João Gilberto (1973)

João Gilberto (1973) opens with “Águas de Março”, written by Tom Jobim in 1972 and still almost newly born when João recorded it. Before the famous Elis & Tom duet of 1974, João had already pulled the song into his own gravitational field. Try singing along to his version and the difficulty becomes obvious: the phrases are long, the syncopation keeps slipping away from you, and yet he makes it sound like speech.

The record feels almost monastic: voice, guitar, and the barest percussion from Sonny Carr. Even the recording has a strange history: the sessions were engineered by Wendy Carlos, better known for Switched-On Bach, which makes the album’s austerity feel even more uncanny. “Undiú” is the center of that world, less a song than a meditation, João reducing everything until rhythm and silence are basically the same material.

Around that stillness, he builds a bridge across Brazilian music. There is the older samba repertoire, Ary Barroso, Geraldo Pereira, Haroldo Barbosa, Carlos Coqueijo, but also the new generation arriving through Caetano’s “Avarandado” and Gilberto Gil’s “Eu Vim da Bahia”. In retrospect, it feels like an early invitation to the conversation that would become Brasil (1981).

My personal highlight is still “É Preciso Perdoar”: João at his most suspended, intimate, and devastating.

Melville guessed in Moby Dick that the mystifying power of whiteness lay in the fact that it was "the concrete of all colors," a "dumb blankness" that was also terrifyingly full of meaning. João Gilberto is, in a sense, the white whale of Brazilian music, a ghostly specter that countless artists have grappled with obsessively, trying alternately to copy and exorcise themselves of it; and a recording that remains, for all its simplicity, remarkably elusive. It is also strangely all-encompassing: in a way that only João was capable, it takes all manner of Brazilian musical scraps--the dusty, forgotten tune dredged up from the vaults of decades past, the cutting-edge product of the (then recent) Tropicalia movement--and fuses them into a unified solidity. Andrew Kay