Desperately Seeking Astrud Gilberto
A Fan's Journey To The Edge Of Contact And Back.
Note: The following piece was originally published as the cover story to the June 5, 2002 edition of The Philadelphia Weekly. It is republished here with the author’s permission.
By Joey Sweeney
Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, each one she passes goes — ah!
— "The Girl from Ipanema"
This is a story about genies getting let out of bottles, champagne corks popping by sheer cosmic force and the ephemeral nature of "it" girls down through time. It is a story of being a fan, and of being a meta-fan; of immersing yourself so far into the object of your obsession that when it comes to completion, you become the object, understanding its desires, wanting what it wants, and if you're lucky, being able to look back at the world with even just a modicum of the easy grace and charm your host cell has always portrayed.
It is a story of trying to talk with someone who hasn't talked with anyone in more than two decades. It is a story of what happens to you when it is revealed that you live but six blocks from greatness, from the source of one of the greatest musical moments of the 20th century, and after you've tried everything, all you can do is stare down the blocks in wonderment, and up at the dirty night sky, and know that that is enough. It will have to be.
Two or three moments of raw, uncomplicated happiness might be all you get in this world. I'm speaking about the stolen moments of sheer joy eked out of moments when no one's looking — moments that have absolutely nothing to do with your family and friends, nothing to do with life's traditionally big events: weddings, births and so on. Moments when you are at one with the world, and completely removed from it, flying over the furniture, looking down at yourself and narrating to God and yourself, saying something to the effect of, Now there is a person, in all that they encompass, doing everything.
It's impossible to ascertain what provoked it, but one of my moments came on a Wednesday afternoon in November 1997. I was sitting on the couch, eating a ham sandwich and listening to Astrud Gilberto. It was an oddly warm day, and I got to come home for lunch that afternoon.
And while memory won't permit the reasons for doing so, the other recollections make up for it: That day I came home at lunch, threw open the windows, let a weird, fake spring air blow in, put on Getz/Gilberto, side one, and sat on the couch, staring at the treetops, eating my brown-bag sucker lunch.
There was that first bit on track one, where João Gilberto sings his part, and then, about a minute in, her. That voice, that song, that tune. As soon as I heard it, something happened to me, something so plainly spiritual that it feels funny to say it. I transcended space and time and reality and my problems and cares, and got ejector-seat launched straight into a place no drug or God or pleasure of the flesh has ever delivered me. I was alive.
To this day, if I've ever cause to think about the happiest moments of my life, this aberrant Wednesday in November occupies a strange place in the catalog. There's my wedding, the day my sister was born, and then, the day I was sitting on the couch, eating a ham sandwich and listening to Astrud Gilberto.
Born to intellectual parents in Brazil in 1940, Astrud Gilberto was and is a chanteuse. In fact, it seems that dorks like me invented the word specifically for this woman who made her singing debut in 1963 with the international hit single "The Girl From Ipanema."
At the time, she was married to João Gilberto and was called upon to sing during the recording session by default. She was the only Brazilian in evidence that day who could translate the lyrics.
João Gilberto himself was widely hailed as the architect of bossa nova music, the pop-jazz hybrid originated in Brazil in the late '50s amid a climate of social and political upheaval. She had also never sang publicly before.
After that recording won Record of the Year in 1964, and became a standard, the calling card by which bossa nova music became known around the world, she went on make a string of albums and singles for Verve Records, among other labels, all of which showcased her unaffected, almost siren-like, simple singing.
Astrud Gilberto has been accused before of perhaps singing in a deliberately naive fashion, but among her fans the exact opposite feeling is held: Still waters run deep, and this plainspoken muse virtually wrote the book on shy-girl singers.
True to form, she has, for the last 20 years, been a world-class recluse of the Greta Garbo ilk, having not done an interview in almost as much time, suffering from one of the more classic cases of stage fright and generally shying away from publicity as a whole, while still managing to create works of art and music at a fairly prolific rate. Within that body of work, there is genius.
You live in this town, and you hear things. Over the course of the last year or so, I kept hearing bits and pieces, some hearsay, some fact, about Astrud Gilberto being in Philadelphia. The news was always whispered in hushed, excited tones by people who generally don't whisper (or get excited) about anything. All of them came packed with enough strange whimsy and random intrigue that they could be true:
Astrud Gilberto was living as a kept woman on the Main Line. (Untrue.) Astrud Gilberto was at Fergie's one night. (Oddly, true.) Astrud Gilberto was recording an album in South Philly. (Weirder still, very true.)
Rumors would fling this way and that, and nailing them down was dicey, for all information came in a brown wrapper of a subtext that was the one thing everyone knew for sure: Astrud Gilberto, having altered the entire landscape of pop music — having, for better or worse, made herself an archetype by which all women singers in her wake would at least have to consider — was a recluse. She hadn't given an interview in about 20 years, and as such, readily available information on her was, to put it mildly, sparse.
But somewhere along the line my fandom got the better of me. While the cognitive part of me knew and respected Astrud Gilberto's retreat from public life — in this media age, who wouldn't sympathize? — another part of me, the creepy fanboy, wanted to at least connect with that reclusive nature, to see what made it tick, to see how much of that I could consume and relate to.
So, knowing that here was a woman with stage fright so bad that not even a stint at the Actor's Studio could cure it, knowing that her no-interviews policy was an unshakable terra firma, I set out to interview her. Just to see what would happen.
Under the guise of writing about her new album, I got in touch with a go-between who I knew could put me in touch with the person who would invariably say "no" to my interview request.
"Look," I said to the go-between, "I'm going to write about her whether she wants to be interviewed or not. And it's not that I won't respect her wishes — scout's honor, I will — it's just that ..." I paused, trying to say that this is one of the greatest pop singers who's ever lived, and as someone who's lucky enough to get to write about these people, I'd be damned if wasn't going to try to write about this one, knowing now, as I did, that she was living but a few blocks from me.
Instead, I just stammered. Later that day I received an email from Astrud's manager, which read, in part:
"I can assure you that Astrud is very flattered by your interest. However, it has been her policy, for nearly two decades, not to grant interviews of any kind. Please appreciate that she does not single out any particular journalist or publication to say 'no' to, as this was a conscious decision on her part as to how she wishes to conduct herself/her career."
He made no bones about that pretty much being the end of the discussion. A few days later Astrud's new album, Jungle, arrived in the mail. Knowing what I know about people who go away for years at a time between albums, I expected nothing like Jungle. It wasn't mired down in present-day production styles, nor did it seem to have any trace of comeback-desperation anywhere on it. In fact, it was a record equally as at ease as anything she's ever done — maybe even more so.
At the center of it, of course, was Gilberto's singular voice, and hearing that voice in a new recording was startling in its clarity. Time, fame, her reclusive reaction to it and whatever else has done absolutely nothing to alter the quality of her voice.
In her vocals — whether it's a reading of a standard like Bacharach and David's "The Look of Love," or one of the many tropicalia-influenced originals in the set — she's still ageless, almost timeless, the girl standing at the edge of the world disaffectedly singing something that can beguile anyone who stands still long enough to feel everything stirring within her, everything she's trying not to give away.
Murderers, artists and heroes all share one thing: The experience of how what you do over a day or two can alter the course of your entire life. On March 18 and 19, 1963, Astrud Gilberto was in a New York City recording studio with her then-husband, João Gilberto, along with Stan Getz, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and a handful of engineers and session musicians. They were there to record what would become Getz/Gilberto, one of the best-selling jazz recordings of all time.
The record was anchored by a song that became an instant standard, a towering piece of bewitching tunefulness that would cast its shadow, in one form or another, on the pop world right up to this very day, and beyond. "The Girl From Ipanema" was the first Latino crossover, the first bilingual sensation — it made bossa nova a commonplace in the musical vocabulary — and Astrud Gilberto was the first global pop ingénue, doe-eyed, sexy and otherworldly all at once.
In the wake of its appearance on Getz/Gilberto, "The Girl From Ipanema" was recorded an incalculable number of times by a range of artists from Frank Sinatra to the Living Strings. It was a staple of the '60s — perhaps one of the last songs of that golden age where there were songs everyone knew the words to.
At a certain point people may have stopped recording versions of the song, content to finally let the original ascend to its proper place in the pop pantheon, but people have never stopped purchasing, listening to or singing the song. And it has almost everything to do with Astrud Gilberto. Everyone who's ever heard her has, at least for one shining subconscious moment, wanted to be her.
There is a whole lore surrounding the day Astrud Gilberto came to sing on "The Girl From Ipanema." By most counts, it wasn't something that was supposed to happen at all.
"The Girl From Ipanema" was written by pals and bossa nova originators Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes after a long summer spent drinking beer and watching the same 15-year-old girl come into the beach bar to buy cigarettes for her mother day after day. (Not great, guys, but here we are.) By the time they had gotten around to composing the song, the entire world was beginning to feel a bossa nova buzz, thanks in large part to the film Black Orpheus and its accompanying score. After American jazz musicians got wind of this and other records, it was only a matter of time before a few made the trip down to Brazil with crossover in their hearts.
Looking at the rough historical data, the marriage of Astrud Weinert to João Gilberto in the late '50s was a match made for the movies. By the time he was in his thirties, Gilberto had been institutionalized briefly for depression. He was a chronic drug user, and, as often as not, homeless, cruising from couch to couch for as many as 10 years. They say he had a thing for talking to cats.
What he did have going for him, though, was that he was a charmer, and throughout these years, his solace was playing guitar and writing songs. He'd stay up all night in the bathroom — he became enamored of the acoustic slapback sound of the tiles — deconstructing the rhythms and the chords of the American big-band sound he grew up adoring.
By the time the woman who would be Astrud Gilberto came into his life, João had come over the hump. He had engineered his own sound, paring down the rhythms in his head to the most elemental forms of what would be bossa nova, and he'd written the first bossa nova song, "Bim-Bom," whose lyrics consisted of little more than the song's title, repeated over and over.
When his old friend Jobim heard what Gilberto was up to, he rallied at his day job, as a producer for Odeon, to commit Gilberto's sound to a 78. Even with his rough times behind him, the thread of difficulty that would run through Gilberto's life again evidenced itself — a record that should have taken an afternoon to record instead took four days.
By the time João Gilberto teamed up with Stan Getz (who had, along with guitarist Charlie Byrd, already given bossa nova its first stateside hit with the Jazz Samba album) that difficulty had reached legendary proportions. A story circulated around jazz circles that one day the Gilbertos' cat jumped out a window. João left the studio to pick it up in a taxi and speed away to the nearest veterinarian, but alas, the cat had already died. The joke Gilberto's fellow musicians liked to make was that the cat committed suicide after hearing João practice "O Pato" one time too many.
In the fateful days of the Getz/Gilberto sessions, it was decided that a tune the band had been cooking up deserved to be sung at least partly in English. Against a spate of crowing by Jobim himself as well as João, Astrud was pushed in front of the mic, and in turn, the legend goes, paid the princely sum of $110.
Whatever the charms of "The Girl From Ipanema" — and they are many, from Getz's sauntering sax to the seductive flutter of the melody itself — Astrud Gilberto was the something the bossa nova enterprise needed to go overground in a big way. By July 1964, "The Girl From Ipanema" chuffed everyone and sat at No. 2 on the Billboard charts. No. 1 was by some band called the Beatles.
And if the winds of pop had a choice at that impasse — go for the stylized melancholic cool of bossa nova or the hysteria that would come to earmark '60s rock — the choice, at the time, seemed like a no-brainer. Bossa nova became the idiom of choice for the blandest entertainers America could bear. And rock 'n' roll became, once again, the definitive voice of youth.
By the time the late '60s came around, bossa nova had, for the most part, evolved into tropicalia, the music most closely associated with protest and revolution both political and cultural in Brazil. What remained of the musical process was left mostly in the hands of Americans, and what was an inherently melancholy, bohemian and sophisticated form, left to the devices of stock music houses and hack bands, became Muzak, easy listening. Both Gilbertos by this time had cut back on their musical output. Astrud's 1967 album, Beach Samba, despite its title, was comprised of a fair share of Broadway tunes.
And though she continued on with a musical career, Astrud Gilberto, after the turbulent '60s had finally ebbed, eventually settled into the same hermetic, uneasily famous lifestyle as her first husband. She continued to release albums and even make public appearances here and there, but for all intents and purposes, she'd dropped off the pop culture radar almost as easily as she'd popped on.
She became the Girl From Ipanema: She passed by. The bossa nova moment may have been just that, but in the space of just a year or two, Astrud Gilberto had become an accidental icon with few rivals in the spectrum of 20th-century pop music.
But even before all that — as early as the end of the summer of '63, just six months after "The Girl From Ipanema" had been forever committed to tape — Astrud grew weary of João 's tortured-artist lifestyle. One summer afternoon, João returned home from a series of tour dates to find Astrud gone. She left two things: A note and a new cat.
The interview might have been a definite no-go, but spurred on by Jungle, I only had more questions: How was it that Astrud Gilberto, the Girl From Ipanema, made a new record this good, and so far as I could see, had no booking agent, no proper publicist and, crazier even still, no record label? (As of this writing, the album is for sale only at www. astrudgilberto.com.)
That said nothing of the most basic question: How did Astrud Gilberto wind up living here, of all the places in the world, in Philadelphia? The go-between wasn't saying, Astrud certainly didn't want to talk about it, and it seemed like nobody else knew. I wrote back to her manager, wondering if, given the general nature of my questions, he could answer a few for me. Within hours came the response:
"As for your inquiry, an interview with me in lieu of or about Astrud Gilberto, is not a viable option. We appreciate your understanding in that regard, as well."
So much for that idea. But he did offer me something else:
"Astrud has agreed to compose a written statement about the album and its elements. We will send this statement to you in the next few days, in hopes that it will be adequate for assisting you in what you have in mind to write."
Holy smokes. This was unheard of. Astrud may not have given an interview in a long, long time, and to my mind, this was as close as anyone was likely to come. Whether it was my tenacity or desperation, I anxiously awaited the statement, all the while knowing in my heart of hearts that the thing might even in fact raise more questions than it answered.
I wasn't disappointed. One of the first things Astrud said in the statement was that the album was dedicated to her cat.
"As I reveal on Jungle's liner notes, this album is dedicated to my cat, Precious, not only because he is the 'apple of my eye' and a source of joy in my life, but also as a symbolic statement on behalf of animal rights and animal welfare, two issues that deeply concern me."
Be that as it may, I couldn't help but think that in some way it was also a nod to João , either a jab or some kind of tribute across time and continents. Stranger still was the opening statement in which she put her career in perspective:
"A couple of years ago, I made the decision of taking indefinite time off from public appearances. After so many years of constant traveling, and dealing with the inherent hassles of being 'on the road,' I am now enjoying a quieter lifestyle. But, I am one of these people that are always looking for things to do, and have never been inclined to become a 'couch potato' (not even now at this 'later age' ...). I dedicate a lot of time now into doing work as a 'fine artist,' and have lately found a lot of joy in creating computer-generated graphics, some as mixed-media. So, you may say that I have found another 'career,' as I have entered this new phase in my life, because in near future, some of my artwork will be offered commercially for sale."
Her use of quotation marks belied her seriousness, though. Or at least it seemed to me. Go to Astrud's website and you'll find samples of her artwork, some of which is quite compelling, and really gets to the heart of where she's been all this time as a musical artist as well. Some of it feels like outsider art — a more critical eye would want to decry at as being naive, or perhaps unstudied — but that doesn't get to the heart of it. There's something too willful about it. It's as if she's trying to preserve something simple and uncomplicated, trying to nail it all down so it can be remembered in that same gentle way that her first records captured.
On the website there's an illustration of Astrud's that is my favorite of them all: It's a simple line drawing of a waifish girl called "Magya." Only the head is shown, staring down in a melancholic reverie that borders on the sad. In this forlorn portrait there's only one patch of color: a blue bow in the girl's hair. In a lot of ways it reminds me of my favorite photograph of Astrud, the one on the cover of The Shadow of Your Smile. In it she has just the same airy look.
When I mentioned to the go-between that this was my favorite piece, she chuckled a little:
"Didn't you know?" she asked.
"What?"
"That's Astrud's logo."
On the list of things I don't normally do, but in fact am doing right now is this: standing outside the Center City building where I have heard tell Astrud Gilberto resides. I'm staring up at the windows, one after another, hoping to see her... do what? Unpack from a shopping trip so I can hone in on what brands of paper towels and microwave popcorn she buys, so I can somehow, through the magic of the modern age, co-opt the lifestyle of an "it" girl gone Garbo? That's sick.
But here I am in the overcast Philly morning, drinking my coffee and hurting no one, really, but myself. What is it that I am looking for? If I were to be struck by lightning right now, to die right here, what kind of epilogue would that be to this story?
I don't want anything from her. I'm not even completely sure I'd like to see her. Maybe after all, being near her, in that same airspace, far away enough to feel her legend but close enough to know that there, by all accounts, is a happy heart beating at the center of it--well, maybe that's enough. Maybe that will have to be.
Two or three moments of raw, unencumbered happiness might be all you get in this life, but if you live your life at least remembering one of them, keeping them close enough to your heart, you're in pretty good shape.
