Chega de Saudade

Twelve short songs, and the subtractive test finds very little inside any of them. Each performance is the song once through, sometimes with a short return, and stops. “Chega de Saudade” states its minor lament and its major release and ends; “Desafinado” takes its long form once. Jobim gives the band a phrase where the voice breathes and nothing more. Across the sequence the test bites a little: “Hô-ba-la-lá” and “Bim Bom”, Gilberto’s own slight pieces, and the comic “Lobo Bobo” are three, and one could go without loss. They are the plain ground of the method, the beat with almost no song on it, as “Freddie Freeloader” is on Kind of Blue. A few string pads are permitted rather than compelled.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Credited through sound as fully as through words. What the record brings into the open is that the whole body of samba, the surdo, the tamborim, the dance and the crowd, can be carried by one guitar and a voice at speaking level, and that feeling held under the voice is not less felt. It is a claim about restraint as a form of intensity, and it holds on every track: the inherited sambas of side two, written for the big voices of radio, prove to have been intimate songs all along. “Desafinado” puts it in words, a defence of the singer heard as out of tune, naming itself “isto é bossa nova”. Held below the bar: beyond that the lyrics are light love songs, and what is disclosed is a sensibility and a way of making music more than a meaning about how people live.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Elevation comes often and it comes small. The turn to the major in “Chega de Saudade”, where the voice lifts over Jobim’s strings without raising its level, is a true height. So is the long line of “Desafinado” as it crosses its unexpected harmony, the slow suspended close of “Aos Pés da Cruz”, and the unhurried “É Luxo Só” that ends the record. The kind is beauty held at arm’s length, never grandeur or terror, and the scale of each height is a phrase, since no track lasts long enough to build. Frequency is high across a short record. It stands below Kind of Blue (9.1), whose ballads hold height for minutes at a time, and below Low (8.8).

Score: 8.4 / 10

Saudade, the Portuguese longing for the absent, is the pattern the record summons, and the title song turns it. Its words tell longing to end and call the beloved back, so the oldest figure of Luso-Brazilian song, longing as a state to be lived in, is answered with an instruction to stop. That is myth turned, and it is the record’s best claim here. Elsewhere the archetypes are evoked as types: the morena of “Rosa Morena” and “Morena Boca de Ouro”, the nobody of “Maria Ninguém”, the penitent of “Aos Pés da Cruz”, taken as a love song’s figure. Rio, the city of the beach and the apartment, is atmosphere rather than figure. Nothing in the sequence makes archetypal structure load-bearing, and that holds the axis below the gate.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The turn is from the Brazilian popular singing of the 1950s, the samba-canção and the radio voice of Orlando Silva and Dalva de Oliveira, full vibrato over a big orchestra, to a voice without vibrato placed at conversational level; and from the full percussion of samba to a guitar that abstracts it, the thumb holding the surdo’s pulse while the fingers displace the tamborim’s syncopation against it, so that voice and guitar run slightly apart and meet. The stake was real: Gilberto was a little-known singer from Bahia, staking a record on a voice that the trained ear could hear as wrong. Held from the top: Jobim’s writing, Johnny Alf, Dick Farney and cool jazz had prepared part of the ground, and Gilberto’s guitar had already been heard on Elizeth Cardoso’s Canção do Amor Demais (1958).

Score: 8.8 / 10

Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows. Put these songs in the samba-canção form of the day, the large orchestra and the projected voice, and they say the opposite: that feeling is shown by being displayed. The short song, sung once at the level of speech over one guitar, is the instrument of the claim that restraint carries intensity. The form also sets voice and guitar as two lines in counterpoint, the voice anticipating or trailing the beat the guitar keeps, so that the swing lives in the gap between them. The sequence, counted here once, is the weaker part: two singles and later sessions gathered, all new songs on side one and old into new on side two, a case made but not an arc built.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence of nearly seven decades. Guitarists in Brazil and abroad have transcribed and studied the batida of these tracks, and musicians still argue over what exactly the right hand does and how far it derives from the tamborim, the teleco-teco or jazz. Gilberto’s phrasing against the beat, ahead of it and behind it inside a held tempo, keeps yielding on close listening. The record became the reference point of a large Brazilian literature, Ruy Castro’s history of bossa nova (Chega de Saudade, 1990) and Caetano Veloso’s account of it as the beginning of his musical life among them, and Jobim’s harmony in the title song and “Desafinado” has been analysed at length. The depth is mostly formal and rhythmic; the words do not reward return as the playing does.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The intrinsic force is that the record constitutes a style. The batida, the voice at speaking level, the harmony of Jobim’s songs and the short form together reorganised what Brazilian popular song could be, and the record is the founding document of bossa nova, not one record within it. The discount: much of the reach abroad travelled through Jobim’s songs and later records rather than this LP, and Jobim shares the credit. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Brazil the generation of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque, Edu Lobo and Nara Leão started from it, and Tropicália defined itself against and through it; abroad the style entered jazz and pop within five years, through Stan Getz, Charlie Byrd and Getz/Gilberto (1964); two of its songs became standards.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the twelve performances exist as issued. Presence is continuous in Brazil, where the record is a national reference and its songs are sung by every generation since, and real but narrower abroad, where the songs and Getz/Gilberto are better known than this LP. The presence of the album as released is charged: Gilberto contested EMI’s remixed and reordered compilation of the three Odeon albums in 1988, and the dispute kept the records out of authorised circulation in their original form for long stretches. The fabric is a clean, close mono studio recording of the 1950s; the string writing carries its date, the voice and guitar almost none. Sixty-seven years: below Kind of Blue (9.0), as old and more widely present.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Read to the elder anchors. Gilberto’s command of voice and guitar is load-bearing and nearly complete: intonation exact at very low volume, every syllable placed against a beat that never wavers, the guitar voicing each chord change with its bass note and holding the rhythm in one hand while the voice moves freely. The craft is the meaning, since the restraint would be nothing without the precision under it. Jobim’s arrangements are economical and exact, the flute and string phrases entering only where the voice breathes, and the balance of the record, voice and guitar level, close and dry, is part of its sound. The costs keep it from the top: strings that are at times the routine studio strings of their year, a few padded arrangements, and a recording good rather than exceptional. Below Kind of Blue (9.3) and Winterreise (9.5).

Score: 9.0 / 10

One law governs the record: the voice at speaking level, level with the guitar, over a pulse that does not change speed within a song, with nothing pressed. The two most distant elements obey it. “Hô-ba-la-lá”, near-nonsense syllables over the beat, and “Aos Pés da Cruz”, an old samba of the 1940s with a lament for its text, are sung in the same voice, in the same band of tempo and with the same balance, and the second is not made solemn nor the first made comic. The range covered is wider than it sounds: three decades of Brazilian song, from Ary Barroso and Caymmi to the new writers, comic and grieving, major and minor. The range of dynamic and tempo is narrow by design, which is the law and not a lapse; but narrowness is not coherence, and it holds the axis below 9.0.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged on what a short record holds. Consciousness is held, as the interior of the singer, feeling kept under the voice. The couple is held, in nearly every song. Rio is present as a place and a manner of living. The tradition of Brazilian song is held more fully than anything else, three decades of it gathered and remade, and through it, unstated, the Afro-Brazilian ground of samba, abstracted into a guitar figure. Music itself is a subject, in “Desafinado”. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the family, labour, the state, history as events and the natural order do not appear, and the sacred enters only as a love song’s image. Twelve short songs hold what they hold, and the figure describes the form, a little below Kind of Blue (7.2), which holds more and runs far longer.

Score: 6.6 / 10