João

On João Gilberto's gentle genius, the real girl from Ipanema, and the best music genre to ever emerge from a bathroom

This weekend, Pitchfork published just a hair under 3,000 words I wrote about the 1964 collaborative album between Stan Getz and João Gilberto, Getz/ Gilberto. Enjoy the Sunday Review of the album.

You might have heard of it? Or else seen it in your grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ record collection? I feel most people have already subconsciously filed away “The Girl From Ipanema” as a bachelor pad Muzak punchline before even registering just who or what the song is. It can be a pretty good punchline for elevator scenes. I certainly can’t tell you about whenever I would have first encountered the song, save that it seemed like fluff or the kind of flower that blooms only on wallpaper. Like fluff and wallpaper, it feels like it’s always been there.

(I didn’t do this because of “The Girl From Ipanema.” I’m fairly indifferent to the song in a way. Not to say that it wasn’t the song my wife and I always sang to our young child. I’m not going to say I named my child after João Gilberto. But I’m not going to say I didn’t not name them after João Gilberto.)

But I can recall the first time I heard João Gilberto. Or rather, felt that frequency João was tuned into. In late 1999, I started an email interview with Oren Ambarchi on the strength of this Touch promo CD that had landed at our house in Austin, Insulation. (That transcript has since been printed out and lost to time.) In one of his answers, he mentioned João’s “white album” and I immediately ordered it from Waterloo. “Wonder” seems to be an understatement about what I first heard. And a just reward for always being curious about the music that other musicians cite.

I hesitate to say that I understood what João was doing with just his voice and guitar, as his guitar playing is singular, his sense of timing, his ability to have the rhythm and vowels push and pull against their confines in a musical measure, that all really remains an unplumbable mystery. Hence the first paragraph of this Sunday Review, with Getz just audibly in awe of what João does:

“The most individual singer of our time, a true originator,” he enthused. “His curious ability to sing warmly without a vibrato, his impeccable and inimitable rhythmic sense, his intimacy, all coupled to his wonderful guitar work, make him unique.”

I realize now that I left out what Getz uttered just a few lines later: “It’s just one of those mysteries.”

If you’ve ever tried to play a bossa nova song on the guitar, you’ve no doubt experienced that sense of mystery or of helplessness. How can something so smooth be so hard to capture?

To disprove my point, here’s Glen Kotche absolutely smoking this version of what might be my favorite João tune of all-time. Incredible not only to see him lay this out in real time, but also to visualize just how complex this seemingly simple murmur of divinity actually is.

Which is to say, João’s self-titled album from 1973, this “white album,” is the João album I always dreamed of writing about. In fact, I no doubt pitched it as a Sunday Review upon the occasion of João leaving this world in 2019. That didn’t pan out, so it was a challenge to use Getz/ Gilberto, which in all honesty is never the João album I return to when I want to feel that cosmic melancholia of the most mysterious of João’s songs. For example, there are some notes he hits on that Getz/Gilberto ‘76 concert that just make this soul tremble with wonder.

When I think about the artists that touch me so, whether it was Nick Drake in my teenage years or Mark Hollis and those late Talk talk records, I realize that it comes from this taproot. If you want to hear the sound of a human using his voice and guitar to question the universe, that’s where João sits, humming to himself.