Getz/Gilberto - Getz Getz & Joao Gilberto

 

Corcovado

Getz/Gilberto
Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto
Featuring Antonio Carlos Jobim
Recorded March 18 & 19, 1963 in New York City
Recording Engineer: Phil Ramone
Director Of Engineering: Val Valentin
Cover Painting by Olga Albizu
Produced by Creed Taylor
Photo by David Drew Zingg
Verve V-8545

From the inside cover: Paul Hindemith often expressed his disbelief in abstractions in music. Music should concern the making of music, not the speculative transcending of its limits. "The ear," he said, "should remain the first and last court of appeal."

The songs of Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim came to America like a breath of fresh air. Their music arrived here at a times when anemia and confusion were becoming noticeable in our music to anyone who knew enough to be concerned. The desperate craze for innovation had been overextending itself. Jazz literature was becoming increasingly pompous, complex and chauvinistic, theorizing and analyzing itself into a knot. Musical groups were disintegrating into an every-man-for-himself egomania. Soloists and sidemen were engaged in endurance tests of repetitious and/or outlandish endeavors, Sometimes they lost the audience. Worse, they often lost musical contact with one another.

A discerning minority of greats and true jazz aficionados everywhere remained in a state of apprehension concerning this questionable trend. Was it inevitable that jazz would lose its initial charm in the process of growing old? Did approaching maturity herald the eventual loss of the refreshing qualities which kept jazz apart from traditional music?

Then came the music of these Brazilians with an impact much the same as the one caused by the child's classic comment in H.C. Anderssen's Emperor and His New Clothes. If for nothing else the music world in indebted to them for exposing "this emperor" in all his nakedness.

Thus the ultimate making of this record was inevitable. We discovered an indestructible bond between us. Sebastiao and Milton as well as Joao and Ton understood little more English than I did Portuguese, but it didn't matter. We had the music, the excitement of playing together, and the feeling of mutual respect for one another.

Unpretentious, spontaneity and the poetry of honest emotion belong back in jazz. And don't let that gentleness fool you. These guys know how to swing harder than most, and they do it without pushing.

Had this record never been released, the making of it would have been gratification enough. – Stan Getz

Peace is a beautiful feeling.

To understand and be understood is a kind of peace.

I find great peace in real communication with another person. Getz is a person I understand, and who understands me even though we speak different languages. I would say that even if we could not exchange a word, the love that we have for music would be enough to make us friends.

Our talks – generally through our wives – are sometimes amusing. I do my best to speak English, and Stan uses all his knowledge of Latin languages: "Diga ao Joao..." When Stan gives an opinion I often exclaim, happened so often one night that I thought to myself, "I had better disagree once in a while or it will sound silly." The truth is that we agree on most everything.

Some years ago when I was young and searching in my country, I knew about Stan through he didn't know me. I was introduced to his music through Donato, a pianist friend of mine. Time and again we listened to Getz records with stirred emotions.

Despite our good friendship I never forget that Stan Getz is a great artist. There isn't any American whom I'd rather hear playing the music of my country. Jobim said "It's unbelievable the way Getz assimilates the spirit of the Brazilian music!" My good friend Dorival Caymmi, composer of Doralice, will be amazed at the swing and feeling Getz gives his authentic samba, so typical of Bahia.

Ary Barroso wrote the composition P'ra Machucar Meu Coracao. Barroso is an outstanding figure in the history of Brazilian music. Ary was ill when we recorded this album. I told Getz how happy I thought it would make Ary feel to hear his composition recorded by us. He will not hear it. Today as I write this, I know that he is dead. Now our version will remain as a humble homage to Ary Barroso from myself and from Getz who came to love him through his music without ever having met him.

Finally just a word about Asturd, my wife. She always liked to sing and we often sing together at home. I like the way she sings The Girl From Ipanema. Getz heard her sing it and asked her to record it with us. This is her first recording date, and I am glad she was among friends.

In many ways, then, this is more than a record. It is a friendship communicated by music. - Joao Gilberto

When in 1962, Stan Getz's LP Jazz Samba began racing up the sales charts, those denizens of the music business who are there not to contribute but to take from it, whose very survival in fact depends on the theft of ideas from others, began falling over each other in their haste to jump on the bandwagon. Imitations of the album poured from the presses.

In a few short weeks, the remarkable and significant Brazilian musical development that Stan had introduced to the North American public, a development that had promised to have a refreshing and healthy influence on the sick American music business, was ravaged and ground into the turf. When the fad was over and the takers ha gone on to other things, everyone thought bossa nova was dead. One group thought so because they weren't making so much money on it now; we who loved the music thought nothing so lyrical and exquisitely subtle could survive so brutal a treatment.

Both groups underestimated the vitality of bossa nova. We all should have realized that anything so valid had to survive. And it has. In the months that followed, jazz musicians of sensitivity began the legitimate incorporation of its melodies and rhythms into their work, though I have yet to hear anyone play it as well as Stan does with his quartet. Stan and Creed Taylor produced another bossa nova album with arrangements by Gary McFarland, a superb disc called Big Band Bossa Nova (V/V6-8494), and then another called Jazz Samba Encore (V/V6-8523), with Brazilian guitarist Luiz Bonfa – both of which, incidentally, have had phenomenal public acceptance, and continue to sell  – long after the supposed death of bossa nova.

Now, nearly two years later, it seems that bossa nova has won: it has become a part of North America's musical life.

The present LP brings together the two Brazilians who launched the bossa nova movement in Brazil – the incredible singer-guitarist Joao Gilberto and the equally incredible composer-arranger-pianist Antonio Carlos Jobim – with one of the most astonishingly gifted musicians American jazz jazz has yet produced, Stan Getz. And I'm not using those adjectives lightly.

By the testimony of Jobim and Gilberto themselves, it was the "cool" school of jazz (a misnomer if there ever was one), and particularly the controlled-vibrato, straight-tone saxophone approach that Stan uses, that influenced the development of bossa nova. You need only compare Stan's tenor sound with Joao's vocal sound to see the parallel. It is a relaxed approach. The air moves effortlessly past the reed, in one case, or through the vocals chords, in the other. It is as if air were not so much pushed out as allowed to flow out. The approach demands that the player have superb assurance and absolute control of his instrument. Stan and Joao don't seem to make mistakes.

The record has an extremely warm feeling about it. I think it derives from the fact that the record date was to an extent a gathering or friends. Milton Banana has long been Joao's drummer. The girl's voice that you hear on the album is that of Asturd, Joao's wife, a sweet, quiet girl who is herself a composer – and, of necessity, Joao's English translator!

The Girl From Ipanema
Doralice
P'ra Machucar Meu Coracao
Desafinado
Corovado
So Danco Samba
O Grande Amor
Vivo Sohando