Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

Joãozinho’s absence at church put his father in a very awkward position with the other children, but what truly bothered him was that Joãozinho wanted nothing to do with anything that wasn’t his guitar.
    In an attempt to bring him into line, he stopped giving him the usual small change for the cinema, jujubes, and other children’s treats. This created a problem for Joãozinho, who then had no money to buy cigarettes (having taken up smoking) or even worse, strings for his guitar. Any other child would have conformed under such paternal pressure. But he was saved by theunhesitating solidarity of his friends, who set aside money from their monthly allowances and took up a collection in order to subsidize his guitar string purchases—and thus, the evenings in Juazeiro continued to be lulled by his renditions of “Naná.”
    However, as if the pressure from his father weren’t enough, Juazeiro was beginning to feel too small for Joãozinho. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday in June 1949, he felt ready to leave and move far away with his voice. The first step would be to travel to Salvador, where he would sometimes go, by train, with his cousin Dewilson. The trip took twenty-four hours by train, with an overnight stay in Senhor do Bonfim, and they would take bananas to eat on the journey. During these trips to the capital, he would restrict himself to strolling through the city and coveting the radio station buildings from afar, without having the courage to actually go in and say that he was a singer. After all, he had no idea whom to ask for. But he had several important cousins living in Salvador, like Jovino, Alípio, and Yulo. When he went to live there, they would help him with the only thing he needed: to get into one of those radio stations. His voice would do the rest.
    During the last guitar sessions beneath the tamarind tree, once he had decided to leave Juazeiro, Joãozinho was in a euphoric mood, and throwing his arms wide in anticipation of what awaited him in Salvador, he announced to his friends, “Champagne, women, and music, here I come!”
    And he went.
    But João Gilberto knew from the beginning that he would not stay long in Salvador; he was on his way to Rio de Janeiro.







Part I
The Great Dream

1
The Sounds That Came out of the Basement

    The little green wallet: the passport to proximity to the inaccessible gods
    I n the summer of 1949, the natives were restless in the land of Carnival. The
cuícas
rumbled in the streets of Rio in February, and the knobs of the Philcos were already catching fire to the sounds of that year’s hits. Every three minutes, National Radio would pound out “Chiquita bacana” by Emilinha Borba and “General da banda” by Blecaute. Not even the deaf were spared the carnage. And this wasn’t even one of the worst Carnivals: some sambas and
marchinhas
were fun, like the euphoric “Que samba bom!” (What Great Samba!), the risqué “Jacarepaguá,” and the surly “Pedreiro Waldemar” (Waldemar the Stonecutter). There were dozens of other songs, written to last about as long as the effects of an inhaled squirt from a Rodouro ether atomizer at the Hotel Quitandinha dance in Petrópolis, but that, nevertheless, people learned and sang. The samba schools were for the samba dancers, not the tourists, foreign or domestic. And given that television didn’t exist, no one stayed at home like couch potatoes, merely experiencing the bizarre chaos vicar iously. They went out into the streets to have fun; during the first two months of the year, the entire city of Rio de Janeiro was a Carnival with a cast of millions (to be exact, 2,377,451 participants, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics in 1950).
    Put that way, it sounds fantastic, but for those who didn’t like samba and hated Carnival, it could be hell. That summer of 1949, for example, a gang of young men and women from Tijuca, in the Zona Norte (Northern Zone) of Rio, had better