Remembering João Gilberto and the way his sound shaped bossa nova

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By m_x_ 12 Jul 2019, 10:02am

by Chloe Catajan

At the heart of “The Girl from Ipanema," the bossa nova hit made popular by João Gilberto captures the essence of enjoying life's simple pleasures. A golden sky, a seaside view, a natural beauty: its lyrics find bliss in even the most unassuming details. Its instrumentation, striking yet stripped-down, does the same. Much like the girl in the seminal song, bossa nova as a whole turns heads with the art of subtlety. Gilberto had perfected this in his sound—a combination of acoustic guitar mastery and a soft-spoken nature that would come to define the genre.

Gilberto, whose recording of “The Girl from Ipanema" turned bossa nova into a global marvel, passed away last Saturday in his Rio de Janeiro home. While his version of the track (off landmark 1964 album Getz/Gilberto) will be forever iconic, Gilberto's contributions to bossa nova run far deeper and date back to the genre's beginnings.

Bossa nova, meaning “new trend," emerged from Rio de Janeiro in the late 1950s during a progressive transition for Brazil as a nation. A group of young musicians based between Ipanema and Copacobana set out to make music for the new age, appreciating the beauty of their culture. They looked to traditional Brazilian samba and American cool jazz in order to find their own sound. Among the collective were composer Antônio Carlos Jobim and poet/lyricist Vinícius de Moraes, who together penned some of bossa nova's most memorable tunes, and Gilberto.

Known to have reserved tendencies, Gilberto seemed to lean inward with his instrumentation too. He played the guitar with a serious attention to detail—his strumming, delicate but his form, tight.

“He used to play with the five fingers in a strange way and he could swing that way," said bossa nova artist Carlos Lyra during a 2016 interview with BBC. “We all tried to copy that because that was the way of playing bossa nova."

João Gilberto performing “Desafinado" live.

Gilberto's approach took the explosive, syncopated elements of samba and turned them into an intimate experience, as heard on “Chega de Saudade" and “Doralice."

In addition to his idiosyncratic guitar chops, Gilberto sang with a gentle and fond tone that further cemented his understated magic. His vocals bounced lightly from note to note on uptempo songs like “Bim Bom," and sauntered in calmer tunes like “Rosa Morena." But no matter the mood, every intention, every subtlety boiled down to just his voice and guitar. Gilberto's intricate yet bare bones presentation set a standard for a bossa nova sound nuanced by openness—a soundscape inspiring reflection and mystification of the simple pleasures that bossa nova so naturally captures.