Gal Costa's Bossa Nova Life
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For many in the largest South American country, desperate to be seen as more than a tropical backwater, the overwhelming international appreciation signified Brazilian culture had arrived on the world stage. In 1962 Gal Costa was just beginning her singing career in her hometown of Salvador, in the northeast of Brazil. But even as a young woman she understood the importance of the Carnegie Hall show. "It was spectacular," Ms. Costa, now a sensual and striking 55, told me over coffee last week." It gave me so much pride to know that other people could understand our music." Tonight she will bring bossa nova back to Carnegie Hall with a tribute to two of the music's pioneers, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Stan Getz. There is no better woman for the job. Bossa nova inspired Ms. Costa to pursue a life as a singer, she has sung the work of all of its great composers, and she was instrumental in developing the sound into the larger genre of Popular Brazilian Music (MPB). Not to mention that she was Mr. Jobim's favorite singer. We met at a coffee shop on the Upper East Side, near where she maintains a New York apartment, to talk about the music and her career. In typical Brazilian style, she was late, but once she arrived spoke readily in an animated combination of English and Portuguese. It was American jazz greats who first shared the "new twist" with audiences in this country. Around the time Ms. Costa was discovering her own voice, Charlie Byrd was discovering bossa nova itself. On a tour of Brazil in 1962, he fell in love with the music and introduced it to the saxophonist Stan Getz. The two followed with a collaboration, "Jazz Samba" (1962, reissued 1997, Verve 14132). The album took them just a few hours to record - and it sparked a bossa nova craze in America nearly as quickly. In 1963, Mr. Getz collaborated with Brazilian musicians - including Mr. Jobim, who had been one of the original Carnegie Hall performers - to create "Getz/Gilberto" (1963, reissued 1997, 14142). The album's feature track, Mr. Jobim's "The Girl From Ipanema," became an immediate international sensation; in time, it would become the defining song of the genre. Mr. Jobim would go on to write compositions that would be sung by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald. As bossa nova was taking off in America, Ms. Costa was training her crystalline voice to sing its melodies in Salvador. "My first connection is bossa nova," she said. "All that I sing passes through this filter - even an old song has a modern face because of the influence of bossa nova on me." She fell in with a crowd of musicians, most famously Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, who began to perform together in Salvador. The Tropicalistas, as they became known, were a dadaist, anti-establishment movement, blending bossa nova, rock, and leftist politics. But the group's freedom was challenged by a military coup in 1964. Even as bossa nova exploded abroad, in Brazil it was more or less dead by the late 1960s. In the early 1960s Joao Gilberto, another pioneer of bossa nova, and Mr. Jobim left for America to pursue their careers. At around the same time, Mr. Veloso and Mr. Gil spent two years in exile in London, though they would later return to Brazil. All this time Ms. Costa remained in Brazil, where she said she "sang their songs and kept them alive," often employing codified lyrics to protest the dictatorship. Since the 1970s, Ms. Costa's songs have mellowed politically and musically, but bossa nova has continued to work its way onto every one of her albums. The evening before Mr. Jobim left Brazil for his final trip to America, in 1994, he called Ms. Costa. "He said, 'Listen, as soon as I come back I'm calling you and we'll do our show together,'" Ms. Costa recalled. The two friends never played together again: Later that year, Mr. Jobim died of cancer at New York's Mount Sinai hospital. So tonight, Ms. Costa will not sing with Mr. Jobim, but for him. "It's a pleasure, an honor, to be able to pay homage to him," Ms. Costa said. "He always said that I was the singer that he liked best in Brazil. The music is perfect for my voice."
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