Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (5 page)

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 musicians’ only apparent use was to feature as whimsical characters in Walt Disney films set in Bahia. (Or not? After all, his namesake, Dick Haymes, was Argentine—and despite everything, he was Dick Haymes!) It’s true that Farney already had a starting contract for fifty-two weeks with the radio chain NBC—the brainchild of an American conductor named Bill Hitchcock, who had heard him at the Urca. The opportunities in Brazil for singers like him, who needed to be accompanied by a large orchestra, were few
and far between. President Eurico Gaspar Dutra had threatened to close the casinos (“You’ll shee: I shall closhe the cashinoshe,” he announced in his peculiar diction), and indeed he did. In doing so, he also shut down the orchestras who played at them, and laid off innumerable crooners.

So what did Dick have to lose now? Not a lot, and maybe something would pan out. He had a good image, perfect English, the voice of Bing Crosby (with a few Sinatra-like touches) and, most importantly, he had already mastered an enviable jazz piano style. And didn’t everything work out? Within a short time, reports began to arrive that Dick was truly dominating the chic cabarets of New York, recording hits such as “Tenderly” with Majestic Records, and that he had even managed to land two radio programs dedicated exclusively to him, sponsored by Pepsi-Cola and Chesterfields cigarettes. Of course, there were those who sneered quietly to themselves and refused to believe the reports.

In order to silence the skeptics, live recordings of those programs, brought over on V-discs by Dick’s father, began to make the rounds of the radio stations in Rio, as if providing proof of the crime. (V-discs were sixteen-inch 33 r.p.m. acetate records produced by the Allied forces during World War II in order to bombard the Axis powers with Glenn Miller recordings. They were part of Allied propaganda. With the final victory of “In the Mood” over “Die Fahne Hoch,” those cumbersome objects were used to record everything, but only the radio stations had the equipment needed to play them.) From that point on, no one doubted that Americans were actually paying money to hear a Brazilian named Dick Farney.

In the two and a half years that followed his departure, his Brazilian recording label, Continental, continued to flood the domestic market with the songs he had recorded, of which he had left behind a large supply before he departed. His renditions of other songs that were even more modern than “Copacabana,” like “Ser ou não ser” (To Be or Not to Be), “Marina,” and “Esquece” (Forget) were launched in dribs and drabs during 1947 and 1948, in the hope of maintaining Farney’s popularity should he return one day.

Dick
return
? At that point, no one in Brazil thought that would happen. The more presumptuous believed that, if he continued in the same vein, Dick would soon overshadow Sinatra himself and, following in Carmen Miranda’s footsteps, would only return to Brazil on vacation. After all, his recording of “Tenderly,” a ballad by the pianist Walter Gross—at that time accompanist to the young Mel Tormé—had entered the American charts, or so they believed. Why would Dick want to return to Brazil?

But in December 1948, he announced his return to Rio de Janeiro—to stay. He would leave behind the success he had managed to build abroad in order to pursue his career in Brazil. No one really understood why, but Brazilians being who they are, many saw this as a patriotic gesture, and his popularity in Brazil
exploded. No one questioned his return. If they had, and Dick had replied—like many others before and after him—”The food didn’t agree with me,” “I missed my mother,” or “Folks, there’s no moonlight like this, etc.,” they would have thought it perfectly normal. But Dick didn’t proffer any of those clichés, and, anyway, they didn’t fit to his image as a well-bred, refined, and wordly gentleman.

The truth was that he returned because his contract with NBC had expired and there weren’t any promising opportunities on the horizon—a common situation for any musician in his own country, but very inconvenient for a foreigner.

And besides, he
did
miss his mother.

A few months before Dick Farney’s return, Praça Mauá would receive another Brazilian who had come from New York: the broadcaster Luís Serrano, who stepped off the boat with a suitcase full of records and two or three ideas in his head. The records were the latest hits released in the United States by Capitol, a recording label founded in 1943 in Los Angeles by the composer Johnny Mercer and others. In just a short time, Capitol would become, both artistically and commercially, the most cutting-edge label in the market. Every label needs at least one star in order to launch itself. Well, Capitol started with the guitarist Les Paul (the very same inventor of the famous guitar), Woody Herman’s and Stan Kenton’s bands, the world-famous “King” Cole Trio, and singers like Mel Tormé, Margaret Whiting, Peggy Lee, Dinah Shore, Rose Murphy, and Nellie Lutcher. How about that? Only, none of them were stars when they were signed by Capitol. But it didn’t take long for them to become stars, and when that happened, Capitol became the hottest record label on the planet. The company even built that revolutionary building, shaped like a stack of records, on Vine Street in Los Angeles.

In 1948, Capitol identified a market to be conquered in Brazil, and considered installing a representative there. Luís Serrano was the go-between, and the Brazilian recording label that was awarded its representation rights was Sinter, which had just barely been launched—and, not coincidentally, belonged to Luís’s brother Paulo Serrano. The first records produced by those stars began to come out in Brazil in 1950, which spared jazz fans from coming to blows over them in Rio stores that imported records, such as Lojas Murray and Suebra.

Luís Serrano had another idea which he didn’t hesitate to carry out: hosting a daily program called Disc-Jockey on Rádio Globo, from 6:00 to 6:30 P.M. The program’s very name was ultra-hip and, among other innovative features, he played records (almost all the music heard on radio then was live), interviewed musicians, and encouraged significant interaction between fans, just as had begun to be done in the United States. And just like in the United States, this
exchange of information was much easier and more useful to him if the fans gathered in clubs—fan clubs—whose activities he would promote and which he could furnish with records (with an understandable preference for Capitol’s upcoming international events).

Serrano inaugurated the program at the end of that year and mentioned the idea of the clubs on the air. Joca, Didi, and Teresa were the first to jump at it. In a few days, they had appropriately outfitted the basement in Tijuca; they informed Serrano that they would be the owners; he alerted Sinatra and Farney fans over the microphone at Rádio Globo; the fans began to appear in Rua Dr. Moura Brito; Dick Farney was returning to Brazil—and, in February of 1949, ignoring the uproar of
cuícas
and
reco-recos
coming from the uncivilized outside world, they declared the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club officially open.

And, unbeknownst to all, bossa nova was already being dreamed up.

For many members, even those who later became celebrities, having belonged to the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club was one of the greatest achievements of their lives. Just ask the saxophonist Paulo Moura. He was seventeen, a tailor’s apprentice, and for a while was refused membership. On arriving at the club and asking for an application to join, he learned that his admission hinged on what he knew how to play on the clarinet he carried under his arm. (All members had to be able to dance, sing, or play an instrument, even if they did it badly—but not
too
badly.) The boy played a few scales and his judges, their ears finely tuned to what they had heard Benny Goodman do with the same instrument, were not overly impressed. Moura got in by the skin of his teeth, and only because the club needed a clarinetist. Two years later, Paulo Moura would face a tougher jury, that of the long-haired National School of Music, and would play those same scales so well that they not only admitted him, they made him skip ahead to the fifth year. Those girls were a little too strict.

Johnny Alf, then twenty years old, needed a piano. Compared to the other members, the young Alf (whose real name was Alfredo José da Silva) was considered poor. His father was an army corporal who had been drafted to fight in the Brazilian civil war of 1932, and died in combat in the valley of Paraíba when Alfredo was only three years old. His mother, a maid, had gone to work in the home of a family in Tijuca and took Alfredo with her. His mother’s boss liked music, and the boy. She enrolled him in IBEU (Instituto Brasil–Estados Unidos—Brazilian-American Institute), where they gave him his nickname and made him study classical piano with the instructor, Geni Bálsamo. But, because he had to share the instrument with other family members, Alf spent more time listening to records by the “King” Cole Trio or the English pianist George Shearing than
actually practicing. When he found out that the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club had a piano that was silent most of the time, he overcame his extreme shyness and joined. He was easily accepted: all Alf had to do was to open the piano and run his fingers over the keys for fifteen seconds.

The Sinatra-Farney Fan Club piano was an old brown upright Playel, the heroic ex-accompaniment to silent films, with keys so decayed that it appeared to have been a reject from the cinema for the deaf. It had been donated by a member named Carlos Manga, whose mother had wanted to get rid of it and had thought about selling it to the rag-and-bone man. It was out-of-tune down to the very last note, and following its donation, the club evicted a family of cockroaches that were nesting in it, turned it over to a piano tuner, and had it revarnished. Alf had permission to spend weekday afternoons—outside the club’s normal opening hours—practicing and trying out songs like “I’m in the Mood for Love” and “How High the Moon,” as long as he didn’t make too much noise.

Noise was the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club’s main problem. Despite the tolerant attitude of the owners of the house, Dr. José Queiroz and Dona Jandira, Joca’s parents, and Dona Zeca, Didi and Teresa’s mother, the girls were only given permission to turn the basement into a club provided that they didn’t bother the neighbors. This limited the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club’s activities to Saturday afternoons and evenings, so in the beginning a good part of the music that was played there came from an ancient Victrola set up by the father of a member named Oswaldo Carneiro. It had only one speaker, a laryngitic amplifier, and a turntable that would only play 78 r.p.m. records—whose disposable steel RCA Victor needles were the length and thickness of rose thorns. It was those kind of needles, from the days of Enrico Caruso, that dragged doggedly over the ultramodern arrangements by Pete Rugolo for Stan Kenton’s orchestra on purple label Capitol records—which had not yet been released in Brazil, but that Luís Serrano provided with great pleasure. The fan club might have been dedicated to Sinatra and Farney, but the enthusiasm of its members for Stan Kenton was quite overwhelming. People would all but fall to their knees when listening to his recording of “Artistry in Rhythm.”