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

trombones) to play louder and louder. It was chaos. The manager of the store, Mr. Álvaro, fearing a conflagration, would run up the stairs to the mezzanine and ask them to keep their voices down. The discussion would die down, with Sarah winning by several points over Ella, but would beresurrected on the following day, this time with a debate between the fans of Jo Stafford and those of Dinah Shore.
    Besides the passion for supreme idols such as Sinatra, Kenton, and Vaughan, everyone who frequented the Lojas Murray was crazy for American vocal ensembles. The best-loved groups were the Pastels, the Starlighters, the Modernaires (who got their start singing with the Glenn Miller orchestra and then continued on their own, when Miller took that plane), the Pied Pipers (who had done very well in breaking from Tommy Dorsey), and the Page Cavanaugh Trio. The young people listened to them avidly, and managed to identify the finest nuances of harmony on those 78s even though the sound quality was terrible. There was no shortage of records by these particular groups at the Murray. Unfortunately, this was not the case for the records of another group, which, although they hadn’t recorded much, were the band that the gang really liked: the Mel-Tones, headed by Mel Tormé. His recordings of “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” accompanied by Artie Shaw’s orchestra, and “Bewitched,” backed by Kenton’s men, made the boys sit up and listen. Consequently, no one understood when, during that era, Tormé disbanded the Mel-Tones to pursue a solo career. There were those who vowed never to forgive him for breaking up the best vocal ensemble on the planet.
    It is hardly surprising that, being a part of that harmonious universe, everyone at the Murray dreamed of only one thing: being part of a vocal ensemble. Some of them already were, like Jonas Silva and Acyr Bastos Mello, the store’s counter clerks. Together with arranger Milton Silva, guitarist Alvinho Senna, and tambourine player Toninho Botelho, they were Os Garotos da Lua (The Boys from the Moon). It wasn’t a coincidence that the name sounds familiar: the Garotos appropriated not only part of the name, but also many of the ideas of Lúcio Alves’ recently disbanded Namorados da Lua—which in turn had acquired the same lunar inspiration from the name of Aloysio de Oliveira’s Bando da Lua (Band of the Moon). (There was a moon epidemic among those vocal ensembles: there was also a group called Vagalumes do Luar [Moonlight Fireflies], although they only twinkled occasionally.)
    Os Garotos were considered the most Brazilian of the groups—not because they were from the arid northeast part of the country but because, contrary to the rest, they did not sing many American songs. That is, they didn’t sing them in English. But they had nothing against Inaldo Villarim’s Portuguese lyrics for “Caravan” and “In the Mood,” which he recorded in 1946, or Haroldo Barbosa’s for the highly popular “All of Me” and “The Three Bears,” his hits on Rádio Tupi. And they weren’t in the slightest bit embarrassed about reproducing, note for note, the Page Cavanaugh Trio’s ultra-cool arrangements of the latter two songs.
    Os Garotos da Lua had been on the scene since 1946. After a lean start in Rio, they were contracted by Tupi to fill the void left by the Namorados da Lua, and they were promoted almost all day long on the program
Parada de sucessos
(Hit Parade), fearfully headed by the conservative samba old-timer Almirante. They had almost no freedom. One night, they were singing an arrangement by Cipó of “Feitiço da Vila” (Village Witchcraft), which had been strongly influenced by Stan Kenton. Almirante, who was listening to the program at home over dinner, jumped up in the middle of eating his soup and burst into the radio station with his napkin around his neck, ordering them to erase the arrangement so that “no one will ever sing that again.”
    Like all