport (he spoke French and a little English). Afterward, following in Tom’s footsteps, he became an evening pianist. Between all the bars, nightclubs, and slightly disguised whorehouses, they played at practically every address in the Zona Sul in the early fifties: Mocambo, Tudo Azul, Clube da Chave, Acapulco, Farolito, Mandarim, La Bohème, Dominó, Vogue, Michel, French Can-Can, Posto 5, Ma Griffe, and Caroussel. The two of them hadn’t played every single one of these clubs, but at many of them Newton would go in Tom’s place, or Tom would go in Newton’s. The symmetry by which they had lived their lives was broken during one of these rotations. In 1952, Tom decided he needed to switch from working nights to working days—that is, to find a job that still allowed him to continue working with music, but in some sort of downtown office, for which he would have to carry a briefcase and put in a standard commercial work day.

Preferably, he wanted a job where he wouldn’t have to accompany crooners who were incapable of singing a single note that wasn’t off-key. It was
because of this that Tom would sometimes grab the nightclub microphone and sing out of tune himself. But mainly, he wanted a job where he wouldn’t be obliged to continually please singers.

“Ivon, do you think I’m good?,” he asked the then-famous singer Ivon Curi at the Michel nightclub, where he played.

“But of course, Tom. You’re great,” Ivon replied.

“But do you really think so?”

“Sure—what’s the problem?”

“Then tell that to Madame Fifi, to see if she’ll give me a raise.” Madame Fifi was the owner of the Michel, the nightclub on Rua Fernando Mendes.

Tom became the arranger for the recording company Continental and only sporadically returned to working at night, and only when the landlord was snapping at his heels, demanding an increase in his rent. At Continental, copying onto score sheets the samba music that the primitive
sambistas
composed on matchboxes, he decided to try his hand at composing, too. And he kept constant company with the man that every musician wanted to have at their side for at least five minutes: Radamés Gnatalli, who was also a conductor at Continental. (What was impressive was not the number of jobs that Radamés had, but the fact that he
really
worked at each and every one.)