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Home , Astrud Gilberto, Elis Regina, Elizete Cardoso, Marisa Monte, Stan Getz

Jazz Back to Bossa Rosa Passos and fifty years of . by Gary Giddins November 26, 2007

Passos, who was six when bossa nova was born, may surpass her musical forebears.

Rosa Passos is often described as the heir to, or female equivalent of, João Gilberto, which is a way of saying that she is a distinguished interpreter of bossa nova at a time when gifted young Brazilian singers, like , have adopted more fashionable pop styles. This won’t necessarily sound appealing to those who recall bossa nova as an easy-listening diversion of the Kennedy years, epitomized by ’s girlishly vacant invocation of “.” But there has always been a difference between the musical phenomenon that began in in the late fifties and the watered-down version that flourished in the . Though the latter inspired brilliant collaborations— and João Gilberto; and Antonio Carlos Jobim— bossa nova quickly became a lounge-music punch line. “Blame it on the Bossa Nova,” Eydie Gormé wailed, as Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 made a sedative of “The Look of Love.” In Brazil, the perspective is entirely different. While João Gilberto reigns as a god, Astrud is hardly known on the beaches of Ipanema. And many key bossa-nova figures, including the incomparable , never found a North American audience. The divide between the domestic bossa and its export- market derivative is sure to be much brooded over next year, when Brazil celebrates bossa nova’s fiftieth anniversary.

Bossa nova grew out of long-standing traditions, but its emergence is usually traced to a 1958 album, “Canção do Amor Demais,” by the hugely popular singer Elizete Cardoso. The album had a strange evolution. A few years earlier, , a playwright, poet, and diplomat, hired Jobim to write music for his play “Orfeu da Conceição.” The play, a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, was a success and generated interest in a film—the 1959 hit “.” But the French production company wanted a new score, leaving Vinicius scrambling for a way to introduce the songs he had written with Jobim. He chose Cardoso for her popularity and musicality, and, though initially reluctant, she agreed to make the record. (Imagine Lennon and McCartney, unable to get a record deal, having to persuade Vera Lynn to introduce their songs.) But the interpretative twist that gave the music a genuinely new feeling came from the participation of an obstreperous guitarist from , João Gilberto.

Jobim and Gilberto belonged to a generation that had grown up with . While the tunes written by bebop innovators like , , and Bud Powell were often too volatile and complicated for contemporary listeners, Jobim found a way of using bebop harmonies— especially the tritone, or flattened fifth—as the basis for irresistibly lyrical melodies. One of his most famous songs, “”—the title means “slightly out of tune,” or “off key”—is built almost entirely on discords. Gilberto, meanwhile, refined rhythms, banished vibrato, and subdued emotion, forging a style that was neither Brazilian samba nor American . The music historian and producer says that the first use of the phrase “bossa nova” was in a liner note that Jobim wrote for Gilberto, describing his “new way” of doing things; the phrase also appears in the lyric of “Desafinado.”

In 1958, Rosa Passos was six years old and had been playing piano for three years. She grew up in Salvador, the capital of Bahia, her imagination fired by the early recordings of Gilberto and by the success of “Black Orpheus” (with its Luiz Bonfá score). By the age of fifteen, she was performing on local television. Yet her career was slow in taking off. She made an album in 1979, “Recriação,” introducing songs written with her longtime collaborator, Fernando de Oliveira, and then retired to Brasilia, where she married and raised a family. She rarely performed during the next decade and did not record again until 1991. In 1996, her album “Pano Pra Manga” brought her renewed attention, including an appearance at the Hollywood Bowl. Jazz musicians began to discover her: she performed in Japan, Cuba, Germany, Denmark, , and Russia, and returned to the United States for a New Orleans concert in 2001. She made several more albums, with ensembles ranging from small jazz groups to orchestras, among them “Entre Amigos,” “Festa,” “Eu e Meu Coraçâo,” “Azul,” and “Amorosa.” Yet, as good as the recordings are, Passos belongs to that dwindling tribe of performers who do their best work before an audience. Recently, she gave her début performance at the Blue Note. She began with two songs by , whose helped define the development of Brazilian popular music during the nineteen-thirties, the period of ’s pre-Hollywood stardom. On “Vatapá,” with its clipped, fizzy rhythm, her right hip bumped upward on the offbeats as her hands elaborated the melody, and, for a moment, you could imagine her in a fruit-bowl hat. The ballad “Marina” was a more emblematic Passos vehicle: tender, stylish, knowing. She laid out her phrases with the deliberation of an instrumentalist, behind or on the beat, conveying, even to listeners, like me, whose Portuguese is limited to “Uma caipirinha, por favor” and “obrigado,” a conversational spontaneity that seemed to illuminate the emotional core of the piece. Yo-Yo Ma, who has toured and recorded with Passos, has described her voice as “the most beautiful in the world.” That’s an overstatement, but only in degree. Her voice has the clarity of water, and her phrasing, all but free of vibrato and ornamentation, is colored only by the nasality that is embedded in the Portuguese language. If it isn’t the most beautiful voice, it is surely one of unusual splendor, especially bewitching in the upper register, where it suggests fragility but never breaks. Whether she whispers or shouts, her intonation is reliably solid—a crucial asset in music that values dissonance and verbose lyrics.

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And she is more than a singer. Passos is a prolific songwriter and a superb rhythm guitarist in the manner of her idol, João Gilberto. When she accompanies herself, the intimacy of her style and her harmonic sophistication are underscored; her fretting hand is in constant motion, adding transitional chords to already copious harmonies, and her grasp of the fretboard is so sure that she produces far less “surface noise”—those scratching sounds made when sliding from one chord to another—than many full-time guitarists. Her most recent album, “Rosa,” released last year on Telarc, is the long- awaited testimony to her self-sufficiency: she arranged the entire album for voice and guitar (except for an introductory a-cappella number) and composed nearly half of it. The confident delicacy of her attack masks fascinating details—her varied articulation of different words in the same phrase, as on the intricate “Molambo,” arranged with a bolero beat, and, in her own haunting “Sutilezas,” an exquisitely plaintive series of rising four-bar phrases that resolve and then rise again.

At the Blue Note, she fronted a quartet with the saxophonist Rodrigo Ursaia, the pianist Helio Alves, the bassist Paolo Paulelli, and the drummer Celso de Almeida. Passos absorbs the enthusiasm of the audience; at intervals, she plucked a flower from a vase onstage and presented it to someone sitting ringside. Short and stocky, she has a strong face with prominent cheeks and a generous mouth. She speaks little English—her stage announcements were translated by the saxophonist—but she commands attention by her emotional resolve. In this respect, she is not Gilberto’s heir; she is his better. On Jobim’s ingenious “Fotografia,” backed by the band, she telegraphed its flirtatious romance with lilting high-note inflections and an occasional wink; in the same composer’s heartbreaking “,” she sighed the words; and on ’s jubilant “É Luxo Só,” accompanied only by her own acoustic guitar, she opened up her lungs and transformed a crowded downtown night club into Carnival. Then she handed out another flower. ♦

ILLUSTRATION: JACQUES DE LOUSTAL