For seven years, João Gilberto had barely been seen in public. The musician whose voice and guitar had helped create bossa nova played his last concerts in 2008, and a planned return to the stage in 2011 was cancelled on medical advice. He retreated further into the intensely private life for which he had long been known.
Then, in 2015, two short videos appeared online. There was no concert hall and no carefully controlled session. Gilberto was sitting on a sofa at home in Rio de Janeiro, wearing pyjamas, with a guitar and his nine-year-old daughter Luisa Carolina beside him. One clip lasted 23 seconds; the other ran to 37, long enough for father and daughter to rehearse the song he would always be most identified with, “The Girl from Ipanema.” For a man who had spent decades avoiding cameras and interviews, it was a rare glimpse behind the curtain, and it arrived days before his 84th birthday.
At home with his daughter
The footage was filmed by Claudia Faissol, Gilberto’s manager and Luisa’s mother. According to Folha de S.Paulo, Faissol had been recording material from his private life for years, with the idea that it might eventually form part of a film or documentary.
The clips are striking precisely because so little happens. In one, Luisa tells her father she is going to sing at school, and he answers enthusiastically that they will rehearse hard. In the other she sings “Garota de Ipanema” while he accompanies her. It is a domestic scene rather than a performance — and yet the man on that sofa had spent more than half a century changing the way musicians thought about rhythm, singing and the guitar.
The sound he built
That work began in considerably less comfortable circumstances. During a difficult period in the mid-1950s, Gilberto spent time living with his sister in Diamantina, Minas Gerais, where he practised for hours in the bathroom, drawn by its acoustics. What he worked out there was a way of dividing samba between his thumb and his fingers: the thumb holding a steady bass pulse while the fingers scattered chords across and against the beat, so that one guitar could imply an entire percussion section. Over it he sang almost under his breath, discarding the declamatory delivery then standard in Brazilian popular music. His voice could sound conversational, as though he were speaking to someone in the next room.
Back in Rio, Antônio Carlos Jobim recognised immediately what he had. Gilberto played guitar on Elizeth Cardoso’s 1958 recording of Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes’ “Chega de Saudade”, then recorded the song himself later that year; the version he cut on 10 July 1958, released on a 78 rpm single backed with “Bim Bom”, is widely treated as one of bossa nova’s starting points. His first three LPs, released between 1959 and 1961, set the vocabulary that everyone else would work from.
Ipanema
The record that carried it out of Brazil was Getz/Gilberto, made with the American saxophonist Stan Getz and built around Jobim’s writing. “The Girl from Ipanema” was its calling card, and the English-language vocal that made it an international hit was sung by Astrud Gilberto — at that point João’s wife, and not a professional singer. She was in the studio because he was. Her voice is the one most of the world knows, but João’s guitar and Portuguese vocal sit at the centre of the recording, and the album’s success made him one of the defining figures in modern Brazilian music.
Half a century later, the song had returned to something close to its smallest possible form: Gilberto, a guitar, a voice. This time the voice belonged to his nine-year-old daughter.
The obsessiveness had not gone anywhere either. Faissol said that at the time the videos were made, Gilberto was working in a home studio on his first three albums, trying to restore them to the sound he believed they had originally had. That project was tied to one of the disputes that shadowed his later years: he had fought a long legal battle with his label over reissues of those same early recordings, which he considered badly handled. Unable to get the versions he wanted from the people who owned them, he had set about producing them himself, in his eighties, at home.
His final years
The videos were not the start of a comeback. Gilberto never returned to the concert stage; his 2008 tour remained his last, and the performances planned around his 80th birthday in 2011 were abandoned because of his health. His remaining years grew steadily more difficult, with financial problems and legal disputes spilling into public view, though his standing within Brazilian music was never seriously in question. He died in Rio de Janeiro on 6 July 2019, aged 88, by which time the idea he had worked out in a bathroom in Minas Gerais had travelled almost everywhere.
The 2015 footage carries none of that scale. It shows an old man in pyjamas on a sofa, holding the guitar with which he changed Brazilian music, playing quietly behind a child singing “Garota de Ipanema.”
