Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (65 page)

Perhaps. But keyboard player Walter Wanderley had needed far less—just five months—to become extremely well known in America, and he did so with one of Marcos Valle’s own songs. Wanderley (whose name had the advantage of being able to be pronounced
wond’rli
) arrived in New York in 1966, hired by Creed Taylor. He recorded “Samba de verão” in May, and it went straight into the charts. In Brazil, he enjoyed great respect among musicians and his albums were popular, but nothing that would have brought the house down. His repertoire was a festival of boleros and cha-chas, when it was clear that the unbelievable rhythm of his organ deserved much more worthy material.

Those who knew him from the São Paulo nightlife already knew this in 1958, when Walter, at the age of twenty-six, arrived from Pernambuco to play at the Oásis nightclub and in the Captain’s Bar of the Comodoro Hotel. At the time, he was married to singer Isaurinha Garcia, whom he accompanied and wrote arrangements for. Around 1963, he started accompanying and writing arrangements for Claudette Soares and took advantage of the opportunity to change his repertoire, which everyone benefitted from—except perhaps Isaurinha, who lost her husband. Tony Bennett, who heard him on one of his trips to Brazil, thought he’d never heard organ music like it, recommended him to Creed Taylor, and the rest is history.

Or maybe not. Walter Wanderley’s huge success in the United States would have passed unnoticed in Brazil if his American records hadn’t occasionally been released over there, where they were received with the usual apathy. No Brazilian businessman was ever interested in bringing him over to play in his own country. The Americans, on the other hand, compared his personality to that of Fats Waller, the first jazz organist, and his technique to that of Jimmy Smith, the last. At one point, Walter Wanderley had all of the Los Angeles area jazz clubs eating out of his hand, and was constantly going off on tour to Mexico, Europe, and Japan.

Unfortunately, he appeared to suffer from that affliction that haunts certain musicians and creates barriers between them and their chance of success, as if the latter were a dangerous tiger to be kept at a distance. In his case, the barrier came in bottles. After a series of disasters that made even his most enthusiastic supporters fearful of contracting him, in 1969 the opportunity of a lifetime fell into Walter’s lap: to spend the next few years, sponsored by Holiday Inn, performing at the hundreds of hotels in the chain in the United States, Mexico, and Japan. His debut show would be the inauguration of the San Francisco Holiday Inn. For this particular show, they even invited Cyva and Cybele, from The Girls from Bahia, to do the female vocals.

All was well during the first set of the opening night. During the second set, his style was starting to become heavily influenced by Johnnie Walker. Between the second and last set, Wanderley must have swallowed a Molotov cocktail in his dressing room, because he barely managed to signal to the girls that he was going to start playing—one-two, one-two-three—before he collapsed over his keyboard like a dead weight. When they finally managed to wake him, hours later, it was goodbye Holiday Inn.

“Anyone who says they went to America and made lots of money is lying. Including me,” declared veteran guitarist Laurindo de Almeida, former Stan Kenton band member.

There are those who disagree.

“My name is Luiz Bonfá. I’m the composer of
Black Orpheus
.”

Joking aside, rumor has it that this is how Luiz Bonfá usually introduced himself to people in the United States, as if he were reading the information on a business card. This was, of course, before 1967, when he had to change what he said to: “My name is Luiz Bonfá. I’m the composer of ‘Gentle Rain.’”

Bonfá wasn’t exactly the
composer
for the film
Black Orpheus
, because there had been another, named Antonio Carlos Jobim, but it was true that “Manhã de carnaval,” which became known internationally as “A Day in the Life of a Fool” had covered more ground than any other song in the entire score. Bonfá was one of two Brazilians in the United States (the other, of course, was Jobim) who could introduce himself as the composer of more than one song that everyone seemed to know.

The world was kind to Bonfá as he ventured around its axis. At the start of the 1950s, he left the Quitandinha Serenaders (remember?) in order to write and play music solo. As a songwriter, he was soon taken on by Dick Farney, who felt he was modern enough to record practically everything he had written up until then, including “Sem esse céu” (Without This Sky), “Perdido de amor” (Lost in Love), and “Ranchinho de palha” (Little Straw Hut). As a guitarist, Bonfá also impressed him from the start with his technique and the different harmonies he used to embellish any song that fell into his lap. In 1957, he was already a name in Brazil, and when he was asked how he came up with those harmonies, he replied, in all seriousness:

“I once went to the cinema to see a movie called
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing
; I heard the music and told myself that’s what I wanted to do.”

If the interviewer laughed, Bonfá didn’t need to provide further explanation; if he didn’t, no explanation would help. The song he was referring to, “Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing,” by Paul Francis Webster and Sammy Fain, was a hit in 1956, when he, Bonfá, was already more than ready. In 1958, he packed up his guitar and left for New York with all his savings. Before he took off, he left two songs (“Manhã de carnaval” and “Samba de Orfeu” [Orpheus’s Samba]) with Sacha Gordine, for the film that would become
Orfeu Negro
(Black Orpheus). In New York, the goddess of Broadway, singer Mary Martin, heard him at a party at the home of Julius Glazier, owner of Cartier jewelers, to which he had been taken by a rich Brazilian friend. Mary Martin liked him and invited him to accompany her on a long tour that would be starting in Alaska.

While Bonfá was playing in Alaska and in other more hospitable places,
Orfeu Negro
was gathering awards on the worldwide screen, and people were going crazy for “Manhã de carnaval,” with his guitar and Agostinho dos Santos’s vocals. When he returned to Brazil in 1959, bossa nova was just starting to creep onto the scene, and he felt as comfortable with the new genre as if he had been one of those responsible for bringing it into the world—without changing his style of playing or composing. In 1962, when singers and musicians in Rio were tumbling over each other for the concert at Carnegie Hall, there was no need for him to hurry: after Jobim and João Gilberto, he was one of the few artists whom Sidney Frey truly couldn’t do
without. That night, at Carnegie, he played solo, accompanied Agostinho in “Manhã de carnaval,” thanked the audience whenever possible for their applause, and decided to continue his career in New York, with his new wife and partner, Maria Helena Toledo. And he had already recorded a multitude of discs when, in 1967, he had the idea of inviting the young keyboard player, pianist, guitarist, composer, arranger, producer, and conductor Eumir Deodato to come and work with him in New York.

Bonfá even paid his airfare—which was very cheap, when you take into consideration the number of musical instruments Eumir Deodato took on the plane as luggage. In Rio, in 1959, at the age of sixteen and in the flower of his youth, Deodato formed part of the very first bossa nova gang. He then retired to his apartment in Laranjeiras, where he spent the next few years sitting in a swivel chair in his pajamas, surrounded by his piano, keyboards, and study desk, learning all about theory, harmony, counterpoint, solfeggio, arrangement, and instrumentation by correspondence, with all the imported books and course packets that the mailman brought him. One of the courses he took was that of Henry Mancini. And, as had happened with the generation immediately before his (Menescal’s generation), the record he listened to with his external ear while he studied with his internal one was the same
Julie Is Her Name
, with Julie London and Barney Kessel.

When he felt he was ready, Deodato went out and approached the studios—literally,
all
the studios in Rio. From 1963 to 1967, he took part in dozens of recordings in one or another of the many capacities which he was capable of fulfilling. His arrangements backed just about every singer of the era you could name: Wilson Simonal, Marcos Valle, Wanda Sá, Maysa, Nara Leão, Pery Ribeiro, Leny Andrade, Quarteto 004, Tita, Elis Regina, Pacífico Mascarenhas’ Samba-Cana, among many others. Whenever the public bought a record by Elenco entitled
A Bossa Nova de Roberto Menescal
(Roberto Menescal’s Bossa Nova) or
A nova Bossa Nova de Roberto Menescal
(Roberto Menescal’s New Bossa Nova), they were under the impression that they were buying a record by Roberto Menescal, but in fact, they were buying one by Eumir Deodato—Menescal was merely cheerfully acting as a kind of front man. Other discs without definitive paternity, like the two recorded at Philips by Os Gatos (
Os Gatos
and
Aquele som dos Gatos
—The Cats and The Sound of the Cats) could have been ace guitarist Durval Ferreira, but they were also Eumir Deodato. There’s nothing like being twenty years old.

Eumir Deodato must already have felt like a veteran at this age. When he had released his real first album—
Inútil paisagem
, with Roberto Quartin’s new label Forma—he astonished everybody with his maturity. Four long years later, in 1967, there was no other way out for him than Galeão airport, as Tom Jobim used to say. This was primarily due to the fact that Deodato had
just been fired from EMI-Odeon, where he worked as an arranger. The alleged reason given by Milton Miranda, the artistic director of the recording company, was that his arrangements were “too complicated and they confused the singers; and besides, his albums weren’t selling.”

That was when Bonfá sent him a ticket to New York, so that he could do the arrangements on a record by his wife, Maria Helena Toledo. Deodato did the arrangements, and, chosen by Astrud Gilberto to write the arrangements for her record
Beach Samba
, astonished producer Creed Taylor by arranging and recording five songs in just six hours—which was typical of a hotheaded Brazilian trying to impress. But Taylor knew he was capable of doing an even better job if he worked a little more slowly and, little by little, started entrusting him with other contracted artists: Jobim himself, Walter Wanderley, Wes Montgomery, Paul Desmond, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, and, yes, Frank Sinatra. At the end of 1972, Deodato—at the ripe old age of twenty-nine—recorded his first official disc for Creed Taylor, entitled
Prelude
, and introduced it with a jazz-pop arrangement of “Also sprach Zarathustra.” The single sold five million copies.

This was an unquantifiable achievement, given that the market then was much smaller than it is today, when sales of that figure are still impressive. Giving “Zarathustra” a pop rhythm was certainly less work (and less fun) for him than another project he undertook that year: untangling six hours’ worth of tape that João Donato had recorded in a studio in New York—free improvisations on old themes, such as “Cadê Jodel?” (Where Is Jodel?) and others that Donato had made up on the keyboard as he went along—with a note for the producer at Muse Records, whom he owed a record: “Give this to Eumir Deodato. He understands me and he’ll know what to do.”

Deodato took the spool of tape, added his own keyboard, sprinkled in a few brass instruments, with Maurício Einhorn’s harmonica and percussion by Airto Moreira, and the result was a classic bossa nova–Latin jazz fusion:
Donato/Deodato
, which was released almost clandestinely in Brazil.

Deodato’s presence in the United States also had positive repercussions for the career of the man who had opened the gates to New York for him: Luiz Bonfá. He modernized Bonfá, opening him up to a more jazz-influenced style, and convinced him to experiment with other guitars, such as the Craviola, the Ovation, and even an electric guitar. Bonfá was no less revered as a composer and great virtuoso, and expanded his audience even further, recording surprising albums like
The New Face of Luiz Bonfá
, in 1970, and the record widely considered in the United States to be one of the classics of solo guitar,
Introspection
, in 1972. These records went practically unnoticed in Brazil.