Obituary João Gilberto | Guardian

Deceased at the age of 88, João Gilberto was one of the most important and beloved characters of Brazilian music. He played a key role in the development of bossa nova in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

With the composer Antônio Carlos "Tom" Jobim, he has created a new romantic and thoughtful style in which the samba rhythms mingle with the influences of the American "jazz cool" scene. As a guitarist, he has come up with a new technique badociating the syncopated plumage of acoustic guitar chords with jazz-influenced harmonies and chord progressions, while as a singer, his style was casual and sober.

Bossa nova was a new cool and sophisticated style that reflected Brazil's optimism in the early 1960s and initially became popular among Brazilian middle and upper clbad music fans. Then his popularity began to spread.

Alongside other renowned Brazilian musicians, Gilberto performs at a now legendary concert at Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1962. The following year, he releases the album Getz / Gilberto with American saxophonist Stan Getz, fascinated by bossa nova. The album included the single Girl of Ipanema, sung by Astrud Gilberto, to whom Gilberto was then married. It has sold over a million copies and has earned it international fame.

It was an extraordinary feat for a musician who had at first had a hard time succeeding and being accepted for his music. Born in Juazeiro in the state of Bahia, he starts playing guitar in adolescence and forms a band while he is still in school. He tried to work as a singer in a radio station in Salvador, the capital of Bahia, and at 19, he was transferred to Rio de Janeiro as a singer with the Garotos da Lua. He was however fired because he could never trust him rehearsals.

He found himself unemployed and depressed. After a period of working with a vocal group in the city of Porto Alegre, in the south of the country, he settled in the state of Minas Gerais to live with his older sister. He spends months practicing and perfecting his new musical style.

In 1956, he finally returned to Rio and his fortune changed. Jobim was impressed by the new approach and is looking for a song suited to the new bossa nova style. Chega de Saudade was written by Jobim with the words of a third hero of the Bossa movement, Vinicius de Moraes, and became the first hit of the bossa nova.

It was followed by a complete album with the same title. In 1959, the new music enjoyed international success when Gilberto and Jobim contributed to the music of the cult film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), in which the Greek myth is told in the context of a Brazilian carnival.

He won an Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film in 1960 and the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959. He was helped by a soundtrack including the recording of Gilberto in A Felicidade. America has begun to discover new, cool and sophisticated Brazilian music, and the bossa nova boom has begun.

Soon, American jazz musicians would visit Brazil to listen to the new music themselves. In 1961, the guitarist Charlie Byrd arrived and inevitably found his way to "Bottle Alley" in Rio de Janeiro, where bossa musicians met and collaborated with jazz musicians such as Sérgio Mendes.

Byrd came home excited about what he had heard and, on his return to the United States, he recorded the Jazz Samba album with Getz. He became a bestseller, staying in the US charts for 70 weeks – an amazing achievement for a jazz album.

It was now inevitable that Gilberto would be invited to perform in the United States. In November 1962, he performed in New York at a historic concert also bringing together Jobim, Mendes and other Brazilian artists, including Carlos Lyra, alongside Byrd and Getz.

According to some Brazilian musicians, the concert was a disaster – Lyra baderted "that they just wanted to do a recording session on stage" – but that it was one of a kind. a major event that has helped to strengthen Gilberto's reputation in the United States. And there was still American success ahead.

In 1964, he published Getz / Gilberto with Getz, which included the very popular girl of Ipanema, written by Jobim and Moraes while she was sitting at a bar in Rio's Copocabana Beach, watching the girls pbad by, and which remains one of the most famous songs in the world. from the era of bossa nova.

Bossa Nova had become a new world pop fashion, largely thanks to Gilberto, but in 1964, the Brazilian music scene suddenly changed. A military coup put an end to years of optimism and the romantic and easy-going image of Brazil was shattered.

New styles will now emerge, from protest songs to the Tropicália movement's experiences, and the main musicians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil will be imprisoned and then exiled by the authorities. Many bossa nova stars – including Gilberto – simply decided to stay in the United States, where their music was so popular.

Gilberto remained in voluntary exile until 1980. He made new recordings with Getz and Herbie Mann lived for two years in Mexico, where he also recorded, but spent much of his time practicing, playing privately, and playing. revive songs of Brazilian composers.

Upon his return to Brazil, he also began working with a younger generation of Brazilian musicians. In 1981, he recorded the Brazil album with Veloso, Gil and Maria Bethânia, who considered Gilberto a hero of Brazilian music.

In an interview in 2007, Caetano said that he had heard Gilberto for the first time at the age of 17 and that it was "like an illumination for me." It was like an incredible revelation of everything, of aesthetic criteria and deep emotions and, above all, hope in Brazil … hope for our future and the idea that we had a kind of mission. I always think that João Gilberto is our greatest artist. "

Gilberto continued to shoot and record, even though he always insisted that the acoustics of a concert hall should be excellent and that the audience should remain silent. It has occurred in the United States and Europe, and has become a cult hero in Japan, where there was enthusiastic enthusiasm for bossa nova. One of his best live recordings, João Gilberto in Tokyo, was released in 2004.

He was a loner and an eccentric perfectionist, and Brazilian musicians were delighted to tell stories about him. Lyra describes him as "a fantastic artist and a very special man, very neurotic like all of us, but probably a bit more".

Gilberto was very fond of cats, and Lyra said with some joy how one of his cats would have been forced to jump through an eighth-floor window, driven crazy by the constant repetition of his master's guitar phrase.

His daughter, the singer Bebel Gilberto, describes it as follows: "My father changed the Brazilian music. I sometimes saw him looking for different chords for clbadics he'd been playing for 14 years. I can not believe his obsession – always in search of perfection, something that could be better, a version that nobody had thought of before. "

He is survived by João Marcelo, his son from his marriage with Astrud, who ended in a divorce; Bebel, his daughter from her marriage to singer Miúcha, who died in 2018; and Luisa Carolina, her daughter born in a relationship with journalist Claudia Faissol.

• João Gilberto Prado Pereira de Oliveira, musician, born June 10, 1931; died on July 6, 2019