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 December 8, ten years ago, exactly fourteen years after John Lennon's assassination, Antonio Carlos (Tom) Jobim's heart also stalled in New York City. It is high time we learned more about another priceless legacy to the music and music-lovers of the world.
Poet and novelist Helena Jobim's non-fiction book in Portuguese, Antonio Carlos Jobim: Um Homem Iluminado (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1996), makes her brother's personal, intellectual, and professional history come alive in a compelling story for all readers.
It is, likewise, an illuminating document for researchers in the fields of music, literature, art, philosophy, and popular culture. Here we find a vast, intimate, and revealing set of photographs, the engaging elegance and unique structure of the prose, the resourceful catalog of recording data, and the enlightening description of creative processes and partnerships of a true twentieth-century's genius.
We may learn even more about this father of "The Girl from Ipanema," though, from one of the interviews appropriately added to his biography.
Helena Jobim's work was written and published somewhat soon after Tom's short-lived illness and death, but it was carefully crafted. With portraits of multiple generations of Jobim's forebears and offspring, as well as those of numberless international artists in action and in pose, the book is visually charming.
The narrative's cunning and precise attention to details also contributes. They are the colors, shapes, smells, names and historical facts regarding the flora and fauna within and beyond the landscapes of a country house in the neighboring state of Minas Gerais and those of Rio de Janeiro (such as downtown's Botanic Garden, Tijuca's Forest, and Corcovado Mountain).
The cuts and flashbacks in the narrative structure consistently enhance (and extend to the reader) the dramatic effect, the suspense and the disbelief that subdued Tom's family after his bladder cancer was diagnosed.
The point-of-view and tone of the narrative voice are mixed. In two parts, the Introduction and Denouement, Helena digresses in first-person. Through short sentences and poignant observations, her suffering runs in discreet but contagious dosage.
The other two segments, Opening and Trajectory, are narrated in third-person and interspersed with a variety of other pieces written by different authors, including her brother.
One of such texts is a composition through which Tom reveals, in 1939, his very early ecological concern. Another piece is a crafted poem that Jorge Jobim, Tom and Helena's father, wrote about his children shortly before his own death in a mental institution (47-48).
A third extra writing is the most elucidating. In 1970, Tom is interviewed by Carlos Lacerda, one of Brazil's most intelligent and controversial journalists and politicians of all times (151-163).
An extremely enigmatic figure himself, Lacerda captures one of the keys to Tom's complex and peculiar way of thinking. According to the ex-governor of Guanabara, who once was a communist (in the 1930s), a communist-hunter (in the 40s and 50s), and a dangerous "subversive" in the eyes of the military dictators (in the 60s and 70s), Tom is a living paradox.
He articulates his ideas on transcendental issues in colloquial language and, trivial thoughts, in transcendental metaphors (156). When Tom is asked whether his music is erudite, he replies: "In Germany, people hummed Schumann and Schubert's tunes in the kitchen. Are you fabricating some Brazilian lieder?" (158)
The illustrious son of a hard-working mother and educator (who founded the Colégio Brasileiro de Almeida in Ipanema) is above all, contends the famous journalist, "a free soul" (153). People were not capable of "enslaving him to a nametag, neither could they imprison his conscience or intelligence.
The price of that freedom, though, is anguish. Tense and shiny, that's him now" (153). Some of Tom's greatest anguish (but not resentment) resulted from his own image in the Brazilian press: too often distorted and misunderstood.
The harshest attacks on him arguably came from prejudiced critics who, rather unfairly and unwisely, regarded his music as imitation of foreign sounds. If bossa nova is, for many Brazilians, too Americanized, Jobim argues that more than 80% of his music is not in that style.
"I am Brazilian and I write Brazilian music not because of nationalism, but because I don't know how to do anything else. If I were to do jazz, I'd be an idiot, since any black musician from their Lapa [poor and bohemian district in Rio] would play better than I" (157).
For decades, Tom was a victim of a dreadful and sinister sort of discrimination - something ludicrous and painful that justifies itself on the narrow basis of art nationalism.
It had happened to others before him, like samba singer and actress Carmen Miranda and guitarist and composer Laurindo Almeida. When a Brazilian artist is successful abroad, people at home are proud. But if one's success goes on too long or too far, the artist is regarded as a traitor.
"Don't think I'm obsessed with an idea of persecution. [...]. I'm an Aquarian [typically a unique, independent, revolutionary character]. Their behavior was expected. The poor [in Brazil, until the 1980s] have no access to records and the rich buy Frank Sinatra or Brahms" (158).
Tom once declared to his family, "Lacerda's article is the only serious piece that describes who I am" (151). The number of critics who later understand and become outspoken defenders of Tom Jobim's art increases as the 1970s go by.
One of them is Tárik de Souza, who highlights Jobim's choice of mingling classical and chamber music with popular forms and motifs (like Gonzaga, Villa-Lobos and Gnatalli).
Souza also confirms the mighty influence of Pixinguinha, Ary Barroso, and Dorival Caymmi over Tom's music, but he adds a disclaimer: Jobim's sambas encompass such "sophisticated harmonic complexion that they won't be drummed very easily on a matchbox" (208).
Of course Helena Jobim's work helps explain and dissipate the remnants of that old distortion and misunderstanding of her brother's art.
Quoting Pablo Picasso (and he loved quoting artists and poets, such as Carlos Drummond, Fernando Pessoa and Guimarães Rosa), the maestro once explained that out of that anguish, his own "cube of darkness," he was "born again" on a daily basis (163).
Jobim's exceptional talent as performer and songwriter follows a tradition in Brazilian music since Chiquinha Gonzaga 150 years ago: sometimes to bridge over and sometimes to do away with the illusive divide between erudite and popular culture, including music and poetry.
Toward that goal (just naturally and smoothly being driven to it, rather than pursuing it), Jobim was certainly lucky and clever enough to chose and to be chosen to work with virtuosos of either end, such as Radamés Gnatalli and Dolores Duran, or other outstanding bards, like Chico Buarque de Hollanda and Vinicius de Moraes, whose art has also spanned all over that open field of borderless creation.
Initially trained by Hans Joachim Koellreutter in modern classical music for piano and, later, joined by Mangueira composers on writing projects for Carnaval tunes, the author of "Waters of March" actually read, questioned, and recreated the world he lived in not only through mesmerizing melody, but also through down-to-earth poetry.
Helena Jobim does justice to her brother's poetic voice in many dazzling instances. She tells us how he used to rejoice at nature's sounds and, at the same time, write his own music while walking through the woods. But pollution of all kinds had been taking its toll on him.
So, the book opens on a high note of low spirits by an extraordinary composer whose ecological concerns made him a bit gloomier everyday. It is indeed too sad that he had to leave us prematurely, at the peak of his career and before writing another 500 tunes of inexplicable grace.
Tom could have applied one of those to his own verses that stand as the epigraph in Um Homem Iluminado: "Every time a tree is cut down here on Earth, I believe it will grow again somewhere else, in another world. So, when I die, it is to this place that I want to go, where forests live in peace."
Dário Borim Jr. is a Luso-Brazilian Studies professor. The author of Paisagens humanas (2002) and Perplexidades (2004), he produces and presents Brazilliance, a live weekly radio show on Thursdays from 3 to 6 PM at www.wsmu.org. Borim can be reached at dborim@umassd.edu.
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