They were close friends and said goodbye almost simultaneously.
Journalist Zuza Homem de Mello died on October 4, 2020, at the age of 87.
Presenter of musical programs, organizer of concerts and festivals, he was a passionate guy: already retired, he dedicated the last stretch of his life to writing
Amoroso
, intended as the definitive biography of the great João Gilberto.
According to Zuza's widow, a few days earlier he had finished that job.
Actually, now that we read the Spanish version of Libros del Kultrum, some errors are detected (does it tour with a certain Jimi Hendricks?) and the suspicion arises that perhaps the volume was not finished off.
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When a swing swings alone: João Gilberto's 'saudade'
We can understand Zuza's reticence about how to finish the book: we imagine her biting her tongue.
Gilberto, who died in 2019 at the age of 88, broke up with many of his friends due to his last partner, a lady from a good family named Claudia Faissol.
Claudia's forays into João's professional life were disastrous;
Only she was able to get João Marcelo and Bebel Gilberto, her first two children (from different mothers), to come together to obtain the guardianship of the father and thus manage issues such as the costly fight with EMI, a multinational that released its decisive first three LPs.
Generous, not to say spendthrift, João was evicted from his house and Caetano Veloso had to come to the rescue.
João Gilberto with Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa. UH/Folhapress Collection (UH/Folhapress Collection)
One of the biographer's obsessions is to dilute the eccentric fame that surrounded Gilberto: the delays in appointments and concerts, the manias with hotels, the gastronomic whims, the antipathy for interviews, the hatred of air conditioning.
All this, Zuza comes to say, is the small toll to pay for João's perfectionism, manifested in the obstinacy to balance the
output
of his voice and his guitar (it could require the presence of his favorite sound technician, the Japanese Kenichiro Kondo , in any concert hall in the world).
They were not mere cravings.
Zuza breaks down the content of each Gilberto album, including those made live, to demonstrate his constant reinvention of the basic repertoire, both instrumentally and vocally.
He insists that João was not exclusively a bossa nova interpreter, even though that was his gateway to universality.
He played countless previous styles: samba, samba-song, choro,
baião
, march,
frevo
, without forgetting the bolero, the Italian song and the American pop between the wars;
His professional origins are in choral groups such as Os Cariocas or Anjos do Inferno, to whose evolution more than 20 pages are devoted.
João Gilberto with his first wife, Astrud.
Amoroso
is, true, a book written in Brazil for Brazilians;
footnotes added by the translator, Antonio Jiménez Morato, are appreciated.
And it perfectly portrays the moment in which a country with a Third World complex manages to make the entire planet follow its sinuous rhythms.
The
bossa, a happy product of the dialogue between samba and
cool jazz
, generated a commercial boom that resulted in the dispersion of its creators.
João Gilberto also lived through that labor exile, with long periods in the United States and Mexico, although he ended up returning to his country, where he did not exactly win popularity contests.
Haircut to João Gilberto.IVAN CRUZ
But he always had eloquent admirers.
Like the Buddhist monk Celso Marques, who places him in
Amoroso
as the apotheosis of
Brazilianness
;
“I consider samba as the drumbeat of common interests and the social pact that summons and raises up all the tribes of the Brazilian nation.
The samba beat on João Gilberto's guitar, invented by him and elevated to artistic sublimation, expresses the sacredness of the sense of belonging to the tribe.
The art of João Gilberto is a torch that illuminates the most worthy part of what we are as a nation, but that we may never reach as a country”.
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