Every day she passed in front of the old Veloso bar on her way home from the beach, and from the window of the bar she was watched by the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim and the poet Vinicius de Moraes. She was 17 years old, with brown hair, green eyes like the sea, and her name was Heloisa Pinheiro. But the world came to know her as the Garota de Ipanema, the girl “full of grace” that Astrud Gilberto immortalized in a record that later went down in history for inaugurating the bossa nova genre. Astrud, whose English rendition of her hit song won the 1965 Grammy Award, the first ever given to a Brazilian female artist, died tonight at the age of 83. It was 1962, and in those days, the elegant district of Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro, which takes its name from the beach nestled between the rocks of Leblon and Arpoador, had just forty thousand inhabitants and the tallest building did not exceed four plans. The song inspired by Heloisa was born with the name of Meninha Que Pasa, and was initially intended for a musical comedy called Dirigível, which Vinicius was working on.
The first known recorded version of the song dates back to a live session on August 1, 1962 in the Copacabana bar called Au Bon Gourmet, with the participation of Tom Jobim, Vinicius de Moraes and João Gilberto. But it was an American music producer named Creed Taylor who created the magical mix that transformed the Garota into its most famous English-speaking version: The Girl from Ipanema. Taylor was looking for new sounds for one of the strongest jazz labels, Verve Records, and he sensed that the delicate rhythm and sophisticated harmonies of the nascent bossa nova movement blended perfectly with the cool jazz of emerging names on the US scene such as pianist Bill Evans and saxophonist Stan Getz. And it was the latter, in March 1963, who met in a studio in New York with João Gilberto and his wife Astrud to record the still most famous and worldwide known version of the song by Jobim and Vinicius. A magical interpretation in which Astrud Gilberto’s natural and nonchalant voice seems to perfectly embody the innate grace of the Garota who passed in front of the Veloso bar every day. Born March 20, 1940 in Salvador de Bahia, northeastern Brazil, daughter of a German married to a Brazilian, Astrud has collected 19 albums in her career. Prominent among them are Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto (1964), The Shadow of Your Smile (1965), Live in New York (1996) and Jungle (2002). In 1992, the singer was honored for her career by Latin Jazz USA and, since 2002, she has been inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame.
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2023-06-06 18:23:55
#Farewell #Astrud #Gilberto #girl #Ipanema
