2023-08-26 12:30:40
Pop Bebel und João Gilberto
Now the daughter asks forgiveness for the father
Status: 26.08.2023 | Reading time: 3 minutes
Bebel Gilberto
What: Bob Wolfenson
João Gilberto was the father of bossa nova – and of Bebel Gilberto. Now the daughter sings his songs. It’s about reconciliation, the power of cultural appropriation and a crass word for it, but with a completely different meaning.
Her father sang the waltz for her when she was seven. At the age of 57, Bebel Gilberto sings it herself. For her father. “João” is the name of her new album with eleven classics by João Gilberto, who founded bossa nova in Brazil, in 1958 with the song “Chega de Saudade” (No More Blues). He slowed down the samba and connected it to the cool jazz of North America. The new wave carried Brazil into the world. The MPB, the Música Popular Brasileira, and the easy, beautiful way of playing football, Beautiful gamewent down in global pop culture.
Four of the eleven songs on Bebel Gilberto’s “João” come from the album “João Gilberto” that his father recorded in 1973: “Valsa”, he had “Como Sao Lindos Os Yougis” (How beautiful your eyes are) after it in brackets, over his daughter’s eyes. “Eu Vim Da Bahia” (I came from Bahia) was his native song, by the age of 18 he had become a guitarist and singer in a band in Salvador before moving to Rio de Janeiro and from there out into the world. In “Undiu” he recommended a Brazilian stir-fry.
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“Where are you, João Gilberto?”
„It Is Necessary To Forgive“ was his plea for forgiveness. He had plenty of reasons to do so: in 1962 he went to New York with his first wife Astrud Gilberto, who sang “The Girl from Ipanema” for him and made him, alongside Pelé and Oscar Niemeyer, an ambassador of Brazilian modernism. In 1964 he left the family and founded a new one with the singer Miúcha, in 1966 Bebel was born. He also left his family again.
Bebel herself became world famous as the singer of the next new wave from Brazil. She rarely sang with her father. In 1980 they met for a duet „Enough of Saudade“ record. In 1998 they shared the stage at New York’s Carnegie Hall and celebrated 40 years of bossa nova.
Bebel and João Gilberto in New York in 1998
Quelle: Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
But João Gilberto never made it easy for himself or anyone else. When the generals came to power in Brazil in 1964 and also felt threatened by the bossa nova, by the free, open and cheerful, he lived and sang in New York and Mexico. And when he returned home in the 80s, he disappeared. But he sang, on records and sometimes in Europe and America. In 2019 he died somewhere in Rio, 88 years old.
„Goodbye America“
“It’s time I sing the songs of João Gilberto that have shaped me since birth and even before that,” explains Bebel Gilberto. That’s what their interpretations sound like: distanced, forgiving, melancholic. From the oldest song, “O Pato”, in which a mallard duck asks the teal to dance the samba, to “Adeus America”, left by João Gilberto in 1985 in Montreux at the Lake Geneva Festival in one of his rare appearances on an album.
With „Out of tune“ (Verstimmt) Bebel Gilberto once again explains bossa nova: the song was her father’s answer to the critics of the new wave, who would have liked it to be more harmonious and less “out of tune” between guitar and vocals. Back then it was actually about cultural appropriation as a reproach, about the appropriation of the foreign, about jazz. In Brazil, this became a separate term for music open to all sides as an ideal: Canobalismo musical.
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