Why João Matters

On his 82nd birthday, a meditation on the master of musical understatement

On his 82nd birthday, a meditation on the master of musical understatement

João Gilberto turns 82 today. As I’ve done every year for the last decade or so, I will mark the occasion by drifting into a melancholic reverie characterized by endless variations on the theme of “I wonder if I’ll ever get to hear that guy perform again.”

The singer, guitarist and architect of the bossa nova sound is a legend in Brazil, of course. But his footprint is fairly faint elsewhere. In the U.S., Gilberto is regarded as just another distantly exotic figure from the old days; jazz lovers remember his pioneering 1964 multi-cultural collaboration with saxophonist Stan Getz, and little else. His own spare and perfect recordings from the late ‘50s and ‘60s are erratically available here. He’s as far off the pop-culture grid as a million-selling genre-shaping trailblazer can get.

This is unfortunate, because Gilberto is the best living symbol of a vanishing aesthetic — the oft-praised yet under-employed principle of “less is more.” He’s among the all-time-great exponents of it, right up there with Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Steve Reich. If you haven’t seen him, words can’t quite describe his impact — though the Portuguese term saudade, which describes a state of quiet yearning or brooding, gets close. His art happens deep inside the wounded heart of saudade, and when he’s on, it’s like being throttled by the most modest, unassuming feather.

Gilberto performs alone. He appears onstage looking like an insurance office employee — thick glasses, humble sportcoat, nondescript demeanor. He sings in an interior, musing-to-himself voice, his nylon-string acoustic guitar standing in for an orchestra. There is no show business in his presentation. Notorious for walking off stage mid-tune if conditions don’t suit him, he insists on quiet. Insists. His terms are extreme: all or nothing. The uneasy quiet becomes his blank canvas, and from it, he sets forth a harrowingly vulnerable emotional landscape. Conjures it, really, out of thin air. In this place, everything, even soul-crushing disappointment, is explored in a stage whisper. His is a seduction of silences, measured pauses, infinite restraint. He understands that by not blurting out full details of his every feeling, he draws the sensitive listeners in, makes them anticipate the next turn in the road, activates their own longing for a distant, mostly unattainable serenity.

And yet, Gilberto’s voice itself is always serene, contented, smiling. He confides when he sings, telling stories in slopes and twists and arcs that simulate the graceful movements of butterflies. His phrasing flows like great conversation, but underneath it, running in the background, there’s this wicked crisp guitar, chopping up the time with murderous precision. The slicing, forward-moving syncopations — another signature contribution, the heartbeat of bossa nova — are intricate marvels all by themselves. Heard alone, the rhythms can seem like a relentless energy surge. But when his voice enters, it radiates a feeling of calm introspection that transforms the unsettled rhythm into something utterly sublime. Tension and release in the same instant.

The cover image of Gilberto’s 2000 studio album Jo~o Voz e Violao shows a close-up of a woman’s face, her trigger finger crossing pursed lips in the international symbol of “Shhhhh.” I’ve gazed at this image for years, and still I don’t know: Is this an admonition? Or an invitation into rarifed airspace, with silence as the price of admission?

Gilberto’s followers would say it’s both. Then they’d add that the world has become so noisy, and its smartphone-enabled humans so self-absorbed, it’s necessary to remind people that astounding art sometimes happens without production numbers, pre-release hype, any sort of big megaphone. If you’re going to set terms of engagement for performance, any performance, “quiet” is a reasonable place to start. Gilberto goes further, though; he stays with the bare minimum outlines of melodies, honors their symmetry and grace, and adds nothing that’s not absolutely essential. He makes stillness part of his art. Certainly the Kanye Wests of the world don’t roll that way: They use any and every device available to demand attention. They arrive on stage armed with pyro and massive lights and all manner of thrill-making stagecraft in the wings, and seek, from the very first note, to stun audiences into bedazzled submission. Limit them to an acoustic guitar and a folding chair and see how far they get.

Gilberto matters not simply because he sets rather extreme terms of engagement — itself a bold stance in our look-at-me age. But because out of that, he creates art that offers rare and elusive truths about what it means to be alive, in love, devoted to something other than the self. He may be removed from the spotlight, his work nearly forgotten, but his example endures as a high-level argument for that fast-disappearing quality at the root of so much great art: Nuance. After João Gilberto, just about everything sounds like shouting.