In Conversation with Bebel Gilberto

 

August 2003

(Originally published in the Big Issue, Manchester edition, July 26-August 1 2003)

 

A little Background:

 

Alas, this is not one of my interviews, but rather an interview that appeared in a magazine

Over in England called The Big Issue.

 

The focus of Setting Sun is to provide a stepping stone for artists who deserve

A higher profile that perhaps they are getting.

 

Bebel Gilberto’s background is pretty well self described in this re-printed

Interview. I found out about her through my friend, Cassia in Brazil who let me listen to

A song by Bebel, which I thought, was beautiful and then by chance through

Somebody else I then got hold of her album “Tanto Tempo” which is a beautiful

Album indeed.

 

For more information, contact the official bebel gilberto webpage

 

 

 

 

“I was always a traveller” says Bebel Gilberto, looking out of a hotel window

across the Manchester Ship Canal and pulling on one of her pigtails.

 

“I started travelling when I was baby with my parents because my father was touring and I have been

travelling ever since.”

 

Born in New York and raised in Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro much of the early life of the only

daughter, Brazilian bossa nova legend Joao Gilberto and his second wife, the singer Miucha, seems to have

been totally traipsing after her “totally” hippy parents as they circumnavigated the globe playing their music.

 

One such jaunt, for example took the family to Mexico City when a couple of local gigs en route to Brazil turned

into a two young stop-over.

 

“We had a beautiful house with a big peacock walking around it but we had no furniture at all” smiles Gilberto,

“We all watched Brazil in the World Cup and thought it was fantastic.”

 

Gilberto’s somewhat unconventional upbringing seems to have produced a balanced, self-assured and resolutely

normal individual who feels comfortable in many parts of the world. She makes her own music, a subtle updating

on the traditional bossa nova sound her father helped create 40 years ago. She is in Manchester as a part of a short

tour before she goes out on the road supporting Simply Red.

 

As perhaps might be expected with such a background (her parent’s weren’t the family’s only entertainers, her

uncle is the poet and singer Chico Buraque), journalists often seem to more interested in her home life than in her music.

She is, after all the daughter of the man who wrote The Girl from Ipanema.

 

But while the music on her astounding debut album Tanto Tempo retains the Zen-like simplicity of her father’s best work

and her wonderfully emotive singing echoes the voice of her mother, Bebel Gilberto is more than just the sum of her

parts. She is her parent’s daughter but also an important talent in her own right. Growing up a performer in a family of

highly successful, well-known performers, however brings other problems too.

 

“There’s a good side and a bad side to it” the surprisingly diminutive singer muses, taking a gulp of camomile tea” I

think the good side is because you are around music all the time and the bad side is because they are so in to their

own life as entertainers sometimes they forgot to, you know be normal. I mean I love it that my parents are always

entertaining but I think it is important for the discipline of anyone who growing up to have someone who gives them

the strict treatment.”

 

Luckingly, Gilberto found more stability on an extended stay at her grandparent’s house in Sao Paulo on the family’s

return to Brazil from Mexico. She lived in the bustling metropolis, which has the biggest Japanese community outside

of Japan itself as well as a large Italian and Orthodox Jewish populations, from the age of five to eight.

 

“I call them the most important times of my life” she says “When I got there I was still speaking Spanish after living

in Mexico City. I went to school in the morning and came home at night. I met a lot of normal people and I learnt to

cook, to sew. It was a good time.”

 

“Sao Paulo is very, very.. well it’s Sao Paulo” She shrugs” Rio is very laid back, It is very beautiful. Sao Paulo is…

it’s very hard to say Sao Paulo is beautiful. It is quite horrible,”

 

Nevertheless, her grandparents had a nice house with a garden and a tree, apparently something of a rarity in

the concrete jungle of Sao Paulo and Gilberto considers herself fortunate to have spent time there.

 

“I was very lucky. There is a song called Jubutucada on my next album which talks about the fruit from this tree,

which does not grow anywhere else in the world expect Brazil. I think it’s quite unusual to have a tree that you

can sit underneath in Sao Paulo, but I was lucky, I had that.”

 

After the family moved back to Rio, Gilberto did a little acting and even helped create the flying circus, on the

city’s Ipanema beach, which still exists today (“I feel very proud, this is one of the big things I have done in my

life”), before deciding to move back to New York in 1991, where she has lived on and off since.

 

Around the time she left Brazil, a Yugoslavian ex-pat called Suba pitched up in Sao Paulo and begin to make

a name for himself as a DJ and producer. A few years later, on a trip back home, one of Babel’s friends on a

demo Suba had made of one of Joao Gilberto’s songs – “he was obsessed about releasing it” and she dully

played to her father who allowed its release.

 

The pair only met however, when Gilberto appeared with her father at the Carnegie Hall in New York in 1998

(She had made her stage debut at the age of nine, alongside her mother and Stan Getz) and the extrovert Suba

popped his head around her dressing room door and said “Hallo, I am Suba. How are you? I would like to

be with you,” she paused and raises her eyebrows “ so we went to dinner and he said ‘ Look, I would like

to take you to Brazil to work with you on some music’.

 

“I immediately said yes because I didn’t know anyone who would be interested in such a thing with me, It was

a investment for him – not only of his time but also financially.”

 

It was a momentous meeting and one, which created a strong, unique musical partnership leading to one of

the most accomplished debut albums of the last decade. Tanto Tempo has an unashamedly romantic feel to it

with Suba’s earthy and organic production complementing Gilberto’s fantastically expressive voice beautifully.

It is nothing sort of a modern classic.

 

Some of her songs like her splendid, reworking of Jao Donato and Gilberto Gil’s Bananeria or the sublime

ballad Mais Feliz – rendered with just Gilberto’s voice and simple acoustic guitar accompaniment, are in her

native Portuguese, a few like the langigudly lovely August Day Song are in English.

 

Either way, the unaffected simplicity and casual elegance of the songs on Tanto Tempo transcend mere language.

They come from the heart and that’s as eloquent as it gets.

 

“I talk a lot about my own experiences”  says Gilberto “because I think music soothes you sometimes when

you find something similar in the words to what is happening in your life. So I am more into that – I love politically

minded music which allows people to express themselves but I am too romantic.”

 

Whereever in the world Bebel Gilberto ends up, let’s hope she stays that way.