João Gilberto, the man who sang “The Girl from Ipanema”, has died

IT WAS NOT João Gilberto’s fault, and as a perfectionist no doubt he suffered from it more than anyone, that his greatest hit, “The Girl from Ipanema”, has been mutilated into supermarket Muzak. At its height, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Brazilian fusion of samba, jazz, and other things too, known as bossa nova (“new style” in Portuguese) entranced the world. Back home, it formed the soundtrack to a period of cultural originality, from architecture to football, that seemed to augur a bright future for Brazil. As a guitarist and singer Mr Gilberto, who died an impoverished recluse on July 6th, aged 88, was a star of that moment. He lived to see a darker present.

Born in the arid backlands of Brazil’s north-east, Mr Gilberto arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1950 as a singer in one of the then-fashionable vocal ensembles. After his career stalled he retreated, broke and on the verge of mental illness, to a kind of internal exile. He spent months closeted with his guitar in a bedroom of a sister’s house, obsessively stripping down and rebuilding his way of playing it. He emerged with the terse, syncopated rhythm, complex chords and a gentle, almost spoken, singing style that were the marks of bossa nova.