Joao Gilberto
Joao Voz E Violao
Verve
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Pleasure's Father, Pain's Son
By Derrick Smith
A B&W morena beckons us to "Hush" with a forefinger to her full lips on the cover of Joao voz e violao. Flip the jewel case and see Joao Gilberto in full-dusk color huddled over the mixing board with a slight smile to his face, eyeing through thick glasses the sliding buttons; his hands are clasped, and he could be muttering a prayer or whispering to himself a samba for which even a guitar is sometimes extraneous.
"Desde que o Samba E Samba" opens this first Joao Gilberto album in nearly a decade. It's a Caetano Veloso composition that appeared originally on his and Gilberto Gil's Tropicalia 2, where Veloso in his liner notes named Joao as one of "the great ones." The two tropicalistas have dropped the names of many musicians, Brazilian and non, throughout their careers, but at the end is always Joao - Gil gave him "um abraco" (a hug) on his Quanta, and Veloso dedicated to Joao the final track of Livro. Miles said once, "He could read a newspaper and sound good."
Joao's musicality is more the mystery when the bossa nova itself is considered. A form of music that arose in the Atomic Age from the fusion of the favela sambas with jazz feeling and harmony and the Romantic melodicism that was taken up by so many composers in Latin America, the soul of the bossa nova has always been considered to lie in the relationship of the voice with the guitar - a coupling of smooth but slightly- desafinado ("tuneless") vocals with the guitar's characteristic downward strums at the front of each bar and syncopated bar chords, two frequencies arriving at moments of periodicity. Joao Gilberto's voice-and-guitar is the most identifiable instrumental combination of the "bossa nova sound" that ascended international charts in the '60s. This makes him the very embodiment of bossa nova, and since the bossa's primary root is the samba, "pleasure's father...pain's son," as Joao sings on that first track, he may be Brazilian music's pre-eminent figure.
This album marks the first occasion that Gilberto has gone on record in that archetypal combination of voice with his own acoustic guitar. While I wish such an album had been recorded ten years ago when his voice was more pliant, the (very)occasional "tunelessness" and awkward phrase-endings contribute their own part to the disc's tale of a master revisiting his own firmly-planted stepping-stones, classic compositions by Ernesto Lecuona, Veloso and Gil, and several by Tom Jobim, the pre-eminent bossa composer. Veloso produced, and gave his mentor a sound that's intimate but touched with the hardness expressed by the lyrics, of a person whose love and desolation accrue around the heart. In typical tropicalista fashion, Veloso couldn't help but place his own "Since samba is samba" at the beginning, not as a sop to his own ego, but as a thesis on samba and its modern offspring, bossa nova. "Loneliness is scary", Gilberto sings in his husky way, kindly like a wise and sensual relative, "but something happens...By singing I send the sadness away."
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