Joao Gilberto Whispers to Ants, Invents New Musical Genre -- Twisted Tales

Every time the maids cleaned up the tangerine peels stashed beneath the young musician's hotel bed, they found more the next day. João Gilberto eventually explained that he put them there to attract ants -- to keep him company.

As a young man in Brazil, Gilberto had a unusual way of looking at the world. A rising singing star in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1950s, he dropped out of a fertile music scene and went into self-imposed exile, returning to introduce a new style of music called bossa nova -- Portuguese for "the new thing."

The odd-duck Gilberto, who will play a rare date at Boston's Symphony Hall in June, is the Zelig of bossa nova, the gently rhythmic style of music that caused a revolutionary uproar in its day. His first wife, Astrud Gilberto, though she wasn't yet a professional singer, recorded 'The Girl From Ipanema,' the international smash that made bossa nova the tongue-in-cheek soundtrack for 'Austin Powers'-style jet-setting.

That track was on 'Getz/Gilberto,' the breakthrough album that featured João and jazz saxophonist Stan Getz. When Getz and Astrud had an affair, João left his wife and married Miucha Buarque, sister of Chico Buarque, both future Brazilian singing stars. Gilberto's daughter with Miucha, Bebel Gilberto, is one of bossa nova's key torch-bearers today. At age 9, she performed at Carnegie Hall with Getz, her stepmother's onetime lover.

Amid all this commotion, 78-year-old João Gilberto, often called "the Father of Bossa Nova," has remained uniquely imperturbable. Gilberto "simply is music," Maria Bethânia, sister of another Brazilian legend, Caetano Veloso, once said. "He plays. He sings. Without stopping. Day and night."

Infamous for stopping in mid-song and walking out of his rare concert appearances over bad acoustics or loud audience members, Gilberto reduced the percussive samba beat to a whispery, harmonically complex brand of music. As a young man, he roamed through Rio for days on end in wrinkled clothes, his hair down to his shoulders at a time – the 1950s – when men didn't wear long hair. After debuting in a singing group called Garotas da Lua (Moon Boys), he began refusing work, declining to record what he considered "jingles" as he searched for an elusive new style he knew he could find.

Couch-surfing from one friend's apartment to another, Gilberto developed a reputation as a pothead. As recounted in Ruy Castro's book 'Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World,' friends called him "Reefer Joe." (Later, he swore off the drug, leading an ascetic lifestyle.) After developing a devoted following in the city of Porto Alegre, he spent almost a year living with his sister's family, spending days in his pajamas as he explored the acoustic properties of the family's bathroom.

Like every generation gap since, Gilberto's new direction sounded wrong to his father, who pronounced it "not music" and called it "nyah nyah nyah-nyah nyah." When Gilberto recorded his first single, a salesman for his record company smashed the disc.

But Gilberto's quiet music soon became a rage in Rio. Along with Antônio Carlos Jobim and a few others, he soon introduced it to American audiences. By the mid-1960s, bossa nova was an international craze, with artists from Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald to Sergio Mendes investing in it. The eccentric Gilberto was soon considered a hero to Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and other founding members of the Tropicalia movement, which combined Brazilian music with Beatlesque psychedelic pop and rock.

Still a kind of Zen master, João Gilberto's eccentricity might be best summarized in a story about one of his beloved cats. While rehearsing in a recording studio early in his carer, he got a call from Astrud saying the cat had fallen out a window. Gilberto bolted the session and rushed the cat to a veterinary hospital in a cab, but it was too late. In his absence, his fellow musicians joked that the cat must have committed suicide after listening to the singer practice his latest song countless times.