"It's the oldest story in the world," said Norman Gimbel, who would write the English lyrics. And the girl from Ipanema started walking and never looked back. But they jotted down the gist of the music and text on two napkins - and then they parted and returned to their respective pads and put their respective napkins through some rewriting and polishing. That would have been too neat, even for an and-then-I-wrote anecdote. You say Helô, she says goodbye.Ĭontrary to legend, Jobim and Moraes didn't write the whole thing in the bar. ![]() Which is pretty much what she did that day. Helô was 19 years old and beautiful - ""the paradigm of the young Carioca," as Vinícius de Moraes would later write of her, "a golden teenage girl, a mixture of flower and mermaid, full of light and grace, the sight of whom is also sad, in that she carries with her, on her route to the sea, the feeling of youth that fades, of the beauty that is not ours alone - it is a gift of life in its beautiful and melancholic constant ebb and flow": but it sounds better if you say they were "Ah"-ing and "Oh"-ing. And, when she exited, she was swinging so cool and swaying so gentle that the barflies would wolf-whistle. And sometimes she even came into the bar and bought a pack of cigarettes for her mother. Tall and tan and young and lovely and emerald-eyed and wavy-haired, the girl from Ipanema came walking past the Veloso bar every day, and the patrons sighed. ![]() ![]() The girl was Helô - Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, who lived on the Rua Montenegro in Ipanema, in southern Rio. And then the girl came walking, and they sat and marveled as she passed by, and, when she was gone, they turned back to the bar and wrote a song called "Menina que passa" - "The Girl Who Passes": And they were stalled, as who wouldn't be? So they ordered another round of Brahma beers. It was about a space alien who lands in Rio during Carnaval. It was 1962 and they were just off the beach at Ipanema, in the Veloso bar: a musician-composer called Antonio Carlos Jobim, a poet-librettist called Vinícius de Moraes, working on a musical called Dirigível - or, in English, Blimp, which sounds oddly Lionel Bartish as a show title.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |