Free Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World by Ruy Castro Page B

by the state, it was so profitable that it could allow itself all kinds of creative freedom. Its music department, on the twenty-first floor of the
A Noite
newspaperbuilding, in Praça Mauá (facing a bay filled with ships that left carrying coffee for export, and arrived carrying imported yo-yos), had a truly First World appearance. It held no less than seven studios and an auditorium, which was famous for having a sprung stage. The permanent—and contracted!—cast was a veritable Who’s Who of Brazilian music, with almost 160 instrumentalists, 90 vocalists, and 15 conductors, among whom were Radamés Gnatalli, Léo Peracchi and Lyrio Panicalli. This crowd had to be hired on a contractual basis because, except for the news shows and soap operas, Rádio Nacional broadcast music both day and night, almost all of it live.
    Not all music on Rádio Nacional was Brazilian. In terms of the amount of air time, international music surpassed the sambas,
choros
, and
baiões
by almost 3 to 1—and that included counting the Portuguese versions of American hits in with the Brazilian music category. Haroldo Barbosa in his position as head of the discotheque produced more than six hundred versions of American songs between 1937 and 1948, becoming a “partner” of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Vincent Youmans, and other far less illustrious composers. Ultimately, xenophobia might have dominated other parts of national life, but not there. With its cadre of musicians and singers specializing in fox-trots, mambos, rumbas, tangos, waltzes, and boleros (the station even had a fake cowboy, Bob Nelson, to provide Western-style yodeling), it’s likely that Rádio Nacional was the largest rhythmical democracy in the world.
    It must also have been the most arrogant, but it had good reason to be proud. Its most prestigious music program was the aforementioned
Um milhão de melodies
, and no one thought the title was an exaggeration. In the thirteen years that it aired on a weekly basis, from 1943 to 1956, sponsored by Coca-Cola—in fact, the program was created to launch Coca-Cola in Brazil—it’s obvious it couldn’t possibly have played those million melodies. But scratch a couple of zeros, and you’ll have almost the exact number of songs of all different types of music for which Radamés Gnatalli wrote original arrangements which he then performed with his orchestra, made up of the cream of musical talent at Nacional.
Um milhão de melodies
was a super-production involving so many people that they needed two maestros: one, Gnatalli, on stage, directing the musicians, and another, Peracchi, providing technical support, “conducting” the operators of eight microphones through the musical score. Everything was large-scale at Nacional, except the salaries. Compared to those of Tupi, its competitor, they could even be considered low. Despite this, artists fell over themselves in their bid to join Nacional. Its shortwave radio station guaranteed them a nationwide audience which, for them, meant widespread fame, work, and money.
    Its neighbor on Avenida Venezuela, Rádio Tupi, was not that far behind in terms of popularity; and one of the reasons was that in 1946 it had been restructured from top to bottom by the man who practically built Nacional: Gilberto de Andrade. Andrade, hired by press mogul Assis Chateaubriand, not only stole big names from Nacional and brought them to Tupi, but also wreaked havoc on the Rio airwaves, stealing people and audiences away from the smaller stations. He pulled Tupi out of its romantic phase and made it tick like a clock. At this, its artistic directors began to take themselves seriously and to insist upon the fulfillment of obligations by its musicians, as if they truly understood the situation. Several hired ensembles were sent to the penalty line in 1950, and among them were Os Garotos da Lua.
    Jonas Silva, a native of Pernambuco, was the