Joao Gilberto

Hailed as the Father of Bossa Nova and a legendary singer and guitarist, João Gilberto Prado Pereira de Oliveira, most popularly known as Joao Gilberto, was born on June 10, 1931 in Juazeiro, Bahia in Brazil. From a humble beginning as a kid, Joao has always been a Brazilian music enthusiast as he absorbed the rhythmic subtlety of Brazilian pop songs and the rich sounds of swing jazz by Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey, as well as the light opera singing of Jeannette MacDonald. At the age of 14, against his father’s great disapproval, his grandfather bought him his first guitar. As a teenager in high school, he formed and led a small band with some of his classmates.

At the age of 18, he headed on to Salvador, Bahia’s largest city, to get a quick grasp of the music industry performing on live radio shows. In 1950, despite unrequited attempts at stardom, his constant radio appearances caught the attention of Antonio Maria who then recruited him to join the vocal quintet Garotos de Luna (Moon Boys) as the lead vocalist. He moved to Rio de Janeiro and became quite passive and stubborn, showing up late for rehearsals or not attending at all that a year and a half later on, he was dismissed from the group.

Between the years 1951 and 1959, Joao’s first recordings were released in Brazil as two-song 78rpm singles and in the ‘60s, after the double compact format evolution, 4 songs on a 45rpm record.  Oftentimes nomadic, he performed in Clube de Chave and other night clubs only when he felt like it and through that gained a circle of friends that included several future stars of Brazilian music namely vocalist Luiz Bonfa and pianist/ composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, who was at times credited for the birth of bossa nova. He had the chance of reaching that certain moment at stardom however, before the hipster era, Joao embarked on a creative but unproductive existence marked by heavy marijuana usage. Hope dawned on him in 1955 when Luiz Tellez, leader of the vocal group Quitandinha Serenaders, took him to Porto Alegre, Southern Brazil where he had his musical epiphany and development.

In the 8 months he spent with his sister Dadainha and her husband, he continued to play day and night creating this new musical style which we now call Bossa Nova. The first Bossa Nova song ever played, “Bim-Bom”, was a song Joao wrote as he came across the laundresses balancing loads of clothes on their heads in the banks of the Sao Francisco River. Disturbed by his eccentric behavior, his sister and her husband sent him back to his parents’ house where he was pushed by his father to be admitted in a mental asylum. After a week of rehabilitation, he finally gave up drug abuse.

Returning to Rio in 1956, Joao started to define Bossa Nova after renewing acquaintance with Jobim and producing “Chega de Saudade” for Odeon Records. Releasing two more albums within 3 years, the Bossa Nova, also known in English as the “New wave” gained much attention and widespread popularity. During the goodwill jazz tour of Latin America sponsored by the US State Department, American jazz guitarist Charlie Byrd discovered his and Jobim’s musical prowess and introduced them to American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz. They recorded the top-selling Bossa nova album “Jazz Samba” which spent 70 weeks on the American pop charts at the top spot. After moving to the US, in 1964 he and Getz recorded “Getz/Gilberto” featuring the all-time favorite hit “The Girl from Ipanema” sung by his then-wife Astrud Gilberto and earned Grammys that year.

Edited: September 11th, 2011