if you are of a certain age or so, this obit will mean something. otherwise not much
Astrud Gilberto, the girl from Ipanema singer, dies aged 83
11-14 minutes 6/6/2023
Astrud Gilberto, the Brazilian bossa nova singer, has died aged 83.
She became an international star in 1964 after recording The Girl from Ipanema with João Gilberto, her husband at the time, and Stan Getz.
The track won a Grammy award and helped the album Getz/Gilberto become one of the biggest-selling jazz records of all time. It is said to be the second most recorded song in pop music behind the Beatles’ Yesterday.
Astrud Gilberto did not come from Ipanema and it was never intended that she should sing the song with which she became synonymous.
The “accident” that was to change her life happened one day in March 1963 in a New York studio, where her husband João Gilberto was recording an album with the American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz.
The record was destined to become one of the biggest-selling jazz albums of all time and turned the world on to the sound of the bossa nova rhythms of Brazil. Astrud had never sang on a record before and was merely there to support her husband.
One of the songs they planned to record was Garota de Ipanema and had been written by the Brazilian pianist Antônio Carlos Jobim with lyrics in Portuguese by the singer Vinícius de Moraes about a beautiful teenage girl called Heloísa Pinheiro, whom the two men had admired passing by as they drank at the Veoloso Bar on Rio de Janeiro’s Ipanema beach.
The lyrics were translated into English by Norman Gimbel, who came up with the song’s unforgettable opening lines: “Tall and tan and young and lovely/ The girl from Ipanema goes walking/ And when she passes, each one she passes goes, ‘ahhh’.”
When the album’s producer Creed Taylor decided they should record the song with its English lyric, he immediately realised he had a problem. João Gilberto spoke no English and neither did any of the other professionals in the studio.
“Astrud was in the control room and Creed said he wanted to get the song done right away and looked around the room,” recalled Phil Ramone, who engineered the session. “Astrud volunteered, saying she could sing in English. Creed said: ‘Great.’ She wasn’t a professional singer, but she was the only victim sitting there that night.”
She took the lyric sheet with trembling hands and in what she called “a little bit of fate” proceeded to sing in a dreamily romantic and sensual voice that fitted the song like a silk glove. Taylor later said he knew The Girl from Ipanema was going to be a smash “from the moment Astrud came in with her little voice and sang with that accent”.
Despite the success she brought them, the men around her seemed more interested in taking credit for discovering her
Despite the success she brought them, the men around her seemed more interested in taking credit for discovering her
POPSIE RANDOLPH/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
Yet when the record was released as a single in 1964, her name did not even appear in the credits, although that changed when The Girl from Ipanema became an international hit, won a Grammy award for record of the year and earned Astrud a nomination for best female vocal performance.
The song was also used as the opening track on the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto and she also sang a second song on the record, Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars). The album went to become a million-seller and spent almost two years on the American charts. “It was Astrud Gilberto who made the album a smash hit,” Bryan McCann, professor of Brazilian history at Georgetown University wrote in his 2019 book Getz/Gilberto. “Astrud provided the ineffable allure that made the album irresistible.”
The men around her did not seem particularly grateful and were more concerned with arguing about who should take the plaudits for “discovering” her. Taylor, her husband and Jobim all claimed it had been their idea to get her to sing. So, too, did Getz. “She was just a housewife and I put her on that record because I wanted The Girl from Ipanema sung in English, which João couldn’t do. That was a lucky break for her,” he claimed with more than a whiff of condescension.
The remark rankled with the singer. “The funny thing is that after my success, stories abound as to Stan Getz or Creed Taylor having ‘discovered me’, when in fact, nothing is further from the truth,” she said. “I guess it made them look important to have been the one that had the ‘wisdom’ to recognise potential in my singing. I suppose I should feel flattered by the importance that they lend to this, but I can’t help but feel annoyed that they resorted to lying. ”
Gilberto in 1966
Every bit as galling was that she went unpaid for her definitive version of what is said to be the second-most recorded song in popular music behind the Beatles’ Yesterday. Frank Sinatra, Amy Winehouse and Madonna are among the hundreds of singers to record The Girl From Ipanema, which has also featured in countless films and television shows, including The Simpsons and The Sopranos.
In the 2003 book Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World, author Roy Castro revealed that João Gilberto received $23,000 for his work on the album while Getz pocketed a sum estimated to be not far short of $1 million, with which he bought himself a 23-room mansion in Irvington, New York. Astrud earned only the musicians’ union scale rate for a night of session work — a paltry $120 and there is some doubt whether even that was ever actually paid. The male-dominated music industry was full of “wolves posing as sheep”, she claimed.
By the time The Girl from Ipanema became a hit, she had also separated from her husband who was having an affair with a young student, later to find fame as the singer Miúcha.
Astrud toured America with Getz and his band but it was a difficult time. “Besides being in the midst of a separation and dealing with the responsibilities of being a single mother and a brand new, demanding career, I was also coping with being on my own for the first time in my life, in a foreign country, travelling with a child, having financial difficulties and totally naive,” she said. She also suffered from chronic stage fright and later attended classes at the Stella Adler School of Acting in New York to combat her fear.
Gilberto with Stan Getz, left, in the 1964 film Get Yourself A College Girl
Gilberto with Stan Getz, left, in the 1964 film Get Yourself A College Girl
GETTY IMAGES
The press reported that she had an affair with Getz during the tour and she was subjected to the objectification that was the lot of too many female singers at the time. One reviewer wrote that she “evoked every straight man’s daydream of an exotic, submissive woman in a bikini”.
Yet she proved to be remarkably resilient and after leaving Getz’s band she built a successful solo career. She made her solo debut in London in 1965 and over the next six years made eight solo albums, earning another Grammy nomination for best female vocal performance. She also worked with such jazz luminaries as the pianist Gil Evans, the brilliant saxophonist Stanley Turrentine and Quincy Jones, although she insisted she was not a jazz singer. “I’ve been told that my phrasing is jazz-influenced but I prefer simplicity,” she said.
It was perhaps her reluctance to be pigeon-holed as a jazz chanteuse that led her in 1977 to record a disco version of the song that made her famous on an album titled That Girl from Ipanema.
Replacing the lilting bossa nova rhythm of the original with a banging dancefloor beat was undeniably crass, but it did not excuse the way she was maltreated once again by the record industry. “It was the second instance she would record the song, and never be paid for it,” said her son Marcelo Gilberto, who played in her band for 15 years and acted as her manager. “She believed in people and was trusting. They took advantage of her good nature, her trust and her desire to make music.”
She was never embraced in her home country and refused to perform in Brazil
She was never embraced in her home country and refused to perform in Brazil
SIMON RITTER/GETTY IMAGES
She is survived by her son Marcello, from her marriage to Gilberto, and by her younger son Gregory Lasorsa, a guitarist in her band, from her second marriage to Nicholas Lasorsa. Both marriages ended in divorce.
Although she was an international star, oddly the one country where she went uncelebrated was her native Brazil. The reasons for the hostility towards her were never entirely clear but she made no secret of the fact that what she called the “harsh criticism and unwarranted sarcasm” of the Brazilian media left her “very hurt”.
She was so upset that in 1965 she declared that she would never perform in the country of her birth again. She kept her promise and declined to attend the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro at which The Girl from Ipanema was played. After divorcing João Gilberto, she lived for the rest of her life in the United States, where her talents were better appreciated.
After announcing her retirement in 2002 she spent her time painting, studying philosophy and campaigning for animal rights, but was reported to lead a reclusive existence.
She was born Astrud Evangelina Weinert in March 1940 in Salvador, Brazil, more than 750 miles north from Ipanema. Her Brazilian mother Evangelina Neves Lobo was a teacher who sang and played the violin and the Portuguese mandolin known as the bandolim. Her German-born father Fritz Wilhelm Weinert was a professor of languages at Bahia State University and she grew up fluent in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese — and, of course, English.
In her teens she hung out with a group of Brazilian singers and songwriters that included Carlos Lyra, Roberto Menesca, Ronaldo Boscoli and Nara Leão, who introduced her to João Gilberto. He was a decade older than her and they married when she was 19.
Although she sometimes sang at home while her husband was composing on the guitar, she expressed no ambition to sing professionally and admitted that at the time she was content to play the role of a faithful and devoted Brazilian housewife.
By the time of their marriage her husband was already one of the brightest stars in Brazilian music. The year before he had arranged what is widely acknowledged as the first bossa nova song Chega de Saudade (or No More Blues) for the singer Elizeth Cardoso and swiftly followed with his own debut solo recording, which became a bossa nova landmark.
The popularity of his gentle bossa nova rhythms spread to North America and he was making his debut along with other Brazilian artists at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1962 when he was introduced to Getz. The idea of fusing Brazilian bossa nova with American jazz was born and four months later the two men got together in the studio to record the Getz/Gilberto album.
The Girl From Ipanema meant Astrud’s rise from housewife to international stardom was giddily swift and she was immediately signed up to perform her hit song in the 1964 MGM film Get Yourself A College Girl, appearing alongside The Animals and The Dave Clark Five and looking demurely alluring in a pale blue sundress with matching bow in her hair.
Stand-out moments in her later career included singing as a duo with George Michael and a “virtual duet” with Frank Sinatra, when their two versions of Fly Me To The Moon were edited together for the soundtrack of the 2003 rom-com Down With Love, starring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor.
Even in old age, in the public’s imagination she remained the girl from Ipanema, the sound of her voice able in an instant to banish the cares of the world by conjuring visions of a world of sun-tanned youthful bliss.
Astrud Gilberto, the girl from Ipanema, was born on March 29, 1940. She died on June 5, 2023, aged 83