Trudy Espinosa, the daughter of an Air Force colonel on temporary assignment to install intercontinental ballistic missiles bearing nuclear warheads in silos deep beneath the rich soil of our town, held a party in a temporary teen center for the children of the operatives assigned to this top-secret but widely-known assignment. Then turn to “Language Instruction.” English, French, Latin, Moravian, Russian, Spanish–no Portuguesa!įinally, my picaresque quest–and try saying that five times fast–ended in the ridiculous, not the sublime, as such tales so often do. Every week I would check the Yellow Pages: Plumbers, Porch swings, Printers, Psychologists–nothing. There was the fruitless search for an instructor in Portugese in the small midwestern town where we lived. And with maybe sixty, seventy extra pounds on her frame. When he was sick, his replacement was the owner of the music studio, a corpulent woman who looked like Patsy Cline without the makeup. I took guitar lessons from a flatulent local teen who would go on to the Berklee School of Music in Boston. It was a race against time I had to progress from rank novice to sultry-voiced master before bossa nova was obliterated by the British Invasion in 1964. The bossa nova craze lasted only six years, but oh what a half-a-dozen it wozen! There were the quiet nights and quiet stars and the quiet chords from my guitar, a rental until I proved to my dad that I was firmly committed to my art and would not lose interest in it, the way I had with the guppies and the rock collection. “It is time that you took the skills I have conveyed to you,” my sister said, “and go ask Margaret Pfeiffer to dance. One look at the picture of the unfortunate heir to the Spanish crown in her ninth grade biology book was enough to warn us off. “You two keep that up,” she said to us sternly when she found us practicing in the front parlor, “you’re going to get underslung jaws like Charles II.”Ĭharles II, or Margaret Pfeiffer? You make the call! I know, this smacks of incest, but we knew “when to say when” when it came to this most ancient and honorable of taboos, having been cautioned by our older sister of the “Hapsburg” lip–the product of inbreeding amoung the royal families of Europe. It was perhaps the Fates who decreed it–they have had nothing to do since the demise of the ancient Greeks! I was prepared as no other boy in my elementary school for the coming of the complex harmonies and soft percussive accents of the sound that evolved from the Brazilian samba and swept through the world like a contagion, for I had learned the cha-cha-cha at numerous country club affairs dancing with my younger sister! No music is better suited to inspire thoughts of love than that associated with the Portugese term translated roughly as “the new thing or trend or fashionable wave or something.” It was listed by Rolling Stone Brazil as one of the 100 best Brazilian albums in history.It is no coincidence that the bossa nova craze coincided with the years in which I achieved my greatest romantic success–first through sixth grades. This album is often referred to as João Gilberto's "white album", in a reference to The Beatles' White Album. The album's sound engineer was famous electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos.
#BEST OF BOSSA NOVA TORRENT PLUS#
The minimal instrumentation – just Gilberto's guitar and voice, plus Sonny Carr's very sparse percussion – and the relentless beat give the album a hypnotic feel.
João Gilberto released another album named João Gilberto in 1961, as well as several EPs with only his name as title. João Gilberto is a bossa nova album by João Gilberto, originally released in Brazil as a vinyl LP in 1973 and reissued on CD in 1988.