Garota de Ipanema (The Girl from Ipanema) - Antônio Carlos Jobim (arr. Heitmeyer)

Brazilian Jazz for the Classical Guitar - Steven Saulls, Classical Guitarist

About the music and the composer…

"Garota de Ipanema" ("The Girl from Ipanema") is a Brazilian bossa nova and jazz song. It was a worldwide hit in the mid-1960s and won a Grammy for Record of the Year in 1965. It was written in 1962, with music by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinícius de Moraes. English lyrics were written later by Norman Gimbel.

The song was composed for a musical comedy titled Dirigível ("Airship"), then a work in progress of Vinicius de Moraes. The original title was "Menina que Passa" ("The Girl Who Passes By"); the first verse was different. Jobim composed the melody on his piano in his new house in Rua Barão da Torre, in Ipanema. In turn, Moraes had written the lyrics in Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro, as he had done with "Chega de Saudade" ("No More Blues") six years earlier. While firmly rooted in bossa nova, "The Girl from Ipanema" includes influences from blues and Tin Pan Alley.

Ipanema is a fashionable neighborhood located in the southern region of the city of Rio de Janeiro.

The song was inspired by Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (now known as Helô Pinheiro), a seventeen-year-old girl living on Montenegro Street in Ipanema. Daily, she would stroll past the Veloso bar-café, not just to the beach ("each day when she walks to the sea"), but in the everyday course of her life. She would sometimes enter the bar to buy cigarettes for her mother and leave to the sound of wolf whistles. In the winter of 1962, the composers saw the girl pass by the bar. Since the song became popular, she has become a celebrity.

In Revelação: a verdadeira Garôta de Ipanema ("Revealed: The Real Girl from Ipanema") Moraes wrote that she was "the paradigm of the young Carioca: 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."

A key event in making Jobim's music known in the English-speaking world was his collaboration with the American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz, the Brazilian singer João Gilberto, and Gilberto's wife at the time, Astrud Gilberto, which resulted in two albums, Getz/Gilberto (1963) and Getz/Gilberto Vol. 2 (1964). The release of Getz/Gilberto created a bossa nova craze in the United States and subsequently internationally. Getz had previously recorded Jazz Samba with Charlie Byrd (1962), and Jazz Samba Encore! with Luiz Bonfá (1964). Jobim wrote many of the songs on Getz/Gilberto, which became one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time, and turned Astrud Gilberto, who sang on "Garota de Ipanema" (The Girl from Ipanema) and "Corcovado" (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars), into an international sensation. At the Grammy Awards of 1965 Getz/Gilberto won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group and the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. "The Girl from Ipanema" won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year. Among his later hits is "Águas de Março" (Waters of March 1972), for which he wrote both the Portuguese and English lyrics, and which was then translated into French by Georges Moustaki (Les Eaux de Mars, 1973). (Wikipedia)

About the performer...

Steven began studying the guitar at age nine and has attended some of the finest music schools in the world including the Berklee College of Music (Boston), and the Mozarteum (Salzburg, Austria). He holds both a Bachelor of Arts degree from Western Washington University (1980) and a Master of Music degree from the University of Arizona (1982).

Over the past 40 years, Steven has performed hundreds of concerts throughout the United States, Central & South America, and Europe. His debut recordings ‘Espressivo’ and ‘Steven Saulls Plays Works by Ponce, Torroba & Bach’ have received wide acclaim both nationally and internationally. In addition to solo concerts, he has performed over 200 chamber works including guitar concerti (with orchestra) by Vivaldi, Ponce, and Rodrigo.

About the recording...

Recorded at The Steven Saulls Guitar Studio, Sahuarita, Arizona 2023/Guitar handcrafted by Martin Blackwell.

Copyright© 2023 Steven Saulls, Sahuarita, Arizona

For additional information please contact Steven Saulls at [email protected]