Gilberto

It was the same summer that XTRMNTR came out, I remember because it took me a while to get into that record. Ro showed up with a cassette with ASSSSTRUD written on it in really funky letters and said, “Dude, this is the music they play on the elevator on the way to Heaven!!!”. Immediately, the bossa nova craze swept through my little crowd of friends in Berkeley. He told me the chords were very difficult, but if you could master them, then you’d probably be able to learn all the great jazz songs. That’s all it took, I dived into the deep end.

The next day, my roommate Gerry showed up with a couple of beat up Getz/Gilberto vinyl. It must have been odd to hear Primal Scream interspersed with the voice of Astrud, but in an odd way, they perfectly complimented each other. At first, I liked that I didn’t know what she was singing, or even what language it was in. It added to the mystique. It was definitely pre-Beatles and had a sense of being really old, yet it fit in with those times.

I went back to L.A. the next weekend and The Aux was listening to a whole other batch of Gilberto I didn’t even know about. Those songs were pretty amazing, too. The craze was defintely spreading. The Aux laughed when I mispronounced “Gilberto”, he said, “It’s with a hard G, because they’re Portuguese”. So I learned two things in one sentence.

Fab came by and told me that Astrud was the interpreter between Getz and Gilberto, and then Getz asked her if she could sing. So she gave it a shot and the rest is for the history books. He read that off one of his dad’s records, he said.

Cobbling music pre-internet was quite a bit of work- when you were broke, didn’t know song titles, lyrics, or names of albums. But it was serrendippity dipped in kismet, because Gerry started taking Portuguese at the night school around the block- so we were able to decode parts of the lyrics. Ro learned all the chords by ear and was playing rudimentary versions while The Aux sent up a copy of his mix. We were getting ourselves pretty deep into this bossa nova swing.

What I loved most about it was that it was music for the hips. It didn’t need to be four-to-the-floor slamming beats and pulsating bass lines. This music, while complex, came off easy, like they had the tiger by the tail, yet they were so nonchalant about it. It was a mix of hip, etheral, and timeless. Astrud’s voice could take you away and you didn’t even need to understand a syllable she was saying, It was how she sang.

My mom said, “I remember this music. I guess everything comes around again.”

Bossa nova had a sound that mixed perfectly with house records, Astrud could just soar over the top so effortlessly. It was probably the last time I felt like I was in on something when it came to music. Not everyone was into it, maybe that made it better.

It was like our own little room in the giant house of jazz. Now we’re all married and some keep in touch and some have drifted. But I love putting some ASSSSTRUD Gilberto (with a hard G) and thinking about that summer over twenty years ago and remembering my phenomonal friends and how we let the music guide us and it never let us down.

Christian Garduno’s work can be read in over 75 literary magazines. He is the recipient of the 2019 national Willie Morris Award for Southern Poetry. Garduno is a Finalist in the 2020-2021 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Writing Contest. He lives and writes along the South Texas coast with his wonderful wife Nahemie and young son Dylan.