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

things to do than to parade around the Carnival King. They were very busy restoring, painting, and decorating a 1,500-square-foot basement at 74, Rua Dr. Moura Brito. It wasn’t exactly a basement, but the ground floor, with a separate entrance, of a two-story house, the residential part of which was on the second floor. The girls were named Joca, Didi, and Teresa Queiroz, were aged between fifteen and seventeen years old and, like all their friends,wore ponytails, checkered skirts and knee socks, and swooned over Robert Taylor. The three bobby-soxers studied at the Instituto Brasil–Estados Unidos (Brazilian-American Institute), were cousins, and lived in their family’s two-story house.
    They hosted a work party for their neighborhood friends and transformed the basement: they waxed the parquet floor; they lined the ceiling with a green-and white-striped canvas; they created a makeshift minibar with an old Norge refrigerator filled with supplies of Crush, Guará, and Coca-Cola; and—most importantly—they papered the walls with record sleeves, clippings from
Life
and
O Cruzeiro
magazines, photos, and anything else connected with their favorite singers, Frank Sinatra and his Brazilian counterpart Dick Farney. (Later, the décor would be further improved with a huge poster of the two idols—together!)
    By the entrance, Joca, Didi, and Teresa hung the framed musical scores of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” and João de Barro and Alberto Ribeiro’s “Copacabana,” cut in two, forming a rectangle. The two songs were symbols ofthat era. “Night and Day,” first recorded in 1932 by Fred Astaire, would become almost the exclusive property of Sinatra in the forties and, combined with his collection of bow ties, had been one of the main causes of female fainting fits during World War II. (Those who are less than a hundred years old might not believe it, but Frank Sinatra
was
a sex symbol in those days. He was also so thin that when he walked around on stage with the microphone in his hand—he was one of the first singers to do this—he had to be careful not to disappear behind the cord.) And “Copacabana” was the song that shot Brazilian Dick Farney to fame, proving to nonbelievers that it was possible to be hip, romantic, and sensual in Portuguese, without the operatic raptures of Vicente Celestino.
    There was a reason for the excitement of Joca, Didi, and Teresa and their friends: the basement was being overhauled in order to become the headquarters of a fan club—the first in Brazil.

    If Farnésio Dutra, a Carioca, had kept his original name, he would probably not have gone far. But with such a charming name as Dick Farney, the velvet fingers that played piano in Carlos Machado’s orchestra at the Urca Casino back when gambling was allowed, and his casual, soft singing style, his opportunities increased tenfold. With just one record, he became the national answer to the prayers of a good number of young postwar Brazilians who had fallen in love with the American swing bands, crooners, and vocal ensembles. For these young people—whose reservations about Carmen Miranda derived largely from the fact that she had not become sufficiently Americanized—the world was not a tambourine, but rather Axel Stordahl’s sophisticated harmonies for Sinatra’s records with Columbia. Or, at its most extreme, the sea of guitars, violins, cellos, and oboes led by maestro Radamés Gnatalli, lapping at the sands and mermaids embodied in the music sung by Dick. The suave Farney recorded “Copacabana” with Continental in July 1946, at the age of 25. Then, in an unheard-of move by a Brazilian novice singer, he barely waited for the wax to dry before leaving his fans watching the ships in Praça Mauá, boarding one of them in search of the greatest adventure: trying to build a career in America as an American singer.
    Successfully singing in English in the United States seemed like madness at a time when Brazilian