Read Online Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World by Ruy Castro - Free Book Online Page A

neighborhood in Manhattan, and sometimes it was as if they were in Copacabana.
    Cravinho encouraged him to record an acetate disc in a record store that was looking for a crooner for Tex Beneke’s orchestra. Lúcio resisted, but recorded “Too Marvelous for Words,” whose English lyrics he had been carefully taught by Cravinho. Beneke heard the recording and apparently liked Lúcio. Perhaps he even gave instructions to contact him. But Lúcio didn’t want to wait. At the end of 1948, before he had even been away from Brazil for a year, he caught a DC-4 back to Rio, justifying his decision by saying: “I missed the beans.”
    But he did not regret it. He returned to claim his small-time celebrity status as a solo vocalist and guru of vocal ensembles at the Lojas Murray. And as we know, he even had a fan club.

    There was an electrical appliance and record store by the name of Murray, at the corner of Rua Rodrigo Silva and Rua da Assembléia, a few yards away from Avenida Rio Branco, in the center of Rio. Although its name was the Lojas Murray (the Murray Stores), it didn’t have a single branch to justify such optimism. But anyone who walked through its doors at the end of the afternoon, on any day of the week, would witness such pandemonium on the mezzanine floor that they would swear that the greatest record sales in Riocommerce were taking place right there—and only a small part of the commotion could be attributed to the presence of the stars of the Vasco da Gama soccer team, the city champions in 1949 and the nucleus of the Brazilian team in 1950, who hung out there regularly.
    In fact, the Murray didn’t sell that much, given the comings and goings of people that frequented the store. The mezzanine floor saw daily gatherings of fan club members; protagonists of vocal ensembles, who were numerous; any musician who liked jazz, among whom was a man who commanded the utmost respect from everyone, the guitarist Garoto; journalism and radio celebrities like Sérgio Porto, Sylvio Tullio Cardoso, Paulo Santos, and Eustórgio de Carvalho, a.k.a. Mister Eco; future journalists such as Ivan Lessa, José Domingos Rafaelli, and Carlos Conde; and jazz enthusiasts by the dozen, divided by category—fans of the New Orleans style, swing, bebop, and the modern jazz of the “cool” school. The Murray was the largest importer of records in the city, but few could afford the new American 10-inch LPs. Most people went there to exchange ideas or 78 r.p.m.s, and to enjoy the free soundtrack of new records that arrived at the store, played by two sales clerks, Jonas and Acyr, who were both just as crazy about jazz.
    The Murray owners began to take exception to the window-shoppers’ debates on jazz styles because a large part of the time, the real customers—those who actually bought the records—could not reach the counter, nor attract the attention of the sales clerks. Jonas and Acyr were always very busy arbitrating discussions on, for example, Sarah Vaughan’s superiority over Ella Fitzgerald, during which Sarah’s recording of “Black Coffee” would be played up to five times in less than an hour, against the same number of plays of Ella’s “How High the Moon.” Fitzgerald’s fans argued that Vaughan merely
seemed
better because her voice in “Black Coffee” was backed by Joe Lippman’s Kenton-style arrangements, which were clearly influenced by Pete Rugolo, and that was just not fair.
    Well, if that was the case, the records had to be played again, because the conversation would move on from being about the singers to a debate over the arrangements. Consequently, stacks of Kenton records were taken off the shelves, placed on the turntable, and the discussion would start over. The discussions would become heated, with each litigant attempting to speak louder than the others and everyone wanting to make himself heard, while on the record that was playing, Kenton would encourage the brass section (five trumpets, five