“Tall, (and) tan, (and) young, (and) lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, I smile - but she doesn't see…”—“The Girl From Ipanema,” composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes, English lyrics by Norman Gimbel, sung by Astrud Gilberto in English and Joao Gilberto in Portuguese, with Stan Getz on saxophone, on the LP Getz/Gilberto (1964)
One of my favorite deejays, WNYC-FM’s Jonathan Schwartz, has said that American beaches were dominated by the sound of “The Girl From Ipanema” in the summer of 1964. No wonder. Maybe you’d have to go back to Leonardo with his Mona Lisa to find the female of the species evoked so indelibly, between Stan Getz’s smoky sax and the words and melody by Moraes and Jobim.
(Time to debunk a myth here: the two did not compose it in a bar. The truth is interesting enough: they were inspired by 18-year-old Heloisa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, now known as Helo Pinheiro, stopping by frequently at the restaurant the songwriters frequented, on her way to pick up cigarettes for her mother. Being an unconscious muse has given Helo celebrity ever since then. In the last decade, even in her sixties, she’s posed for Playboy with her youngest daughter and appeared on America’s Next Top Model.)
Astrud Gilberto (whose photo accompanies this post), who had not sung professionally before this record, did so memorably now, picking up the cue from her husband at the time, Joao.
All in all, this became the song that fed countless Norteamericano, middle-aged males’ fantasies of lying on a beach, unconstrained by family, eyeing lissome Latin American ladies. You can almost see the wheels spinning in the brain of Mark Sanford: “Hey, what’s wrong with oodles of ogling?” (I think we know the answer to that by now, don’t we?)
But read that last line in the quote above—in its quiet but unmistakable way, it concerns sexual frustration as surely as the far more aggressive Rolling Stones hit of the next year, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Listen, fella: It’s not just that when you smile, “she doesn’t see” but that she doesn’t see you—undoubtedly because she has a boyfriend her own age, you besotted midlife fool!
One more thing: Only seven years before releasing this Grammy-winning song, Stan Getz was so sore about the music industry that he told Down Beat Magazine that he would get his high school degree, then go on to become a physician. The magazine reprinted his 1957 interview with John Tynan in its May 2009 issue, with this quote about his instrument, the tenor sax:
“Apparently there’s nowhere new to go. All the avenues appear to have been explored. Of course, there will always be the one guy that’s going to burst through the blockade. I don’t know who he is, but he’ll come along one of these days and there’ll be something really new in tenor sax playing again.”
Little did he know that this “one guy,” who would look abroad, where he would pick up and spread stateside the whole bossa nova craze of the Sixties, was himself.
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, I smile - but she doesn't see…”—“The Girl From Ipanema,” composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes, English lyrics by Norman Gimbel, sung by Astrud Gilberto in English and Joao Gilberto in Portuguese, with Stan Getz on saxophone, on the LP Getz/Gilberto (1964)
One of my favorite deejays, WNYC-FM’s Jonathan Schwartz, has said that American beaches were dominated by the sound of “The Girl From Ipanema” in the summer of 1964. No wonder. Maybe you’d have to go back to Leonardo with his Mona Lisa to find the female of the species evoked so indelibly, between Stan Getz’s smoky sax and the words and melody by Moraes and Jobim.
(Time to debunk a myth here: the two did not compose it in a bar. The truth is interesting enough: they were inspired by 18-year-old Heloisa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, now known as Helo Pinheiro, stopping by frequently at the restaurant the songwriters frequented, on her way to pick up cigarettes for her mother. Being an unconscious muse has given Helo celebrity ever since then. In the last decade, even in her sixties, she’s posed for Playboy with her youngest daughter and appeared on America’s Next Top Model.)
Astrud Gilberto (whose photo accompanies this post), who had not sung professionally before this record, did so memorably now, picking up the cue from her husband at the time, Joao.
All in all, this became the song that fed countless Norteamericano, middle-aged males’ fantasies of lying on a beach, unconstrained by family, eyeing lissome Latin American ladies. You can almost see the wheels spinning in the brain of Mark Sanford: “Hey, what’s wrong with oodles of ogling?” (I think we know the answer to that by now, don’t we?)
But read that last line in the quote above—in its quiet but unmistakable way, it concerns sexual frustration as surely as the far more aggressive Rolling Stones hit of the next year, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Listen, fella: It’s not just that when you smile, “she doesn’t see” but that she doesn’t see you—undoubtedly because she has a boyfriend her own age, you besotted midlife fool!
One more thing: Only seven years before releasing this Grammy-winning song, Stan Getz was so sore about the music industry that he told Down Beat Magazine that he would get his high school degree, then go on to become a physician. The magazine reprinted his 1957 interview with John Tynan in its May 2009 issue, with this quote about his instrument, the tenor sax:
“Apparently there’s nowhere new to go. All the avenues appear to have been explored. Of course, there will always be the one guy that’s going to burst through the blockade. I don’t know who he is, but he’ll come along one of these days and there’ll be something really new in tenor sax playing again.”
Little did he know that this “one guy,” who would look abroad, where he would pick up and spread stateside the whole bossa nova craze of the Sixties, was himself.
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