Astrud Gilberto remembered as the voice of bossa nova
Astrud Gilberto was not credited on the first single release of The Girl From Ipanema, but it became her signature song and her voice delighted millions.
Astrud Gilberto did not come from Ipanema and it was never intended that she should sing the song with which she became synonymous.
The “accident” that changed her life happened one day in March 1963 in a New York studio, where her husband, Joao Gilberto, was recording an album with American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz.
The record was destined to become one of the biggest-selling jazz albums of all time and turned the world on to the sound of the bossa nova rhythms of Brazil. Astrud had never sung on a record before and was merely there to support her husband.
One of the songs they planned to record was Garota de Ipanema. It had been written by Brazilian pianist Antonio Carlos Jobim, with lyrics in Portuguese by singer Vinicius de Moraes about a beautiful teenage girl, called Heloisa Pinheiro, whom the two men had admired passing by as they drank at the Veloso Bar on Rio de Janeiro’s Ipanema beach.
The lyrics were translated into English by Norman Gimbel, who came up with the song’s unforgettable opening lines: “Tall and tan and young and lovely / The girl from Ipanema goes walking / And when she passes, each one she passes goes, ‘Ahhh’.”
When the album’s producer, Creed Taylor, decided they should record the song with its English lyrics, he immediately realised he had a problem. Joao Gilberto spoke no English, nor did any of the other professionals in the studio.
“Astrud was in the control room and Creed said he wanted to get the song done right away and looked around the room,” recalled Phil Ramone, who engineered the session. “Astrud volunteered, saying she could sing in English. Creed said, ‘Great’. She wasn’t a professional singer, but she was the only victim sitting there that night.”
She took the lyric sheet with trembling hands and in what she called “a little bit of fate” proceeded to sing in a dreamily romantic and sensual voice that fitted the song like a silk glove. Taylor later said he knew The Girl from Ipanema was going to be a smash “from the moment Astrud came in with her little voice and sang with that accent”.
Yet when the record was released as a single in 1964, her name did not even appear in the credits, although that changed when The Girl from Ipanema became an international hit, won a Grammy award for record of the year and earned Astrud a nomination for best female vocal performance.
The song was also used as the opening track on the 1964 album, Getz/Gilberto, and she sang a second song on the record, Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars). The album went on to become a million-seller and spent almost two years in the American charts. “It was Astrud Gilberto who made the album a smash hit,” Bryan McCann, professor of Brazilian history at Georgetown University, wrote in his 2018 book, Getz/Gilberto. “Astrud provided the ineffable allure that made the album irresistible.”
The men around her were more concerned with arguing about who should take the plaudits for “discovering” her. Taylor, her husband and Jobim all claimed it had been their idea to get her to sing. So did Getz. “She was just a housewife and I put her on that record because I wanted The Girl from Ipanema sung in English, which Joao couldn’t do. That was a lucky break for her,” he claimed with more than a whiff of condescension.
The remark rankled the singer. “The funny thing is that after my success, stories abound as to Stan Getz or Creed Taylor having ‘discovered’ me, when in fact nothing is further from the truth,” she said. “I guess it made them look important to have been the one that had the ‘wisdom’ to recognise potential in my singing. I suppose I should feel flattered by the importance that they lend to this, but I can’t help but feel annoyed that they resorted to lying.”
Every bit as galling was that she went unpaid for her definitive version of what is said to be the second-most recorded song in popular music behind the Beatles’ Yesterday. Frank Sinatra, Amy Winehouse and Madonna are among the hundreds of singers to record The Girl from Ipanema, which has also featured in numerous films and TV shows.
In the 2003 book, Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World, author Ruy Castro revealed that Joao Gilberto got $23,000 for his work on the album while Getz pocketed a sum estimated to be not far short of $1m, with which he bought himself a 23-room mansion in Irvington, New York.
Astrud earned only the musicians’ union scale rate for a night of session work – a paltry $120 – and there is some doubt as to whether even that was ever actually paid. The music industry was full of “wolves posing as sheep”, she claimed.
Yet she proved to be remarkably resilient and after leaving Getz’s band she built a successful career. She made her solo debut in London in 1965 and over the next six years made eight albums, earning another Grammy nomination. She also worked with such jazz luminaries as pianist Gil Evans, saxophonist Stanley Turrentine and Quincy Jones, although she insisted she was not a jazz singer. “I’ve been told that my phrasing is jazz-influenced but I prefer simplicity,” she said.
Although she was an international star, oddly the one country where she went uncelebrated was her native Brazil. The reasons for the hostility towards her were never entirely clear but she made no secret of the fact that what she called the “harsh criticism and unwarranted sarcasm” of the Brazilian media left her “very hurt”.
She was so upset that in 1965 she declared she would never perform in the country of her birth again. She kept her promise and declined to attend the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro at which The Girl from Ipanema was played. After divorcing Gilberto, she lived for the rest of her life in the US.
Even in her old age, in the public’s imagination she remained the girl from Ipanema, the sound of her voice able in an instant to banish the cares of the world by conjuring visions of a land of suntanned, youthful bliss.
Astrud Gilberto, singer. Born Salvador, Brazil, March 29, 1940. Died Philadelphia, June 5, aged 83.
The Times