At a 1976 concert featuring American saxophone superstar Stan Getz and Brazilian singer and guitarist João Gilberto, Getz welcomed his partner to the stage in a tone of voice that reveals just how gobsmacked he remained by his genius. “The most individual singer of our time, a true originator,” he enthused. “His curious ability to sing warmly without a vibrato, his impeccable and inimitable rhythmic sense, his intimacy, all coupled to his wonderful guitar work, make him unique.” If that sounds dry, Miles Davis put it so: “Gilberto could sound seductive reading aloud from the Wall Street Journal.”
Despite being in close proximity to João Gilberto for over a decade by that point—onstage and in the studio—Getz is forever mystified by Gilberto: his voice, his attenuated pitch, his rhythmic sense, the space within the music that he birthed, bossa nova. And in a decade of increasingly louder and louder musical revolutions, Gilberto sat at the center of the most hushed one of all, now mistakenly perceived as quaint elevator music instead of the sophisticated and subtle paradigm shift that bossa nova actually was, a marriage between Afro-Brazilian rhythm and intricate Eurocentric harmonic concepts.
In 1964, Getz and Gilberto brought bossa nova to the American masses with their collaborative album Getz/Gilberto, and then the rest of the world, though everyone was well behind what had already transpired in Brazil—the modern equivalent of finding out the hottest sound in China is “Old Town Road”. When Gilberto cut his first solo record, Chega De Saudade, in Brazil in 1959, it ignited a flame in that country, a revolution in samba that completely transformed Brazilian music. “The kids could see themselves in that music,” Ruy Castro noted in his history of the music, Bossa Nova. Gilberto was an enigmatic singer, a subtle rhythmic player, and a lowkey guitar god, inspiring a new generation to sing and pick up a guitar, while gratefully also ending Brazil’s national obsession with the accordion. At home, Gilberto was an icon. “I owe João Gilberto everything I am today,” Caetano Veloso said. “Even if I were something else and not a musician, I would say that I owe him everything.”