The Girl from Ipanema

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

"The Girl from Ipanema" ("Garota de Ipanema") is a well known bossa nova song, and was a worldwide hit in the mid-1960s and won a Grammy for best record in 1965. It was written in 1962, with music by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes with English lyrics written later by Norman Gimbel. It is sometimes sung by female artists as "The Boy from Ipanema."

The first commercial recording was in 1962, by Pery Ribeiro. The version performed by Astrud Gilberto, along with João Gilberto and Stan Getz, from the 1963 album Getz/Gilberto, became an international hit. Numerous recordings have been used in movies, often as an elevator music cliché.[citation needed]

In 2004, it was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.[citation needed]

Contents

[edit] Background

This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
This article has been tagged since February 2007.
Heloísa Pinheiro
Heloísa Pinheiro

Popular myth has it that the song was inspired by Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (now Helô Pinheiro), an 18 year old girl who lived on Montenegro street in the fashionable Ipanema district of Rio de Janeiro. Every day, she would stroll past the popular "Veloso" bar-cafe on the way to the beach, attracting the attention of regulars Jobim and Moraes.

The song in fact was originally composed for a musical comedy entitled Dirigível (Blimp), which was a work in progress of Vinícius de Moraes. The original title was "Menina que Passa" ("The Girl Who Passes by"), and the famous first verse was completely different. Jobim composed the melody meticulously on the piano at his new home in Rua Barão da Torre, in Ipanema. Vinícius, in turn, had written the lyrics in Petrópolis, near Rio, as he had done with "Chega de Saudade" six years earlier, and it took him just as much work.

The true part of the myth is that the composers did in fact know Helô Pinto and later connected the song's creation with her. They saw her pass by as they sat in the Veloso bar, during the winter of 1962— not just once, but several times, and not always on her way to the beach but also on her way to school, to the dressmaker, and even to the dentist. Mostly because she was 5 feet, 8 inches tall (173 cm), with green eyes and long, flowing black hair, lived in Rua Montenegro and was already the object of much admiration among patrons of the Veloso, where she would frequently stop to buy cigarettes for her mother—and leave to a cacophony of wolf-whistles.[1] She has been famous for this connection ever since the song became popular.

In Revelação: a verdadeira Garota de Ipanema (Revealed: The Real Girl from Ipanema) Moraes wrote that she was:

"o paradigma do bruto carioca; a moça dourada, misto de flor e sereia, cheia de luz e de graça mas cuja a visão é também triste, pois carrega consigo, a caminho do mar, o sentimento da beleza que passa, da beleza que não é só nossa — é um dom da vida em seu lindo e melancólico fluir e refluir constante."

which roughly translates to:

'"the exemplar of the raw Carioca: a golden-tanned girl, a mixture of flower and mermaid, full of brightness and grace, the sight of whom is also sad, in that she carries with her, on her route to the sea, the feeling of beauty that fades, of the beauty that is not ours alone — it is a gift of life in its constant, beautiful and melancholic ebb and flow."

Today, "Montenegro Street" is called "Vinicius de Moraes Street", and the "Veloso Bar" is named "A Garota de Ipanema". There is also a "Garota de Ipanema" Park in the nearby Arpoador neighborhood.

[edit] Recent controversy over the copyright

In 2005, the owners of the copyright, who inherited it from their fathers, the composers, sued Ms. Pinheiro for a kind of copyright violation over her using her status as the girl from Ipanema ("Garota de Ipanema") created partially by the composers to promote her boutique, calling it by the same name.[citation needed] It created a storm of protest among locals living in and around Ipanema where she and her history is known and where she is a part of society. They considered her to be an owner of the name as a personal moniker by virtue of her being established as the holder of that name over a long period of time, and partially because of the intentions of the composers, themselves. If this suit had taken place in the USA, no copyright violation would have been in question, because titles are considered public domain (as far as US copyright law goes). The outcome of the court case is unknown as of this time.

[edit] Artists who have performed "The Girl from Ipanema"

[edit] Other media

A Brazilian musical film, "Garota de Ipanema", inspired by the song, was released in 1967.

In The Sims (original) computer game, music labeled "Latin" feature songs strikingly similar to that of "The Girl from Ipanema", each with the similar elevator sounding tunes, without voice singing.[citation needed]

[edit] Trivia

  • In 2003 MasterCard released a commercial with an unknown female vocalist singing an English version of "The Girl from Ipanema".[citation needed]
  • The B-52's have a song called "The Girl from Ipanema Goes to Greenland" on their 1986 album Bouncing off the Satellites.
  • Director John Landis has, on more than one occasion, used an instrumental version of the song in his films (e.g. in the elevator during the climax of The Blues Brothers)[citation needed]
  • In the film Club Paradise, the 'two Barrys' play the game Geography (where one person names a country, and the next names a country starting with the last letter of the previous country), and one of them uses 'Ipanema' as his country (the other Barry then mentions the song, pointing out that Ipanema is not a proper name).
  • The song appeared in a 2007 episode of the NBC hospital comedy Scrubs, where the character of The Janitor danced to it in his new hide-out.
  • During the song "La Villa Strangiato" on Rush's 2003 live album, Rush in Rio, Alex Lifeson (in a stream-of-consciousness rant) introduces Geddy Lee as "that guy from Ipanema," followed by Lee playing a section of the song on bass guitar.
  • In the film Finding Nemo, the song is played in the background of the dentist's waiting room in a stereotypical Muzak fashion.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World, by Ruy Castro, Pp. 239-240.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../t/h/e/The_Girl_from_Ipanema_adac.html"