Astrud (& Gil)

By the time Astrud Gilberto got to sing with Gil Evans, the great arranger had slowed his pace of working. Eventually he would take as long to compose eight bars as some writers took to complete a symphony, but in 1965 he was still able to write 11 arrangements to order for the singer who had shot to unexpected, almost accidental fame with “The Girl from Ipanema” alongside Stan Getz the previous year.

Those 11 pieces, however, amounted to less than 25 minutes of music — enough for one side of a 12-inch LP. Creed Taylor, supervising the album for Verve Records, knew all about Gil’s working habits, having produced two of his classics, Out of the Cool in 1961 and Individualism in 1964. Probably in desperation, he hired the reliable Al Cohn to arrange two more songs which padded the album out to a total of 32 minutes: 15 minutes on one side, 17 on the other, barely respectable.

But you don’t weight the value of Evans’s music with a set of scales, and there were sublime moments on the album, titled Look to the Rainbow and released in 1966. The opening track, “Berimbau”, featured Dom Um Romao — later to join Weather Report — on the eponymous single-string percussion instrument. “Once Upon a Summertime” is a gorgeous ballad that Evans had arranged for Miles Davis on the Quiet Nights album three years earlier (another LP that had to be bulked out, this time with a six-minute quintet track). “A Felicidade” has Evans finding subtle colours to accompany Tom Jobim’s song: listen to the opening unisons and momentary dissonances in the writing for brass and woodwind, and wonder at the combinations. And “I Will Wait For You” is the diaphanous highlight: Evans in excelsis, featuring one of those moments in which he prepared the ground with exquisite care for an incoming improviser, in this case the trumpeter Johnny Coles, one of his favourite soloists.

Astrud wasn’t a great singer, or even a good one in a technical sense; what she had was a presence that transferred itself to tape, apparent to everyone who heard “The Girl from Ipanema” for the first time in 1964, cherishing its evocation of a certain sun-splashed insouciance that suited the times.

When I heard the news today of her death at the age of 83, I thought immediately of my friend George Taylor, who died a couple of years ago. It was George who bought “The Girl from Ipanema” and The Astrud Gilberto Album when they were brand-new, for us to listen to with our girlfriends on warm summer evenings.

* You can get an expanded CD of Look to the Rainbow on Amazon for practically nothing these days. If anyone knows who took the lovely portrait above, I’d be grateful for the information.