Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (49 page)

For Johnny Alf, it was the beginning of the usual pilgrimage by evening musicians, going from nightclub to nightclub, having to move on before managing to establish a regular clientele because the nightclub went under, or was converted to a whorehouse or a gas station. In the years that followed, until 1961, he played at the Michel and the Feitiço, also in Rua Major Sertório; the Golden Ball, on the corner of Rua Augusta with Avenida Paulista; the Tetéia, in Avenida Ipiranga; the La Ronde, in Praça da República; the new Baiúca, in Praça Roosevelt; and the After Dark, in Avenida Indianópolis. He played at several of them more than once. Wherever he went, he took his small but elite audience with him.

It’s possible to argue that he wasn’t ever out of work. Sometimes he had the honor of being invited to play at good clubs, like the nightclub at the Hotel Lancaster, on Rua Augusta, where he played with a trio. That was when the going was good. But when times were harder, he was forced to play at two whorehouses, the Stardust and the Club de Paris.

There was nothing very serious about all that bouncing back and forth, if his music, despite being popular, hadn’t remained the same. While Alf was hiding out in nightclubs in São Paulo, his former fans at the Plaza (Jobim, João Gilberto, Carlinhos Lyra) were making the music scene in Rio happen. (Newton Mendonça also hid out in nightclubs, only in Copacabana, and had Jobim there to keep his head above water.) So when Johnny Alf was finally able to record an album six years later in 1961, it was as if Brazil had moved up a year and he had been left behind to repeat. Formidable songs like “Rapaz de bem,” “Ilusão à toa,” and “O que é amar” (What It Is to Love) seemed to have lost their impact. On stage at the School of Architecture in 1960, at the invitation of Ronaldo Bôscoli to the
Night of Love, a Smile, and a Flower,
Johnny Alf could almost be classified as retro. And what good was it for him to hear Bôscoli announcing at the microphone that “Johnny Alf has been playing bossa nova music for ten years” if nobody was interested?

João Donato had a different experience. In 1959, he had no audience in Rio because everyone thought he played jazz, so he went to California to play Latin music—which was what in fact he was trying to do in Brazil, only nobody realized it. Upon his arrival there, he was immediately adopted by the
cool cats
of the genre, like the Latins Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, and Johnny Rodriguez, and the Americans Cal Tjader, Herbie Mann, and Eddie Palmieri. Without knowing it, Donato’s career had been similar to theirs: Santamaria and Tjader were, respectively, the conga and vibraphone players for George Shearing’s Latin super-quintet, whose records he had played nonstop on the Victrola in 1953; and Tito Puente was a kind of Latin Stan Kenton. In turn, Kenton was the major American influence on all Cuban musicians at the time,
with his recording of “23°N–83°W,” whose title, by the way, represented Havana’s map coordinates.

Donato felt right at home in the middle of all those congas, timbales, and bongos of Latin jazz, with possibilities for splitting up the wind instruments and creating the craziest piano harmonies. Everything was allowed, given that the rhythm was an
enchilada
of mambos, rumbas, sambas, and—
¿porque nó?
—bossa novas. The West Coast, where these musicians were based, was then, even more than New York, the melting pot for Latin music. From 1959 to 1961, he played piano with Mongo Santamaria and participated in the first recording of “Para tí” (For You), played trombone and wrote the arrangements for Tito Puente’s brass instruments, recorded extensively with Cal Tjader, who was already famous, and with Eddie Palmieri, who wasn’t yet. His appearance on the scene was quite simply stunning.

In the years that followed, they all began to use Donato’s songs in their repertoire, such as “A rã” (The frog), “Amazonas” (Amazon), “Cadê Jodel?” (Where Is Jodel?), and they became standards for what was later called funk music. Donato himself soon started putting together his albums at prestigious Pacific Records—and had his songbook recorded by other corn-tortilla-with-chilies-loving jazz musicians, like vibraphonist Dave Pike. Donato had an entry in Leonard Feather’s
Encyclopaedia of Jazz in the Sixties
, an achievement that he was unable to repeat in the
Encyclopaedia of Jazz in the Seventies
, also by Feather—because as the Americans also discovered, he was still the little boy in short pants that he had been when he was a member of the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club.

Sigrid and LetÌcia (above, with Sérgio Mendes, seated) perform the bossa nova “dance” at Bottles Bar

Collection of João Luiz de Albuquerque

A
ccording to a widely circulated story, Vinícius de Moraes went into the Arpège nightclub in 1962 to support his friend Tom Jobim who was there at the piano, struggling to make some pocket money, and came out with his future partner: a young man who played electric guitar in the dance band, named Baden Powell. Vinícius, who had never heard Baden play before, was very taken with what he was playing—a broad range of songs that included everything from “My Funny Valentine” to “Stupid Cupid.” He sought him out after the show and asked him outright to be his partner, starting that very night. Baden was astonished—after all, this was
Vinícius de Moraes
! He nodded in agreement and, to the dismay of the poet, disappeared from sight. Days later, after getting up the courage, Baden went to his house. Then the two of them shut themselves up in Vinícius’s apartment, drank half of Scotland’s production, and only emerged three months later, with twenty-five finished songs.

Nobody knows how this story began, but it’s one of those typical bossa nova legends that make everything seem very unpremeditated in order to depict its protagonists as shy, frightened young men. Only the end of the story about Baden and Vinícius is actually true. In 1962, Jobim was already too famous for playing at the Arpège, a B-class nightclub in the Leme neighborhood. And the identity of Baden Powell, who did in fact play in a dance band, was no secret either. In fact, all singers and musicians in Rio knew him at least by his curious name (that of the founder of the Boy Scouts)—Vinícius included. It’s somewhat of a stretch to think that, for what he had in mind, the poet would invite him to be his partner based purely on what he had heard him play in the nightclub.

The two of them did meet about that time through a mutual friend, the businessman Nilo Queiroz, one of Baden’s guitar students. Nilo got them together at his apartment in Avenida Atlântica, on the corner of Rua Duvivier, with the hope that something would come out of their meeting. After listening to Baden Powell all night long, playing even Villa-Lobos, Vinícius made his offer. And Queiroz had no reason whatsoever to be nervous about the proposal, because he was waiting for it—Baden had already discussed it with him. What he didn’t know was that, on entering Vinícius’s apartment in Parque Guinle, he would spend the next three months locked up in there, enjoying the biggest and best drinking binge of his life, out of which would come twenty-five songs and a new career on the horizon.

That ethylico-musical retreat produced, among other songs, “Consolação” (Consolation), “Samba em prelúdio” (Samba in Prelude), “Só por amor” (Only for Love), “Labareda” (Flame), “O astronauta” (The Astronaut), “Bom dia, amigo” (Good Day, Friend), “Tempo de amor” (Time of Love) (later better known as “Samba do Veloso” in homage to the bar in Rua Montenegro),
“Berimbau,” and almost all the
afro-sambas
, including the “Cantos” (Chants) for Ossanha, Xangô, and Iemanjá. It was an extraordinary production, both for the number of songs and their quality, especially taking into consideration how much they drank during those three months, and the fact that Baden managed to lend such a Bahian flavor to the
afro-sambas
without ever having been to Bahia.

How much they drank was proudly calculated by Vinícius: twenty cases of Haig’s Scotch whiskey, which worked out to a total of 240 two-liter flagons—or 2.666 ordinary-sized bottles per day. It seems like a lot, but it wouldn’t have been such a ridiculous quantity for two hardened drinkers like Baden and Vinícius if, at the beginning, they hadn’t also been swigging gin, which they didn’t include in the count. And there was no proof that one of their frequent visitors, former president Juscelino Kubitshcek, Vinicius’s friend, then senator for Goiás, contributed much to the depletion of their stock.

As for the Bahian flavor of the music, Baden was given an extensive briefing by Vinícius as he prepared to write that series of songs, and the two of them had an album of Bahian folksongs, which the poet had been given by his friend Carlos Coqueijo, to serve as an aural guide. From this record, they gleaned the recipes for
samba-de-roda
,
pontos de candomblé
, and
berimbau
melodies. Would it be possible to one day forgive Baden and Vinícius for popularizing the
berimbau
, the most annoying instrument in the world after the bagpipes? (Baden only went to Bahia, by the way, years later in 1968, when he spent six months there and came back with “Lapinha.”) As for Vinícius, he left the apartment after the three-month binge and immediately admitted himself to the São Vicente Clinic, where he and Baden, undaunted, wrote three more great songs: “Amei tanto” (I Loved So Much), “Pra que chorar” (Why Cry?) and “Samba da benção” (Benediction Samba).

Strangely enough, a large part of what they wrote was consigned to a drawer and took a long time to emerge. (The album
Os afro-sambas
[The Afro-Sambas] was only recorded four years later, in 1966.) But for Baden, his work with Vinícius was a turning point in his personal and professional life. With it, he ceased definitively to be the boy who lived in the Ramos suburb, who from the age of seventeen had commuted by train to and from the nightclubs, at which he played in dance bands, and occasionally was forced to spend twelve hours on a bus in order to accompany singer Ivon Curi somewhere in the interior of the state of Minas Gerais. At nineteen, in 1956, he managed to get a job with Ed Lincoln’s combo at the Plaza nightclub, where he was able at least to play a little jazz, his passion. It would have been great, if there had been anyone in the nightclub to hear him play.

In those days, Baden was so used to playing to invisible audiences that he could practically manage to play his guitar without even taking it out of its
canvas case. Badeco, of Os Cariocas, used to go to the Plaza to see his friends, and would hang out with Baden into the early morning. Baden wanted to show Badeco a new technique he had learned on the guitar and just grabbed the strings beneath the canvas and produced the sound he wanted. In the years that followed, Baden made the rounds of the nightclubs, which included the Midnight at the Copacabana Palace, playing with Copinha’s orchestra, and ended up at TV Continental, accompanying singers. But within a short time the singers began to complain: unless the cameras focused only on their faces, viewers wouldn’t take their eyes off Baden’s guitar. Just imagine if he had been good-looking.

As a studio musician, Baden then began to get busier than he really wanted, recording at Philips with practically everyone, from Carlinhos Lyra to a small moldy-fig group called Lyra de Xopotó, without ever getting credit on the album sleeve. Just when he thought he would die undiscovered, Philips let him make his first commissioned album, in 1960, and his second in 1961, but with the kind of repertoire that at the time induced people to spare their needles—”Estrellita” (Little Star), “Ojos verdes” (Green Eyes), “Minha palhoça” (My Straw Hut). And with a name like his, people thought his albums were about scouting. (In fact, Baden Powell de Aquino was never a Boy Scout. But his father had been and, as you can tell, slightly fanatically so.)

Until Vinícius came on the scene, the only people who had shown any interest in writing with Baden had been Billy Blanco, in 1959, with “Samba triste” (Sad Samba) (which Lúcio Alves had been the first to record), and his student and defender Nilo Queiroz. It was unfortunate for the others, because Vinícius snatched Baden up in his prime, and with the decisive collaboration of Professor Clementino Fraga at the São Vicente Clinic, who kept the two of them alive, the three created the best duo the world had ever seen since Haig & Haig.