Getz / Gilberto #2 - Stan Getz

The enormous success of Getz/Gilberto—“The Girl from Ipanema” nearly defined the world’s image of Brazilian music—made a sequel difficult. The first album had João Gilberto’s guitar, Astrud Gilberto’s unexpected English vocals, and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s piano and compositions. The second has no Astrud and no Jobim at the piano, though the songs are still his. João Gilberto takes the lead vocal, singing softly in Portuguese.

The listening experience is entirely different from the first album. If the original is a sunlit Rio beach, the sequel is a small bar after midnight. João’s voice is itself an instrument: it rarely leaves the middle and lower registers, and each syllable lands precisely in the spaces of the guitar rhythm, like water soaking into sand. Without Astrud’s innocent English pronunciation acting as a kind of “translation,” you have to let go of understanding the lyrics and feel the texture of the language itself. The music becomes more abstract and immersive.

Stan Getz is also more relaxed here. With the success of the first album behind him, he no longer needs to be deliberately “beautiful.” His tenor tone remains as smooth as velvet, but his solos take more risks, occasionally testing dissonance at the edge of the melody, as if probing how far bossa nova could be pushed.

The tragedy of Getz/Gilberto #2 is that it will always live in the first album’s shadow. It sold far less and received a cooler critical response. But if you are willing to listen carefully late at night—with the lights off and nothing else going on—you may find it more rewarding over time. It has less of the sweet pull of a pop hit and more of jazz’s hidden currents. João’s rare lightness on the final track, “O Pato,” is a breath of fresh air after the album’s heavier mood, and seems to say: We know we have made a difficult record, but that is all right.