I think I’ve always associated “Ipanema” with “Ipana,” as in the toothpaste brand. (Sort of dates me, I know. Apparently it was brought back to market in 2011 as a “retro brand.”) Hey, I’m sure the girl has a great smile, although we’re not specifically told that in the song.
But it won’t surprise you to find out that there is nothing about dental hygiene here. Ipanema is a beach in Rio de Janeiro, and there was a bar about a block from there where the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim and the poet Vinicius de Moraes liked to sit and drink beer. They noticed a lovely 18-year-old girl often walking by on the sidewalk, either down to the beach or home from school (although it’s not clear how they knew where she was going). Her name was Hélo, short for Heloisa Eneida Menezes Pais Pinto. So inspired were they by her loveliness and her way of walking (“sheer poetry,” according to de Moraes) that they wrote the song on the spot, using the traditional manuscript material of bar napkins.
Makes a good story, doesn’t it? But it didn’t happen quite that way, although Hélo was indeed at least the indirect inspiration for the song. Jobim and de Moraes had had a great success with their songs for the 1959 film Black Orpheus and were casting about for a new project. Orpheus was a tragedy, a re-telling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set during Rio’s Carnaval season; they now wanted to do a musical comedy. The idea they came up with was something titled Blimp and was to be the story of a Martian who visits Earth, also during Carnaval. (They must have really liked that holiday.) The film . . . never got off the ground. (Couldn’t resist that one.) They had started a song called “The Girl Who Passes By,” which would involve having the Martian observe a beautiful girl swaying down to the beach, but they couldn’t seem to finish it. Then they remembered Hélo, changed the name to its current one, finished the lyrics, and had a huge hit on their hands. I don’t know that I find this version of the story any more believable than the bar-napkin one, but the common denominator in both stories is this real girl. (So, is the “he” in the song the Martian? I guess that was the original intent. Gives a whole new slant on it, no?) For awhile, she was as well known in Brazil as the soccer star Pelé, but she had a hard time settling down in a career. In 2001 she opened a boutique in Rio called “The Girl from Ipanema” and was sued by the heirs of Jobim and de Moraes. After a court battle she was allowed to keep the name. Seems only fair.
In 1963 Jobim was in New York City to make a recording with singer João Gilberto and saxophonist Stan Getz. They wanted to make an English version, but the only person who knew the language beyond a few phrases was the singer’s wife, Astrud. So they got her to sing it. To quote from a website called performingsongwriter.com, her “child-like vocal, devoid of vibrato and singerly mannerisms” served the song well, so well, in fact, that by the next year it had blown past the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the charts and ended up selling over two million copies. It became the second-most recorded popular song in history, outdone only by another Beatles’ song, “Yesterday.” I’m posting the link to the video below. To me, the word “expressionless” fits Astrud’s performance; I think that this may be a situation in which seeing the performer detracts from the performance itself.
My choir’s original concert in October 2015 also included a parody of this song, “The Boy from Tacarembo la Tumbe del Fuego Santa Malipas Zacatecas la Junta del Sol y Cruz” by Stephen Sondheim and Mary Rodgers. I hafta say, our performer did a better job. But maybe I’m prejudiced.
© Debi Simons
