The EconomistJuly 13th 2019 The Americas 332
Bello João Gilberto, the man from Ipanema
I
t was notJoão Gilberto’s fault, and as a
perfectionist no doubt he suffered
from it more than anyone, that his great-
est hit, “The Girl from Ipanema”, has
been mutilated into supermarket Muzak.
At its height, in the late 1950s and early
1960s, the Brazilian fusion of samba, jazz,
and other things too, known as bossa
nova (“new style” in Portuguese) en-
tranced the world. Back home, it formed
the soundtrack to a period of cultural
originality, from architecture to football,
that seemed to augur a bright future for
Brazil. As a guitarist and singer Mr Gil-
berto, who died an impoverished recluse
on July 6th, aged 88, was a star of that
moment. He lived to see a darker present.
Born in the arid backlands of Brazil’s
north-east, Mr Gilberto arrived in Rio de
Janeiro in 1950 as a singer in one of the
then-fashionable vocal ensembles. After
his career stalled he retreated, broke and
on the verge of mental illness, to a kind
of internal exile. He spent months clos-
eted with his guitar in a bedroom of a
sister’s house, obsessively stripping
down and rebuilding his way of playing
it. He emerged with the terse, syncopated
rhythm, complex chords and a gentle,
almost spoken, singing style that were
the marks of bossa nova.
He returned to a Rio in musical fer-
ment. A loose fellowship of bohemian
young, mainly middle-class musicians,
whose habitat was beachside apartments
and the nightclubs of Copacabana, was
striving to escape from traditional Brazil-
ian folklore. Two stood out: Antônio
Carlos (“Tom”) Jobim, a prodigiously
talented pianist and composer (and fan
of Debussy), and Vinicius de Moraes, a
hard-drinking diplomat, poet and lyri-
cist. In 1957 Mr Gilberto knocked on the
door of Jobim’s house in Ipanema—and
began to make history.It started with “Chega de Saudade” (“No
More Blues”, in its American release), a
short single which gave its title to an al-
bum that sold 500,000 copies in Brazil. Its
controlled phrasing was seen as “a kick up
the backside” to the era of romantic croon-
ers, according to Ruy Castro, bossa nova’s
chronicler. Jobim and de Moraes’s “The
Girl from Ipanema”, a languid musing on
the wistful contemplation of beauty by
age, had its first performance, by Mr Gil-
berto, in a Rio nightclub in 1962. That was
both zenith and swansong for bossa nova.
The new music conquered the world,
starting with a concert in Carnegie Hall in
New York. Mr Gilberto made a hugely
successful album with Stan Getz, an Amer-
ican saxophonist. But in Brazil bossa nova
was yielding ground to protest music, rock
’n’ roll and a return to traditional samba.
According to Caetano Veloso, a popular
musician of a later generation, “bossa nova
is a rare example of music that becomes
popular by becoming more sophisticated.”
It varied to samba in its harmonic com-
plexity, as well as in the intimate intro-
spection and sensuality of its lyrics.The bossa nova era was one of two
great, creative ebullitions in 20th-cen-
tury Brazil. The first came in the 1920s
when a group of painters and writers
embraced modernism under the banner
of antropofagia(cultural cannibalism).
Rather than merely imitating or rejecting
foreign works of art, they consumed and
then regurgitated them to create some-
thing both authentically Brazilian and
universal.
That approach came back in the late
1950s, when Brazil was enjoying a precar-
ious period of democracy. Under Jusce-
lino Kubitschek, a dashing social demo-
crat, the country rushed not just to
industrialise but to embrace the modern
in general. As well as bossa nova, that
impulse included the minimalist palaces
of Oscar Niemeyer that adorned Brasília,
the new capital; the concretist move-
ment of poets and artists such as Mira
Schendel and Lygia Clark; and, later,
cinema novo, in which film directors
adopted the techniques of Italian neo-
realists to address Brazil’s social divides.
As Mr Veloso told the Guardianin
2013, “what was revolutionary about
bossa nova is that a third-world country
was creating high art on its own terms
and selling that art around the world. It
remains a dream of what an ideal civili-
sation can create.”
The dream did not last long. A mil-
itary coup in 1964 brought the curtain
down on the bossa nova era. Now Brazil’s
restored democracy is headed by Jair
Bolsonaro, a socially conservative Pente-
costalist who is openly nostalgic for
military rule. In its sensitivity, disci-
plined search for perfection and open-
ness to foreign influence, bossa nova was
everything that Mr Bolsonaro’s vision of
Brazil—vulgar, hate-filled and national-
istic—is not. Muzak rules.The interpreter of bossa nova and his legacyvide enough money to sustain imports. In
2018 non-oil imports were nearly 90% low-
er than in 2012.
“The regime’s entire focus now is sur-
vival,” says a Caracas-based diplomat. “The
rulebook has been thrown away.” Mr Madu-
ro has quietly abandoned elements of the
socialism brought in by his predecessor,
Hugo Chávez. In January the government
allowed the bolívar to float almost freely
for the first time since 2003, closing the
huge gap between the official exchange
rates (there were two) and the black-market
rate. That ended a bonanza for loyalistswho got access to dollars at the overvalued
rate. The state and firms it owns have de-
faulted on more than $11bn of principal and
interest due on bonds. Mr Maduro still
blames many of Venezuela’s woes on the
“criminal dollar”, but recently the dollar
has become accepted almost everywhere,
from flea markets in Maracaibo to govern-
ment-run five-star hotels in Caracas.
Inflation has plummeted, to a still
stratospheric 445,482% (see chart on previ-
ous page). This is partly because hyperin-
flations always “run out of steam”, says Mr
Rodríguez. The central bank also damp-ened inflation by forcing banks to raise re-
serves. But these moves towards saner eco-
nomic policies have so far done little to
ease hardship for most people.
The main hope for a political transition,
and it is a faint one, lies with talks between
the opposition and government, which re-
sumed in Barbados this week. It is hard to
imagine a resolution to Venezuela’s agony
that does not include Mr Maduro’s depar-
ture and a plan to hold elections with inter-
national monitoring. If that is to happen,
the president will have to sleep less and
worry more. 7