Astrud Gilberto, known from ‘The Girl from Ipanema’, gave her languid whisper voice to bossa nova

She was the singer of one of the sultry jazz songs ever recorded: ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. With that 1963 hit, 83-year-old Astrud Gilberto, who passed away on Monday evening, gave her hoarse, languid whisper to bossa nova, a genre that took the world by storm. In the decades that followed, she would record seventeen more albums of mostly jazz standards in different languages ​​and forever remain an icon of samba jazz.

Astrud Evangelina Weinert was the daughter of a Brazilian mother and a German father. In Rio de Janeiro in 1959 she married João Gilberto, the so-called ‘father of the bossa nova’. When he released the album together with saxophonist Stan Getz in New York Getz/Gilberto recorded, the idea arose for an English version of ‘Garota de Ipanema’ by Antonio Carlos Jobim. Since 22-year-old Astrud, who came with her husband, was the only one in the studio who spoke the language well enough to sing, ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ got her voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s61-e29Vr6Q

The song became a classic, recorded by countless other vocalists but never as deceptively simple and penetrating as Gilberto did it himself. Yet she was not credited at the time and, according to tradition, she was paid no more than $ 120 for her contribution. Getz in particular was quick to claim the ‘discovery’ of the young woman who until then had been ‘just a housewife’. In reality, Astrud had been singing professionally for some time.

Stage fright

Inevitably, in the eyes of the public, she grew into the girl she sang about, the girl who walks along the beach, swinging her hips, and makes all the men look back. The image was gladly confirmed in the press. In 1964 she divorced João Gilbero and went on tour with Getz, something she would later say was mostly out of necessity, as she was going through hard times as a single mother. In later interviews, she also made it clear that she suffered from the machismo in the music industry and American and Brazilian press.

After leaving Getz’s band, she recorded eight solo albums for Verve Records and worked with the likes of Gil Evans and Quincy Jones. She was incredibly popular in Asia and recorded albums in Japanese. She spoke and sang in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, English and Japanese.

At the turn of the century, she retired to Philadelphia with her second husband and said she had always suffered from stage fright. In 2002, the year in which she was inducted into the Latin Music Hall of Fame, she announced that she would no longer be performing for an indefinite period of time.

In the last two decades of her life, Astrud Gilberto made visual art and campaigned for animal rights. But her musical work was used many times, for example in the film Juno and in samples from hip-hop artists such as the Black Eyed Peas.