Astrud Gilberto

Rio

Astrud Gilberto was born Astrud Evangelina Weinert on 29 March 1940 in Salvador, Bahia. Her mother was Brazilian and her father a German immigrant who taught languages, and who named his three daughters after figures from Germanic mythology. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1947. In her teens she fell in with the young musicians of Rio's new bossa nova scene, and through the singer Nara Leão she met the guitarist João Gilberto, whom she later married. She made her public debut on 20 May 1960 at the festival A noite do amor, do sorriso e da flor, singing two songs, Lamento and Brigas Nunca Mais, with João on guitar.

Ipanema

In March 1963 she went with João to A&R Studios in New York, where he was recording with the saxophonist Stan Getz and the composer Antônio Carlos Jobim for the producer Creed Taylor. She acted as his interpreter. The sessions ran on 18 and 19 March, and on the second day the lyricist Norman Gimbel handed over English words for The Girl from Ipanema. Accounts differ on who first suggested that she sing them. The engineer Phil Ramone told JazzWax that she volunteered, and she herself said João had asked her. João sang the first chorus in Portuguese and she sang the next in English. Getz told her, in the words she remembered, that the song was going to make her famous. She also sang on Corcovado.

Taylor held the record back for nearly a year, and Getz/Gilberto came out in March 1964. Her name appeared only in the cover text, and she was paid a flat $120. A shortened single without João's vocals followed in May 1964. It reached number five in the United States and number 29 in Britain, and the record won Album of the Year at the 1965 Grammys.

Verve

Getz asked her to sing with his band, and she toured with him for six months through 1964. A live album, Getz Au Go Go, and two film appearances came out of it. She and João separated in 1964. Her first solo record, The Astrud Gilberto Album, appeared in 1965 with Jobim on guitar and arrangements by Marty Paich, and peaked at 41 on the Billboard 200. In 1966 she made A Certain Smile, a Certain Sadness with the organist Walter Wanderley and Look to the Rainbow, arranged by Gil Evans and Al Cohn.

Beach Samba followed in 1967, recorded in New York in May and June, arranged by Don Sebesky and Eumir Deodato. It leaned toward pop songs, among them Tim Hardin's Misty Roses and a song by Steve Boone and John Sebastian. The critic Richie Unterberger gave it three stars and called it one of her less impressive Verve records, while praising the scatting on Não Bate O Coração. In all she made eight albums for the label before she moved on.

After Verve

Her 1972 album Now took in songs by Jorge Ben and Milton Nascimento. In 1977 she recorded That Girl from Ipanema, which includes Far Away, a song she wrote, sung as a duet with the trumpeter Chet Baker. By 1980 she was playing clubs in New York, and in 1986 she made Plus with the James Last Orchestra. In 1996 she sang Desafinado with George Michael on the AIDS benefit album Red Hot + Rio. Her last album, Jungle, came out in 2002 on her own label, and the same year she announced that she was taking indefinite time off from public performances. She never sang in Brazil again after a 1965 concert in São Paulo.

She said she was not a pure jazz singer and preferred simplicity. In later years she devoted much of her time to animal rights and to her own art. The Latin Recording Academy gave her a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2008. Her recording of Once I Loved was heard in the film Juno, and the Black Eyed Peas sampled Who Can I Turn To? in 2005. She died on 5 June 2023, aged 83.