Song of the Day 5/30: João Gilberto, “Chega de Saudade”

Guest post by Nathan Arizona

The warm weather always gets me thinking about the beaches of Ipanema. I’ve never been to Rio, but every spring and summer I get transported to Brazil when I break out the bossa nova. The mellow blend of samba and American cool jazz is perfect for kicking back with a rum drink as the balmy breezes waft by. Though bossa nova had its glory days in the 1960s, It never seems to go away. Songs like “The Girl From Ipanema” stay on the soundtrack of summer year after year.

But bossa nova also showed that revolutionary music can be smooth and sophisticated.

Bossa nova didn’t assault Brazil’s music traditions with electric guitars and loud drums, but the harmonies and rhythms were quirky enough, the tunes on acoustic guitar so deceptively simple, that one of its first hit songs translated from the Portuguese as “Out of Tune,” a knowing and ironic challenge to the musical establishment. On the other hand, bossa nova was embraced by poets and intellectuals as a new avant garde.

This whole bossa nova or “new thing” business made the Brazilian government nervous after a new military dictatorship took over. Just a few years after it got started, bossa nova, mellow as it was, was declared to be un-Brazilian. Many of the artists left the country, often for the U.S. By then bossa nova had taken America by storm, driven by the recordings of jazz sax player Stan Getz, the first of many Americans who thought the style worth adopting.

Getz often performed with João Gilberto, who released the first bossa nova recording in 1959, collaborating with Antonio Carlos Jobim. Jobim had already had some success in the music industry but quickly picked up on what Gilberto was doing. Unlike the more buttoned-down Jobim, Gilberto was kind of a misfit. He left his rural home town for the city as a teen-ager and scuffled for a few years as he developed his sound, often sleeping on the couch of any friend who would take him in. With encouragement and assistance from more successful musicians, he finally got his chance.

Here’s that first bossa nova recording, “Chega De Saudade” (“No More Blues”).

Gilberto sang on an early version of “The Girl From Ipanema” with Getz, but it was his then-wife Astrud who handled vocals on the version that became a hit in 1964 and turned her into a star. Jobim, who wrote the song, became the best-known bossa nova composer. But he had written a bossa-like song before the movement even had a name for the 1959 movie “Black Orpheus,” a French production with international distribution that put Brazil in the spotlight and helped pave the way for the bossa nova craze.

But no bossa nova song ever surpassed “The Girl From Ipanema” in popularity. It showed up all over American pop culture. This clip from the movie “Get Yourself a College Girl” suggests how pervasive the song was. It’s a silly scene, but that’s still Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz doing the nova thing.