Astrud Gilberto, the singer synonymous with “The Girl From Ipanema,” grew up in Brazil and traveled the world as an ambassador of the gently intoxicating bossa sound created by her first husband, João Gilberto.
But when she died on June 5, Gilberto, 83, was far from her native country. She was at home in the Society Hill Towers in Old City, where her son Gregory Lasorsa said she died of what is believed to be a heart attack.
The rumors, it turned out, were true: Since 1999, Gilberto had been quietly living in her 14th floor apartment with a view of the Delaware River. The internationally renowned artist had given up stardom to live anonymously in a city where she had a history reaching back nearly six decades.
An air of mystery surrounded stories of Gilberto possibly living in Philadelphia for decades. Was she seen at the Reading Terminal Market? At Rustic Music in Center City?
At the Society Hill Towers, even longtime residents were uncertain if the singer was their neighbor. A few said they had heard she lived in one of the trio of high-rise apartment buildings, but knew little else.
That was the way Gilberto wanted it, said Terrance Knighton, the apartment complex’s head of security. Gilberto was deeply private and made few connections.
She was friendly, said Knighton, unless someone was rude to her. He spoke to her about her career as a musician only once. “Somebody had mentioned who she was so I had Googled her.” He asked her about it.
Her life as a singer, she replied, “was a long time ago.”
‘The wife who sings’
Astrud Gilberto wasn’t actually from Ipanema, the sun soaked beach in Rio de Janeiro. She was born Astrud Evangelina Weinert in the Brazilian state of Bahia to a German father, a languages professor, and a Brazilian mother, also an educator, who played several instruments.
The family later moved to Copacabana Beach in Rio, where she joined a vibrant community of musicians and writers, including singers Nara Leão and João Gilberto, whom she married in 1959.
In 1963 she accompanied her husband to a New York recording date with Philadelphia-born jazz sax player Stan Getz that became the stuff of legend.
Getz and producer Creed Taylor saw commercial potential in an English-language version of a song whose Portuguese title was “Garota de Ipanema.”
Astrud Gilberto — fluent in Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish and English as well as Portuguese — sang in English, in an impromptu performance that was her first ever professional recording.
“I made that record in the capacity of the wife who sings,” Gilberto told The Inquirer in 1989. “My husband would say, ‘See, my wife sings nice.’ I would sing around the house and for friends, but I never thought about doing it professionally.”
“The Girl From Ipanema” was sweetness and light, innocence and longing, sung by a singer whose whispery, unaffected vocals fueled a bossa nova craze.
The single sold a million copies in a year, and an estimated 27 million in decades that followed. “Getz/Gilberto” became the first jazz LP to win an album of the year Grammy.
But because she wasn’t a songwriter or arranger — and wasn’t credited on the album at all — Gilberto’s pay for the song was the going rate for one night of studio work: $120.
What “The Girl From Ipanema” did give Gilberto, however, was a career. And it would soon lead her to Philadelphia.
A House in Penn Valley
In 1964, she starred as herself in the movies “Get Yourself a College Girl” and “The Hanged Man.” Divorced and a single mother to her son Marcelo a year later, she released “The Astrud Gilberto Album,” the first of 16 under her own name.
That September, she made her Philadelphia debut, fronting a quintet at The Showboat, Herb Spivak’s jazz venue at Broad and Lombard Streets that had been a tour stop for Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis.
Philadelphia Daily News critic Nels Nelson praised Gilberto as “A Songstress Who Soothes The House” who calms “the savage drinker and instantly converts a noisy oasis into a starch and ruffles recital hall.”
During her Showboat stand, Gilberto met Nick Lasorsa, a widowed bar owner of the King Coal Tavern on 40th and Poplar Streets.
A record promoter friend brought him to the Showboat to see Gilberto over his objections: “I don’t care for the way this broad sings,” he told his pal.
Lasorsa learned to like it, and Gilberto liked “that he didn’t try to impress me,” she told Nelson. “He was himself.”
On their first date with young Marcelo in tow, they went to the South Philly’s Aquarama, the “theater of the sea” home to pilot whales, trained porpoises and dance parties featuring a DJ named Jerry “The Geator” Blavat.
The couple married in 1966 and moved into a house on Sandringham Road in Penn Valley that Gilberto purchased. She performed at the Quaker City Jazz Festival in 1967, the first event ever at the Spectrum, billed as Astrude Gilberto.
The liner notes to her 1968 album “Windy” read: “Astrud Gilberto will always be the girl from Ipanema, aloof, alluring, and unattainable in the mind’s eye. But she is also the girl from Philadelphia now — tall and tan and young and lovely and a sublimely happy suburban housewife.”
Her son Greg Lasorsa was born in 1968 and grew up on the Main Line. This week he described his mother as an ardent animal rights supporter. The family menagerie in Penn Valley included “a dog, several cats, a monkey, and a sheep.”
The family moved all over Lower Merion Township in the 1970s, living in Ardmore, Wynnewood, and Merion, while often traveling to Europe and Japan.
“She would play these wonderful jazz festivals,” he told The Inquirer. “I got to meet so many famous people, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis.”
Gilberto played Philly’s Bijou Cafe in the mid-1970s. Promoter Larry Magid remembers “she went over very well. She was very sweet, but quiet.”
But she also started finding her voice offstage as she realized she wasn’t getting appropriate payment or credit for her work.
Gilberto called it her “Americanization.”
“I declared my independence,” she told the New York Times in 1981. “It was a painful process and it eventually led to my separation from my husband … We had become more incompatible because I had become more assertive.”
In the 1980s, as her marriage ended, she bought an apartment in the West Village in Manhattan, living what she called “my third life.”
Her final shows in the city were at the Hershey Hotel on South Broad Street in 1989 and 1990. In 1996, she recorded Jobim’s “Desafinado” with George Michael for the “Red Hot + Rio” album to raise money for AIDS organizations.
That year, a TV ad for Baked Lay’s potato chips featured supermodels poolside with “The Muppets’” Miss Piggy while “The Girl From Ipanema” played.
Gilberto took legal action — using the name Astrud Oliveira, which was her mother’s maiden name, Lasorsa says. She asked for compensation for use of her “signature song.” The court found against her.
A private, empathetic person
In 1999, she moved back to Philadelphia, “basically to be near me,” said Lasorsa, a musician who lives in the city.
His brother Marcelo was nearby in New Jersey. Without a driver’s license, getting back and forth between Philly and New York had become onerous.
Two years later, Gilberto recorded her final album, “Jungle,” at Indre Studios in South Philadelphia.
Guitarist Paul Ricci, who broke the news of Gilberto’s death at the request of her son Marcelo, says the singer never received proper credit for her musicality. The two played together backing her up in the 1990s.
“She had a very sophisticated sense of time. She was groundbreaking in that she did not use vibrato. When she was on, it was magical. It was some of the most beautiful singing I’ve heard.”
Gilberto, he says, was uncomfortable with stardom. “I remember she once said to me about singing, ‘I’d rather be home vacuuming,’” said Ricci, speaking from Italy. “But she was always excited to hear new things … She was a real musical soul.”
Gilberto produced “Jungle” with guitarist Marc Lambert. “She knew what she wanted, and she was great with the band,” says Bodgan Hernik, an engineer on the project.
Lambert told him that Gilberto had a history of stage fright, and she routinely turned down offers to perform for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
She was “a very private person,” Hernik says. “And she also struck me as a person with a lot of empathy.”
When Hernik’s mother died, Gilberto wrote him a lengthy, moving note. “It seemed like she cared a lot,” he said. “And she wasn’t getting that care in return.”
The “Jungle” session also coincided with a rare Gilberto venture out, when she went to Fergie’s Pub in Center City to see Greg Lasorsa’s rock band Redmond perform.
As “Jungle” came to a close, Mike Thatcher got a call from a friend at Indre “to say Astrud Gilberto is living in Philly and making an album.
Thatcher had co-owned Philly’s Sonic Studios and produced sessions for radio station Y100 for Courtney Love, Alanis Morissette, Dave Matthews. “But with [Gilberto] I was starstruck,” he said. “This way my idol.”
“My grandmother played me her music, and I wound up going to Temple University to study jazz because of it. I was completely enamored with this gorgeous-sounding stuff.”
He showed up with a “stupidly large bouquet of roses.” They struck up a conversation and a friendship, exchanging emails and talking on the phone. “She was just like a nice older lady, like your cool aunt.”
She talked about current musicians she liked, such as Michael Franks, who’d teamed with Gilberto on her song “Beautiful You,” with her son Lasorsa on guitar. Shared plans to see Philly jazz legends like Mickey Roker and Shirley Scott at Ortlieb’s Jazzhaus in Northern Liberties never materialized.
“Jungle” was released through Gilberto’s website in the United States, and also in Japan, where “Temperance,” recorded in 1997, was also released. Lasorsa says he and his brother will make the music on the albums widely available, as well as unreleased songs.
After “Jungle,” Lasorsa says his mother was happy to withdraw from the music business.
“It was a conscious decision,” he said. “She got tired of the traveling.”
A 2022 story in the British newspaper The Independent depicted Gilberto as a lonely recluse, living with her cats. Her son found that unduly harsh.
“That was a very ugly portrayal,” he said. “She wasn’t lonely. She did have a cat,” he said. “But she never had more than two at a time.”
Gilberto wasn’t bitter, Lasorsa says. She still loved — and made — music.
“I gave her a little digital recorder so when she had ideas she could sing them into the recorder. And she would still sing around the apartment.” She also painted and made mixed media art. Some is on display at AstrudGilberto.com.
But her days of putting on a show were over.
“My mother was a caring, loving, easygoing person,” Lasorsa said. “But once she stopped being an artist, she never wanted to be in the public eye again. She didn’t want to be Astrud Gilberto anymore.”
No public funeral service or celebration of life is planned, but mourners can pay tribute at rachubinskiandrogersfh.com. The “Girl From Ipanema” singer is listed as Astrud Oliveira.
___
© 2023 The Philadelphia Inquirer
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
