When he started refusing to work at clubs where he felt the customers talked too much, he entered a period of poverty, growing his hair long and wearing wrinkled clothes. According to Ruy Castro’s “Chega de Saudade” (1990), a colorful history of the bossa nova movement, he also became a strange and marginal figure around town. In the intervening period, he worked sporadically around Rio - accompanying the singer Mariza, recording commercial jingles, taking jobs in a few long-running nightclub revues. He was reclusive, rarely forthcoming with the news media and his audiences, and sometimes truculent onstage if his demands about sound were not met.īut his work became a sign of the relative prosperity, optimism and romance of Brazil during the period of Juscelino Kubitschek’s presidency in the late 1950s, and thereafter an ideal of musical restraint and mystery. Gilberto was not much of a songwriter: He was both “less and more than a composer,” as the Brazilian singer and songwriter Caetano Veloso, an admirer, once put it.

It has to be very quiet for me to produce the sounds I’m thinking of.” “It is as if I’m writing on a blank piece of paper. Gilberto said in an interview with the New York Times jazz critic John S. “When I sing, I think of a clear, open space, and I’m going to play sound in it,” Mr.

It also conveyed interiority through a singing style that was confiding, subtly percussive and without vibrato. Gilberto’s new synthesis replaced samba percussion with guitar-picking figures in offbeat patterns (called by some “violão gago,” or “stammering guitar”). Gilberto to Carnegie Hall and led to a Grammy Award, given to him and the jazz saxophonist Stan Getz, for a collaborative effort that was named album of the year for 1964 and that produced an enormous hit, “The Girl From Ipanema.” The music gained particular popularity in the United States, spawning pop hits and even a dance craze.

Famous bossa nova songs