The Girl from Ipanema

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The Girl from Ipanema ("The girl from Ipanema") is the better-known English title of a popular Brazilian piece of music composed in 1962 by Antônio Carlos Jobim . The Portuguese-language original, the text of which was written by Vinícius de Moraes , bears the synonymous title Garota de Ipanema. At the time the song was written, Ipanema , a district of Rio de Janeiro , was the bohemian district of the Brazilian metropolis.

A recording for the music label Verve on March 19, 1963 in New York , which appeared the following year on the Getz / Gilberto long-playing record , made The Girl from Ipanema one of the world's most famous Bossa Nova songs . The unusual and sustainable success this version, the participation was the well-known American jazz - tenor saxophonist Stan Getz at. In addition to the Brazilian singer and guitarist João Gilberto , who was Jobim's preferred interpreter for his song compositions, you can also hear his wife Astrud , whose world career began with the single release of this piece.

music

Although Jobim and Moraes had written songs together for years - albeit only with moderate success with the Brazilian audience - it is contrary to popular legend that it is not true that the two spontaneously designed the piece at a table in the Veloso bar . Jobim first set to music a text that Moraes had written shortly before in Petrópolis ; However, since this first text was ultimately rejected by both partners and Moraes wrote an almost completely revised, new version, the music must be regarded as the older part of the two basic elements of the song. The great success of the song in the USA and Jobim's emigration there in connection with the Brazilian military coup in 1964 also meant that Girl from Ipanema was the last joint work of the two.

General

The genre of the song makes it the composer's task to use the musical means he uses in such a way that they are able to carry and support the structure and message of a text. Jobim's composition is characterized by a combination of partly clichéd and partly highly original phrases in which the characteristics of very different styles are processed.

shape

Girl from Ipanema is a 40-bar song that is structured in the so-called song form AABA. This form is not unknown in Brazilian music; However, it is style-defining for popular music in the USA. The AABA form forms the backbone of the vast majority of the songs on Tin Pan Alley , which in turn form the basis of a substantial part of the jazz standard repertoire. Whenever the composer Antônio Carlos Jobim resorted to this comparatively “jazzy” form, he endeavored to loosen up its relatively rigid structure with surprising twists where possible. In the case of Girl from Ipanema , it is the middle section (B) which, with its 16 bars, is twice as long as the familiar basic model. The framing eight-bar A parts, on the other hand, correspond to the expectations of the listener to a particular degree, as they are almost completely identical to each other melodically and harmonically .

Meter, rhythm and tempo

The bossa nova musicians understood their style as an emphatically urban, intellectual and " cool " further development of older forms of samba . The traditional division of the rhythm into one “light” and one “heavy” beat per measure has been taken over from samba. Brazilian central issues of the Girl from Ipanema are therefore 2 / 4 - stroke quoted as originally in use for most Latin American rhythms. North American and European musicians whose habits in sight reading are influenced by the jazz tradition, this notation way feel often as confusing, which is why there are now many in the 4 / 4 -Stroke (or, more rarely, alla breve ) are written down expenses, such as the Real Book and the collections of popular repertoire pieces based on him. Like most bossa nova pieces, Girl from Ipanema is composed for a medium tempo; on the best known recording (the LP Getz / Gilberto ) it is MM 124.

key

Jobim originally wrote Girl from Ipanema in the key of D flat major , which corresponded well to both his own and the familiar voice of João Gilberto. Even if there is no evidence to suggest that considerations regarding possible key characteristics played any role for the composer , the characteristics of the instruments normally involved produce an audible effect in this tonality. For the saxophones and the double bass, for example, D flat major is a “dark” sounding, somewhat delicate key that requires special attention in terms of intonation and instrumental technique in general.

Because the middle section now initially modulates a semitone upwards , i.e. into D major , which is relatively easy to play and therefore more powerful , the transitions between the form parts offer a musician who improvises over the chord progression possibilities. In addition to the “classic” version on Getz / Gilberto mentioned above , this effect can also be heard quite well in a well-known recording of the Oscar-Peterson trio ( We Get Requests , 1965), which also makes use of the special properties of the original key. Since the late 1960s, however, the technically less demanding F major has established itself as the common key, which Jobim had already chosen for his own instrumental versions.

Since Girl from Ipanema is preferred by vocalists, the choice of key for vocal versions is usually based on the vocal possibilities of the singer. The difficulty of the piece is less in its range , which is not extraordinarily wide with a major ninth , but in its relatively abstract melody in relation to the accompanying chords .

Motifs and sequencing

Audio file / audio sample The three-tone motif of the A-parts ? / i

One of the most prominent characteristics of the melody of Girl from Ipanema is its striking limitation to a few, simple and catchy motifs and their consistent continuation through the chord progressions. All three A-sections are contested by a single core motif consisting of only three tones, which is first repeated on the same pitch before the same melodic movement - this time shifted one whole tone down - is sequenced again.

The tonal appeal of this simple three-tone motif lies in the ambiguous tension between the melody tones and the accompanying chords. The melody tones e -flat , c and b are in relation to the tonic D flat major respectively the major ninth, major seventh and major sixth or tredezime . In relation to the second chord, the same notes are the root , sixth / tredezime and fifth . In these functions, the tones are by no means extremely dissonant , so they do not sound “wrong”, but they also do not take on a clear harmonic task in terms of voice guidance . This is done only in the A-part each of the second four-stroke each, where the tones of the melody and c as harmonic significant leading tones act. However, since the melody, following the sequential logic, is led into the fifth a flat, instead of dissolving into the keynote expected by the ear, the music remains suspended, as it corresponds to the longing character of the accompanying text. That this must be intentional becomes apparent at the very end of the form, when the sequence motif is varied briefly, but the melody again does not reach the root note, but “only” the seventh. So Jobim uses melodic means to achieve a sound effect comparable to that of a half-close . Their character always remains singing, not least because the melody tones chosen suggest a pentatonic scale and thus the typical material of countless folk and children's songs .

In the further course of the song, i.e. the middle section, Jobim only brings two more new motifs, which he develops in a similar way. Their musical context becomes clearer from an understanding of the original harmonic progression of these 16 bars, which is explained in a later section.

Harmonics: clichés and contrasts

From a harmonic point of view, Girl from Ipanema combines a very common chord progression with a series of tonal shifts in its two forms , which consciously tries to evade a clear, consistent interpretation in the sense of the functional theory .

The A parts

The A parts bring the chord progression tonic - double dominant - dominant and again tonic, in a very clear, symmetrical and tonally hardly alienated form , as it has been in use in European music at least since the Viennese classical period :

Audio file / audio sample The chord cliché on which the accompaniment of the A sections is based ? / i

Additional colors are only set very sparingly with chord reserve (here the chord IIm7 preceding the dominant) or the tritone substitution (bII7), the slightly dissonant effect of which is further softened by the subtle guitar accompaniment, which is characteristic of the bossa nova. This chord scheme is ubiquitous in the three great popular music traditions that the American continent produced in the 20th century, namely those of the United States, Brazil, and Cuba . So it would be a mistake to use such a chord progression to prove the often postulated influence of jazz on bossa nova. On Getz / Gilberto alone there are three other songs that work with the same harmonic cliché (or minor modifications of it).

Very typical for North American melodies above this chord structure, however, is the preference for repetitive and sequencing melodies, as also happens in Girl from Ipanema .

The middle part

As already mentioned, the 16-bar middle section, the so-called bridge , only uses two melodic motifs. The first of these basically only consists of a whole step (in the note example the movement from c sharp to b):

Audio file / audio sample The first melodic motif of the middle section ? / i

These two tones are interpreted as the third or seventh of two related chords (here Dmaj7 and G7) and then played around with the neighboring tones. After the first performance of this motif a sequenced passage begins again, which, however, unusual tone steps used: The design is first a minor third and then again by one semitone shifted audio sample ? / i . Jobim further blurs the harmonious relations by the second and third major chord by their minor parallels replaced Sample ? / i , whereby new relationships of thirds come to the fore. These so-called mediants often create complex sound relationships, especially in combination with the unfamiliar recesses of the bass tones. It was surprising harmonic solutions like this that led to the fact that, in addition to jazz, the music of impressionism was named as another main influence of bossa nova; and indeed Jobim had spent much of his youth studying Claude Debussy's and Maurice Ravel's piano music. Audio file / audio sample Audio file / audio sample

The main purpose of the remaining four bars is to return the piece to its original key (from which it has since moved a long way). Harmoniously and melodically, the composer chooses a proven, coherent method: a fifth case sequence beginning on an F minor chord cadences back to D flat major. This familiar chord progression sounds under a scale that is repeated in the now well-known manner in the last two bars, transposed down a whole tone. This otherwise very predictable course is given tonal sharpness by the "wrong" resolution. Instead of the fifth (f or es), which the ear would expect as the target tone at this point, Jobim ends the figure a semitone lower and thus on the "jazzy" excessive undecimal popularized by the bebop .

Audio file / audio sample The second melodic motif of the middle section ? / i

Doug Ramsey describes the elegant balance that was achieved with such and similar musical means between the predictability of the song-like, danceable and the harmonious sophistication of a predominantly instrumental musical language such as modern jazz as the actual achievement of the bossa nova generation:

"Gilberto, Jobim, and other Brazilians turned the street-dance rhythms of Samba from predictability to subtlety, giving the music an asymmetrical urgency that was almost impossible to resist."

Instrumental solo

In jazz and related musical styles, instrumental solos are usually not considered an integral, immutable part of a composition. That is in the nature of things, since it is common practice to improvise such solo passages within the form already given by the song and over the already established chord scheme.

In principle, it's the same with Girl from Ipanema , but in the case of this piece, special factors have caused the two solos on Getz / Gilberto to be understood by many listeners as essential elements of the musical whole. The case here, which was unusual in the early 1960s, was that the audience wished to hear certain instrumental passages from the musicians during live performances in the most unchanged form possible. This was most recently common in big band jazz of the swing era, i.e. over two decades earlier, and only became popular again with the rock bands of the following years.

In addition to the extraordinary popularity that this special version of the song has enjoyed for decades, inherent musical reasons can also be named for the "sacrosanct" status of the two solos. On the one hand, both soloists are much more focused on the theme than is usual in modern jazz (most of the other solos on the album are also much more independent melodically and rhythmically). In this way, the instruments continue the "purring" sotto voce chant of the two Gilbertos and thus create the illusion of further vocal verses. It should be borne in mind that João in particular, who sang in Portuguese and with a heavily “mumbling” Brazilian accent, was incomprehensible for most North American and European listeners anyway and his contribution was therefore less as a song text, but more as a melody and rhythm (hence almost like an instrumental solo).

Stan Getz only breaks away from the melody more strongly in the last eight bars of his solo, and he does this in a way that is typical for him, namely with rhythmic means. Simplifying the three-tone motif of the A sections even further, he initially denies four bars exclusively with the tones E flat and C, which he places very asymmetrically in the rhythm and thus creates an enormously swinging, polyrhythmic riff with very simple means . In the following four bars the saxophonist returns to the melody, which he interprets with a laid-back phrasing that is very typical for his jazz playing as well as for the feeling of the bossa nova singing . On the single release, the producer Creed Taylor only left this final climax of the tenor solo:

Audio file / audio sample The last eight bars of Stan Getz's tenor solo, which were also retained on the edited single ? / i

Harmonic ambiguity

The sonorous harmony of the middle section with its functionally not clearly assignable chord relationships has inspired many theorists to analyze this original progression over the past decades. It is noteworthy that the debate about the "correct" interpretation model of this idiosyncratic structure in Germany, which is a long way from both the USA as the country of origin of jazz and from Brazil as the home of bossa nova, was conducted with particularly polemical acuteness - this at all the fact that such theoretical “correctness” was neither sought by the composer nor demanded by musicians as a guideline.

Axel Jungbluth , whose jazz harmony theory has long been considered the standard work on this topic on the German-speaking market, devotes an unusually long and elaborate analysis to this central section in his book. Jungbluth, who, as a graduate of the Berklee College of Music, thinks along the lines of the chord-scale theory , comes to astute but didactically controversial results.

The guitarist Werner Pöhlert , who in numerous publications heavily criticizes the “far from practice” of the scale theory, refers to the analysis he describes as “fundamentally harmonious” and propagated as much more conclusive, which takes into account the basically song-like, singing character of the composition.

Lyrics and singing

Thanks to the worldwide success of the Girl from Ipanema , the typical stylistic peculiarities of Bossa Nova singing became internationally known. In deliberate contrast to the established Brazilian music business, the lush orchestra - Arrangements and heavy, simplified samba rhythms preferred, there was the small circle of the protagonists of the new style essential to forge "focus the message on the artist [to]." For this purpose, a completely new (and perceived as very provocative), emphatically quiet style of singing was developed, which, according to João Gilberto, should act "as if you were whispering in the listener's ear". Gilberto in particular turned against the mostly dramatic or pathetic gestures of popular music of his time: "The text must not speak of death, blood or dagger".

Menina que passa

Vinícius de Moraes, 1970.

The song was originally written for the musical Dirigível ("Airship"), the book of which Moraes "already had in mind, but never put it on paper". All he could do was give Jobim a draft of the lyrics for a song he had titled Menina que passa ("Girl Who Passes By "). This first draft began with the words:

Vinha cansado de tudo, de tantos caminhos
Tão sem poesia, tão sem passarinhos,
Com medo da vida, com medo de amar,
Quando na tarde vazia, tão linda no espaço
Eu vi a menina que vinha num passo
Cheia de balanço caminho do mar.
(“I had grown tired of all things, so many ways without poetry and birds singing, full of fear of life, full of fear of loving, when one empty afternoon I saw this beautiful girl walking gracefully on the way to Beach passed me. ")

The music that Jobim wrote on this text also appealed to the poet extraordinarily, but the two agreed that the words placed the melancholy aspect of the depicted scene too much in the foreground. Moraes therefore agreed to a complete revision.

The Portuguese text

Three and a half decades later:
65-year-old João Gilberto at Umbria Jazz in Perugia , 1996

Moraes' new version of the text was ready in the first days of August 1962. He had only retained the basic motif - a somewhat melancholy observer reflecting on a good-looking young woman passing by - as well as a few formulations and small phrases. Since he now had to put words on Jobim's already finished music, the meter and rhyme scheme remained unchanged. The first words of the text that later became so famous are now:

Olha que coisa mais linda, mais cheia de graça
É ela menina que vem que passa
num doce balanço caminho do mar.
Moça do corpo dourado do sol de Ipanema,
O seu balançado é mais que um poema.
É a coisa mais linda que eu ja vi passar.

("Look, what a beautiful sight, so full of grace, is this girl who walks by there swaying step on her way to the sea. Girls whose bodies have been gilded by the Ipanema sun, their walk is more perfect than a poem, she is the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen pass! ")

With that, the Portuguese version, Garota de Ipanema, was complete - and the timing turned out to be extraordinarily propitious. The bar owner Flávio Ramos , who was only moderately successful so far, was able to purchase the Au Bon Gourmet restaurant in one of the best locations on Avenida Copacabana at a reasonable price. Ramos now set about making his lifelong dream of a classy nightclub come true. For the opening, he planned a show in which he presented the three most famous exponents of Bossa Nova (namely Jobim, Moraes and João Gilberto) together on a stage for the first time. This extremely successful and several times extended guest performance was to remain the only one in which the three musicians performed live together.

The Bon Gourmet quickly became an attraction for tourists from the USA, in whose home country the “Bossa Nova craze” had only started a few months earlier. Despite initial reservations, Jobim and Gilberto were finally persuaded by the frequently present representatives of the US record industry to take the plunge into the international arena and record a recording in New York with Stan Getz.

Gimbel's broadcast

Norman Gimbel , who until then had tried his hand at Broadway as a musical copywriter with dubious success , met Jobim in 1963. He offered the Brazilian to translate the Portuguese lyrics of his songs into English. On the basis of literal translations, Gimbel finally created adaptations that mostly retained the approximate context of the originals, but their tone of voice was strongly oriented towards the listening habits of the affluent American middle-class audience, which Jobim did not appreciate, but accepted in view of the success. Although the English translation of the title ( Girl from Ipanema ) is still unproblematic, the first lines of the text, which was subsequently to become famous through Astrud Gilberto's interpretation, show why the Brazilian musicians judged the translations to be flattened. In particular, it was criticized that the ambiguous, restrained poetry of the original was lost and had to give way to a "stale mixture of erotic and exotic":

Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, each one she passes goes "Ah!"
When she walks, it's like a samba
That swings so cool and sways so gently
That when she passes, each one she passes goes "Ah!"
(“Tall and suntanned and young and pretty, the girl from Ipanema goes for a walk, and when she comes by everyone she passes goes 'Ah!'. When she goes, it's like a samba swinging so relaxed and like that Weighs gently so that everyone she passes makes 'Ah!'. ")

Early recordings

The former Rua Montenegro in Ipanema, where the story of the song began, is now named after Vinícius de Moraes

In Brazil, Girl from Ipanema initially achieved only one respectable success. The first recordings were made by Pery Ribeiro (for the Odeon label) and the Tamba Trio (for Philips ). These singles appeared at the same time in January 1963 in order to avoid possible disputes between the production companies. The Brazilian label Mocambo released a version of the singer Claudette Soares , which, however, received little applause.

The composer Jobim recorded the piece for the first time in the United States, where he had resided practically permanently since November 1962. This instrumental version appeared in May 1963 on the LP The Composer of ' Desafinado ' Plays , a record that is also remarkable in that it marks the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration with the German arranger Claus Ogerman . As the first recording by one of the most important bossa nova musicians in the USA, this recording received a lot of attention.

The Getz / Gilberto recording and its reception

Neither in jazz nor in Brazilian music it is the rule that frequently interpreted pieces exist in a “definitive” version, even if the latter label is often used by the record industry and critics. In this respect, there is a clear difference here to rock and pop music, where cover versions tend to dominate that do without profound changes to the "original". Girl from Ipanema belongs to a relatively small group of pieces, which are an exception here: After the publication of Getz / Gilberto , the majority of the following versions refer to this template.

The musicians involved

Stan Getz: tenor saxophone

Stan Getz was considered one of the most important representatives of cool jazz in the 1940s and 1950s , and as a saxophonist many critics and fans valued him as the most important creative innovator of Lester Young's style of playing. His music was well known to the bossa nova musicians long before Getz's first forays into Brazilian rhythms, which is why both Jobim and Gilberto said they were happy to take the opportunity to record with him.

João Gilberto: vocals and guitar

As already mentioned, Gilberto was Jobim's preferred vocal interpreter for his compositions. As a rhythm guitarist, he had already played a decisive role in shaping an essential style element of Bossa Nova years before and was therefore considered the central figure of this recording session, which is also expressed by the title of the long-playing record, which was later released.

Astrud Gilberto: Singing

Astrud Gilberto, 1966.

A legend that has been circulated again and again claims that João's wife Astrud only happened to be in the studio on the second day of the recording session and was completely inexperienced as a singer. As Ruy Castro shows, neither is the case, which is underpinned by the fact that Astrud was able to read Norman Gimbel's recently written English text without hesitation. Stan Getz recalled twenty years later:

"Gilberto and Jobim didn't want Astrud on it. Astrud was not a professional singer […] and I knew she had a tendency to sing flat. But when I wanted translations of what was going on, and she sang 'Ipanema' […], I thought the words in English were very nice. Astrud sounded good enough to put on the record. "

“Gilberto and Jobim didn't want Astrud on it. She wasn't a professional singer, and I knew she had a tendency to intone the notes too low. But when I asked for translations of the lyrics and she sang 'Ipanema' to me, I found the English words very pretty. Astrud sounded good enough to record it. "

The producer Creed Taylor also supported Astrud Gilberto's singing ambitions: For commercial reasons, it made sense to him to have a female voice on the album, who sang "in a less exotic language". The jealousy between Astrud and her husband evidently came less in the studio than months later, after the single was released. João was extremely offended by the fact that Creed Taylor had completely cut his vocals in order to shorten the 5:22 minute take to the three-minute format of a conventional single.

Antônio Carlos Jobim: piano

Although he was the composer and arranger of almost all pieces, Jobim stepped into the background as an instrumentalist at this recording session. His extraordinarily reduced playing is largely limited to economical fills , he completely dispenses with extensive improvisations.

Tommy Williams or Sebastião Neto: double bass

It is still not completely clear which musician can be heard on the double bass on Girl from Ipanema as well as on the rest of the album. The liner notes of the original LP as well as the re-issue from 1997 indicate Tommy Williams , who at the time was the bassist in Getz's actual quartet.

The Brazilian music journalist Arnaldo de Souteiro , on the other hand, names Sebastião Neto as a double bass player. This thesis is underpinned by some preserved photos that were apparently taken during the studio session and on which Neto is shown.

Just because of the listening impression, this question can hardly be answered: The bossa nova requires an extraordinarily restrained, ensemble-appropriate playing style of the bass player. Typical solo interjections, which usually facilitate the identification of a musical personality, cannot be heard from the bass on the entire album. Musical practice, however, speaks in favor of the Brazilian being involved, since producers tend to use rhythm groups that are well-rehearsed when recording such projects.

Milton Banana: drums

To this day largely unknown in the USA and Europe, Milton Banana (1935–1999) was considered one of the best drummers and percussionists in his home country. He came to New York at Jobim's and Gilberto's express request, as they were dissatisfied with the rhythmic conception of the US drummers they knew from records.

Production team and others involved

Creed Taylor: producer

Creed Taylor was only recently from his own label Impulse! Records came to Verve. So he was under a certain pressure to succeed with his new employer, which explains why he made certain decisions when starting and marketing the Getz / Gilberto session, especially with the aim of achieving the greatest possible commercial success.

Phil Ramone: sound engineer

Phil Ramone had been the co-owner and sound engineer of A&R Studio on New York's 48th Street for about a year at the time of recording . For reasons similar to Taylor's, he was interested in commercial success, but he was also looking for a good opportunity to bring his innovative technical ideas to a broad audience. In the case of Girl from Ipanema , he risked the costly experiment of running the tape at a speed of 30 inches (76 cm) per second, given Astrud Gilberto's vocal insecurity - the singer ultimately needed five takes . This elaborate method had previously only been used for recordings of classical music; until then, jazz and pop recordings were usually content with 15 ″ / 38 cm per second.

Monica Getz

Everyone involved emphasized again and again how important the presence of Stan Getz's wife Monica was for the success of the recordings. She knew how to compensate for the unstable psyche of her husband, who was plagued by drug and alcohol problems, she managed to get João Gilberto, who is also very difficult, from the hotel to the studio in the first place, and she is said to have been the first to do so. who had massively sided with Astrud's participation.

Awards and international success

For a long time Creed Taylor was undecided how to deal with the tapes of the session; According to his own admission, it was particularly difficult for him to make the cuts that were indispensable for a single release of Girl from Ipanema . When he finally decided to do so at the end of 1963, however, his success proved him right: The single, released in January 1964, sold almost two million copies within a few weeks, helping the LP version to become very popular. In Western Europe, audiences reacted with similar enthusiasm, which is particularly noteworthy in the light of the fact that Beatlemania was peaking on both sides of the Atlantic at the same time .

In the same year 1964, forty versions of other interpreters are said to have appeared on the US record market alone. The extraordinary success was by no means limited to the white middle class that the record company had originally aimed at. Black musicians and listeners, who normally prefer a different vocal ideal and a different rhythmic intensity than that presented in Girl from Ipanema , were also enthusiastic about the piece: just a few months later there were versions of singers such as Ella Fitzgerald , Sarah Vaughan and Esther Phillips widespread, Nat King Cole also sang a version a few months before his death.

The review by the respected jazz magazine Down Beat gave the recording its best possible rating with five stars. A total of four of the Grammys for 1964 went to those involved in Girl From Ipanema , namely the prizes in the categories for the best album, the best single and the best jazz instrumental performance (to Stan Getz) as well as the best sound recording in “Non -classical “section (to Phil Ramone).

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences inducted the single into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000 and its Latin Hall of Fame in 2001, and in 2004 the Library of Congress decided to record the recording in the National Recording Registry .

Later interpretations

Girl from Ipanema competes, as Ruy Castro suspects, with classic pop material like Paul McCartney's Yesterday for the rank of one of the most interpreted pieces of the 20th century, and this assessment appears given the connection of the song with three extremely productive genres - jazz, the Brazilian music and pop - not absurd. It is therefore hardly possible and makes little sense to compile a complete list of all versions that have appeared in the past decades. A report by Deutsche Welle on the “50th anniversary” of the song refers to the fact that “the song was interpreted more than 200 times, 40 times between 1963 and 1965 alone”.

Jobim and Frank Sinatra (1967)

In the mid-1960s, song composers were awarded an accolade in the entertainment industry when one of their pieces was interpreted by Frank Sinatra . "Ol 'Blue Eyes" contacted Jobim in the course of 1966 and suggested to the Brazilian émigré to record a complete album together - that is, with Jobim as guitarist and second singer. As the arranger they went back to Claus Ogerman, whose work Sinatra also appreciated. The March 1967 LP Francis Albert Sinatra & Antônio Carlos Jobim , which achieved remarkable sales, also included a duet for The Girl from Ipanema (recorded January 31, 1967). With the interpretation by Sinatra, whose style and repertoire served as a model for countless singers, the song had reached the center of the musical establishment, even renowned classical orchestras and soloists (for example the flautist James Galway ) tried it in the following years.

Between commerce and parody: other versions

John Krich resignedly stated in 1991: "The groundbreaking songs that Jobim and Gilberto made a decisive contribution to spreading in the sixties are now standard numbers, department store tussles [...]".

With the successful Sinatra version, Girl from Ipanema had secured a permanent place in the standard jazz repertoire, but it is noticeable - as already mentioned - that the majority of jazz musicians (including artists such as Erroll Garner , Peggy Lee , Diana Krall , Mel Tormé , Don Byas or Eliane Elias ) cannot or do not want to add anything significantly new to the aesthetic statement of the early versions. A radically new approach, as presented by the free jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp in February 1965, remained the rare exception:

“Shepp deconstructs the piece, sets the main motif polyphonically, and turns it into a piece of variety satire. His solo is in the greatest possible contrast to Stan Getz's solo on the hit record: The superior mocking Shepp indulges in atomized, angry motif abbreviations for a tiring long time. "

The many versions of the Girl from Ipanema on recordings by musicians from the more agreeable areas of pop music have made a decisive contribution to the image of Bossa Nova as "department store music ", which Krich lamented . Stars like Sammy Davis Jr. , The Supremes , Cliff Richard , Madonna and Viktor Lazlo were certainly not primarily interested in an independent, creative approach to such a song. Instrumental versions such as those presented by Herb Alpert (as early as 1965) or Kenny G can hardly be denied that the sound is similar to the muzak .

Original adaptations of the song can therefore be found primarily in less broad-based sub-genres of the music business, such as the B-52’s single Girl from Ipanema goes to Greenland (1986) . Even musicians, in whose appearances the parodic element plays an important role, like to use the nowadays emphasized "shallow" image of the number - for example Helge Schneider , who recorded it for a CD production together with the singer Eva Kurowski . The German text of this interpretation (Die Frau aus Castrop-Rauxel) playfully takes up the narrative style of the widespread American translation, but slips into the grotesque.

Stephen Sondheim's The Boy from ... from 1966 can be regarded as a direct or indirect model for most parodies . In this song, which is melodically and lyrically closely based on its original, the Getz / Gilberto version is satirized under almost every conceivable aspect: the singer Linda Lavin performs a text about her dismissive loved one with a similar girlish-innocent timbre as Astrud Gilberto whose clichéd homosexuality completely escapes her. The three dots in the title stand for the absurdly complicated name of a fictional Latin American village from which the young man comes.

Use in film

The Brazilian director Leon Hirszman , an exponent of the so-called Cinema Novo , shot a film version of the original song in 1967. A number of films from Europe and the USA - most of them comedies - use the song mostly in the sense of a shallow background music , if a corresponding mood is to be created. Examples of this are the Blues Brothers ( elevator music in the showdown), Woody Allen's Harry beside himself or the animated film Finding Nemo .

Helô Pinheiro, the “muse” of the song

Helô Pinheiro in 2006

For the girl to whom the text by Vinícius de Moraes sings about, as he and Jobim revealed only years later, there was obviously a real role model. Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (born July 7, 1943), Helô for short, lived in Jobim's immediate neighborhood, Rua Montenegro. On her everyday trips (also, but by no means exclusively, to Ipanema Beach), she regularly passed the preferred bar of the two musicians, the Veloso ,

"[...] where she was already pretty well known and regularly went to buy cigarettes for her mother - and went out again accompanied by a whistle concert."

Jobim and Moraes only revealed to her shortly before their marriage in 1965 that she had been the inspiration for the now famous song. Since some journalists were also informed of this “confession”, Helô suddenly became the focus of public interest; the aforementioned director Leon Hirszman, for example, offered her the lead role in his film Garota de Ipanema . She still enjoys a certain prominence in the Brazilian media today, for example she appeared in the Brazilian edition of Playboy from May 1987. In 2001 she was embroiled in a legal dispute with the heirs of Jobim and Moraes over the legality of the use of the Song title Garota de Ipanema on behalf of Helô Pinheiros Boutique .

Appreciation at the 2016 Olympic Games

The mascots of the 2016 Summer Olympics and the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro were named Vinicius and Tom in honor of Vinícius de Moraes and Tom Jobim . Helô Pinheiro was one of the Olympic torch runners in Rio. Daniel Jobim, the composer's grandson, played The Girl from Ipanema at the opening ceremony . The Brazilian model Gisele Bündchen ran through the stadium as the girl . The performance brought the song a new boost in popularity.

literature

General

  • David P. Appleby: The Music of Brazil. University of Texas Press, Austin 1983, ISBN 0-292-75068-4 .
  • Ruy Castro: Bossa Nova - The Sound of Ipanema. A history of Brazilian music. Hannibal, Höfen 2006, ISBN 3-85445-249-7 .
  • John Krich: Orpheus' children. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-499-12659-1 .
  • Claus Schreiner: Musica Popular Brasileira. Anthological handbook of popular and folk music of Brazil. Tropical Music, Darmstadt 1978.
  • Claus Schreiner: Musica Brasileira. A history of Popular Music and the people of Brazil. Marion Boyars, New York 2002, ISBN 0-7145-3066-2 (Revised English new edition of the previous title).
  • John Storm Roberts: The "Latinization" of Jazz . In: That's Jazz. The sound of the 20th century. Darmstadt 1988, ISBN 3-923639-87-2 , p. 231 ff.
  • Liner Notes from LP Getz / Gilberto , 1964 (Verve V6-8545), as well as the supplemented CD remaster from 1997 (Verve 0602498840221). It includes essays by Stan Getz, João Gilberto, Doug Ramsey and Gene Lees.
  • Liner Notes from the LP Stan Getz: The Girl from Ipanema - The Bossa Nova Years , 1984 (Verve 823 611-1). It contains excerpts from an interview that Neil Tesser conducted with the saxophonist.
  • Michael Heatley: The girl from the song . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 3-89602-579-1 , pp. 220-223. Describes the genesis of the song in one chapter.

Music theoretical aspects

  • Axel Jungbluth: Jazz harmony theory. Functional harmony and modality. Schott, Mainz 1981, ISBN 3-7957-2412-0 .
  • Werner Pöhlert: Analysis of the scale “theory” based on Pöhlert's basic harmony. Zimmermann, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-921729-36-X .

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ The first known joint piece by the two was Chega de saudade (later also under the English title No More Blues ) from 1956.
  2. ↑ The Brazilian music industry almost without exception referred to the classic bossa nova compositions of the late 50s and early 60s as samba canção , "sung samba".
  3. ↑ Castro, p. 256
  4. ↑ The exact technical term traditionally still used in German musicology is Reprisenbarform .
  5. ↑ If the English text is performed, the song follows the reprise bar form in a particularly strict manner, since the first and last A parts in this case are mostly sung to the same words. The Portuguese original text is therefore not only more complex in terms of content, but also formally.
  6. ↑ As far as necessary, the sheet music examples in this article use this “authentic” spelling.
  7. ↑ The fact that jazz, especially in the form of cool jazz , influenced many bossa nova musicians in the early years of their careers and partly also served them as a livelihood is no longer in doubt; see for example Schreiner, p. 147ff.
  8. ↑ These are Dorival Caymmis Doralice and Jobim's own pieces Só danço Samba and Desafinado.
  9. ↑ A well-known example are the A parts of Jimmy McHugh's song Exactly Like You (1930), which are constructed very similarly with a less abstract melody.
  10. ↑ Castro, pp. 75f.
  11. ↑ From the liner notes on Getz / Gilberto
  12. ↑ Storm Roberts, p. 236 ff.
  13. ↑ First Getz plays a complete chorus , then "Tom" Jobim performs solo on the piano over the 16 bars of the first two A parts.
  14. ↑ The minute rhythmic delays that belong to this style of presentation cannot be adequately reproduced either in the note image or in the midi sound sample.
  15. ↑ Jungbluth, p. 44ff.
  16. ↑ In terms of scale theory, the improviser would have to use ten different scales, some of which are quite complex in terms of sound and instrumentation, in the middle section alone.
  17. ↑ Pöhlert, p. 187
  18. ↑ Jobim, quoted in after Schreiner, p. 155
  19. ↑ Schreiner, p. 152
  20. ↑ Castro, p. 256
  21. ↑ The LP Jazz Samba , which Getz and guitarist Charlie Byrd released in the spring of the same year, is usually cited as being primarily responsible for this . For his solo on Jobim's Desafinado on this record, the tenorist was awarded the Grammy for “Best Instrumental Jazz Solo Performance”.
  22. ↑ Castro, p. 318
  23. ↑ Krich, p. 48
  24. ↑ The English translation seems even more bizarre and not free from involuntarily comical prudery to many listeners when, as is practiced by many vocalists, it sings about the handsome boy from Ipanema in order to avoid any homoerotic undertones - especially in view of the fact that the Gimbel text was first introduced by a singer and made famous by her.
  25. ↑ On the difficulties that even top-class guitarists like Baden Powell initially had in imitating Gilberto's accompanying style, see chap. Carpenter p. 149ff.
  26. ↑ Castro, p. 272 ​​ff.
  27. ↑ From the interview with Neil Tesser .
  28. ↑ Liner Notes of a compilation from 2004, in which this question is discussed in more detail. (PDF; 52 kB)
  29. ↑ In contrast to the German translation, the original Brazilian edition of the book contains these photos. Ruy Castro: Chega de Saudade - A História e as histórias da bossa nova . Companhia das Letras, São Paulo 1990, ISBN 85-7164-137-4 .
  30. ↑ Liner Notes from the LP Getz / Gilberto , 1964 (Verve V6-8545), as well as the supplemented CD remaster from 1997 (Verve 0602498840221). It includes essays by Stan Getz, João Gilberto, Doug Ramsey and Gene Lees
  31. ↑ Castro, p. 272
  32. ↑ At that time, albums in the USA were awarded the " Golden Record ", of which 500,000 copies had been sold. Getz / Gilberto achieved this status in 1965.
  33. ↑ The Grammy jury was guided by the date of publication, not the date of recording.
  34. ^ Grammy Hall of Fame. In: Grammy.com. Retrieved June 24, 2007 .
  35. ^ Latin Hall of Fame. In: Grammy.com. Retrieved June 24, 2007 .
  36. ↑ loc. Gov
  37. ↑ Castro, p. 232
  38. ↑ “The girl from Ipanema” is now 50 . Deutsche Welle ; Retrieved August 3, 2012
  39. ↑ Krich, p. 38
  40. ↑ On his album Fire Music , recorded as Impulse 951 158-2 on the former Creed Taylors label.
  41. ^ Hans Jürgen Schaal, in: Rondo. 4/2003.
  42. ↑ The full name of the place, on the almost impossible pronunciation of the humor of satire rests essentially, is Tacarembo la Tumbe del Fuego Santa Malipas Zatatecas la Junta del Sol y Cruz , all the text is here to find.
  43. ↑ This bar was now also in Garota de Ipanema renamed
  44. ↑ Castro, p. 257.
  45. ↑ A short report from the Brazilian press can be found at folha.uol.com.br
  46. ↑ Flora Charner. Shasta Darlington: Girl from Ipanema carries Olympic torch. In: CNN.com. August 5, 2016, accessed June 28, 2019 .
  47. ^ "Ipanema" song jumps 1,200 per cent after being featured in the Rio opening ceremony. The Associated Press, August 8, 2016, accessed June 29, 2019 .
  48. ↑ 'Girl From Ipanema' Makes Olympic Comeback. In: Billboard. August 17, 2016, accessed June 29, 2019 .
This version was added to the list of excellent articles on July 24, 2007 .