I'd Heard Lisbon Before I Got There

Getz/Gilberto, Cesária Évora, and the places a record gives you before you arrive.

By Rafi Mercer

Six o'clock in the morning is the best time I know for listening. Coffee too hot to drink. A few quiet minutes before Oban (by dog and listening mate) wakes. Then out onto the field behind the house, where I stand still and wait to see what turns up.

I do this every day. I don't take a record with me, and I don't go looking for one. I just listen to whatever the morning is doing, and more often than not a record arrives on its own.

This morning the sky wasn't doing much. There was no big sunrise, just a thin strip of orange low on the horizon and everything else calm. That was enough. It was the kind of orange you can't shake once you've seen it, and by the time I was back at the door I knew what it was. Getz/Gilberto, on Verve.

If you know the record, you know the cover: warm blocks of colour, a painting by the Puerto Rican artist Olga Albizu. And you know the sound. João Gilberto sings in Portuguese, almost to himself. Astrud Gilberto follows in English, plainly, as if she's telling you something rather than performing it. Stan Getz says it all again on tenor without a single word, while Antônio Carlos Jobim's piano sits underneath, nodding along. Three voices tell one story. Nobody talks over anybody.

It's a record about Rio, and more precisely about the few streets back from the beach at Ipanema. Bossa nova grew up there in the late 1950s, in small apartments where voices were kept low. "The Girl from Ipanema" began at a bar called Veloso, a block from the sea, where Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes watched a girl walk past on her way to the beach.

But it wasn't made in Rio. It was recorded in a New York studio in March 1963. And still, every time I put it on, I'm somewhere warm and unhurried, somewhere people leave room for each other.

I've never been to Rio. Standing on the field this morning, with the orange already fading, I wondered whether the picture I carry of the place is worth anything. Can you really know a city from a record? Or is it just a postcard you've painted yourself?

I think you can know it. I know because it's happened to me once before.

Years ago I was buying jazz for Virgin in London. Records came through the buyers' office constantly. One of them stopped me. Cesária Évora, Miss Perfumado.

She was from Mindelo, a port town on the Cape Verde islands, off the coast of West Africa. She sang mornas, slow songs of longing in Cape Verdean Creole, and she had been singing them in her home town for decades before the rest of the world caught up. Miss Perfumado came out in 1992, when she was past fifty. She performed barefoot. Nothing about the record is in a hurry. It sounds like someone who waited a long time to be heard and sees no reason to rush now.

It stayed with me.

Not long after, I turned up in Lisbon to open the Virgin Megastore.

Anyone who worked with Richard Branson back then will tell you the same thing: you were never quite sure what was going to happen. For the Lisbon opening, he brought the Spice Girls in on a private jet, from New York if I remember rightly. The loudest pop group in the world, flown in for the opening of a record shop. That was just how it was with Richard.

Around all of that was the city itself. The people. The pace. The madness and the calmness, side by side, as if they'd agreed to share the place. And Miss Perfumado made total sense, every bit of it. I'd heard Lisbon before I ever got there. I just hadn't known that's what I was hearing.

The strange part is that it isn't a Lisbon record. Cape Verde is a long way south of Portugal. But the islands and the city are bound together by centuries of shared history. Cape Verde was Portuguese until independence in 1975, and a large Cape Verdean community has made its home in Lisbon. They share a feeling too, and very nearly the word for it. Cape Verdeans sing about sodade. The Portuguese call it saudade, and Thievery Corporation even named a record after it. It means a longing for something, or someone, you can't quite reach. One of the songs on Miss Perfumado is simply called "Sodade." Lisbon understood that record because the city already carried the same ache.

That's how Getz/Gilberto can be a Rio record made in a New York studio. The sound of a place doesn't stay put on the map. It travels with the people who make it: in how they sing, how fast they move, and how much room they leave each other. João carried Ipanema into a New York studio in his voice. Cesária carried Mindelo to Lisbon, and Lisbon recognised it. A record catches that and holds it. So someone in a buyers' office in London, or on a field in Yorkshire at six in the morning, can hear a place long before they see it.

Lisbon is why I trust the Rio I've built from Getz/Gilberto, even though I've never stood on that beach. When I do get there, I don't expect it to sound exactly like the record. I expect it to make sense.

Tomorrow there'll be coffee again, and the field, and Oban close behind. Maybe the orange will be there, maybe not. Either way, I'll stand still long enough to hear what turns up.

Who was Cesária Évora, and why does Miss Perfumado matter?

Cesária Évora was a singer from Mindelo, Cape Verde, best known for morna, the islands' slow, melancholy song form, sung in Cape Verdean Creole. Miss Perfumado (1992) was the record that carried her to international audiences when she was already in her fifties. It remains the best introduction to her voice and to Cape Verdean music generally.

What's the difference between sodade and saudade?

They are close cousins. Saudade is the Portuguese word for a deep longing for something or someone absent, often something that may never return. Sodade is the Cape Verdean Creole form, and it runs through morna the way saudade runs through fado. The shared feeling is one reason Cape Verdean music sits so naturally in Lisbon.

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