{"id":1818,"date":"2011-01-16T00:43:22","date_gmt":"2011-01-16T05:43:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1818"},"modified":"2015-09-25T20:15:03","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T00:15:03","slug":"samba-do-aviao","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1818","title":{"rendered":"Stereo!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u00a0Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0| Next Theme Song<\/a><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

Stereo!<\/h2>\n
\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n
\n

Samba Do Avi\u00e3o, by Antonio Carlos Jobim 1965, Encountered 1965<\/h3>\n

See it here<\/a>[1]\u00a0 | Buy it here<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When it came to technology, my two sets of parents could not have been further apart.<\/p>\n

My mom and stepfather resisted each advance in consumer electronics.\u00a0 Television, as I\u2019ve written, was kept out of the house until 1964, and then only was allowed in because my father\u2019s grandmother had died and left her set behind.\u00a0 They insisted on telephone operators making their long distance connections for them for as long as that was a viable option, and one of the first skills my mom lost later on when dementia set in was dialing the phone (I think because it called for 10 digits as opposed to the six or seven that had prevailed earlier in her life).\u00a0 They never mastered the VCR I gave them or the microwave.\u00a0 Though each wielded the typewriter a lot, there was never an electric typewriter in the house, let alone a PC (and each lived over a decade after PCs became commonplace, my mother more than two).<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Stereo!<\/h3>\n

My father, by contrast, loved gadgets, especially gadgets connected with music reproduction.\u00a0 In his mountain getaway cottage, there was a trestle table with nothing but hi-fi, or as we came to call it, stereo gear: turntables, tape recorders, amps, pre-amps, tuners, speakers, headphones, all patched together in unique ways.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t always a success from an audio reproduction standpoint, and was never ever very sightly, but my stepmother did not mind, bless her.\u00a0 One of my real regrets about losing him so early (1978) was that he didn\u2019t live to see the dawn of the really good gadgets.\u00a0 Of course he would have been about 90 year old when iPods arrived, 100 years old when Blu-Ray came in, so if he had lived that long, who knows if he would have kept his zest for mechanical novelty late enough in life to enjoy them.<\/p>\n

But in the times I\u2019m speaking of now, he was the guy who opened the wonderful world of sound-making gadgets to me.\u00a0 Somewhere around 1964, probably for my birthday, he provided me some entry-level but serious hi-fi gizmos.\u00a0 I\u2019ve tried to provide pictures that approximate these treasures, though images of the precise models elude me on the Net.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\u00a0[2]\u00a0 This setup was my pride and joy.<\/p>\n

Now you\u2019ll note that in the endnote above describing all this, I mention only a single speaker.\u00a0 I think that one was all my dad could spring for at that time.\u00a0 So though it was definitely the most sophisticated rig in my mom and dad\u2019s household, it remained mono for a while.\u00a0 I knew that stereo was supposed to be way better, but I couldn\u2019t just go out and buy a quality speaker.\u00a0 If I wanted one, I had to save up for it.\u00a0 And I think I put money away for a year.\u00a0 I believe it was shortly after my 16th<\/sup> birthday in the summer of 1965 that I had the necessary coin gathered together.\u00a0 I went out to a store called Schochet\u2019s (I think), put down my money on a companion speaker, and waited a week or so for delivery.<\/p>\n

Eventually, I got the second speaker home, hooked it up with the heavy-gauge transparent wire, flipped the switch on the amp from mono to stereo, and cued up my first stereo record.\u00a0 And that, I believe, was The Wonderful World of Antonio Carlos Jobim<\/em>.\u00a0 As readers of these pieces know, I was all about discovering rock right then, so an album of bossa nova might have seemed like an odd choice.\u00a0 But I was always a musical omnivore, and bossa nova, not to mention Jobim, was all over everyone\u2019s radar screen[3] after The Girl From Ipanema<\/em><\/a>[4] had become the Grammy Record of the Year in 1964.\u00a0 And I think I was also aware that the acoustic impact of an album like this was likely going to be greater than that of a collection of rock music.\u00a0 I probably didn\u2019t recognize the name of the arranger and conductor, the great Nelson Riddle, whose name would have clued me in, but I believe I\u2019d heard (probably read in Stereo Review<\/em>, which I\u2019d begun subscribing to) that the sound of the album was gorgeous.<\/p>\n

So there I was, tone arm posed over the black vinyl with the gold Warner Bros. label in the middle, with \u201cSTEREO\u201d written in an arc across the bottom in big red letters.\u00a0 The needle dropped, and I was transported.\u00a0 When I closed my eyes, I was in a different aural space, floating out there somewhere with the strings.\u00a0 It sounded as if Jobim was singing and strumming his guitar up close to you, with a chorus of growling trombones behind him in the middle distance, percussion to the left, piano to the right, while strings encamped all the way out to the luminous horizon.<\/p>\n

Damn!\u00a0 This was stereo!<\/p>\n

I just kept playing it.\u00a0 I\u2019d keep coming back to those two speakers and the fact that I could close my eyes and lose myself in an imaginary space.\u00a0 I was so taken with the sound that the music almost didn\u2019t matter to me for a while.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Faraway Lands<\/h3>\n

Of course eventually I stopped listening to the sound and started paying attention to the record.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure I found the music overwhelming.\u00a0 I think the effect was subtle, like the very sound of the bossa nova itself.\u00a0 Still that rich Nelson Riddle orchestral palette (the trademark, for instance, of some of the great Frank Sinatra albums of the late 50s and early 60s) elucidated part of the truth about bossa nova, which is that, while it may be quiet and subtle, it\u2019s often about passion and excitement.\u00a0 It\u2019s not just in the breathless frustrated eroticism of The Girl From Ipanema<\/em> that appears in this album, a song which everyone knows is about the habitu\u00e9s of a seaside bar watching a passing 15-year old girl with hopeless and slightly inappropriate lust<\/a>.\u00a0 On this very album you can hear Surfboard<\/a><\/em>, which somehow captures the thrill of waiting for and then riding a wave.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s Samba Do Avi\u00e3o, which is about riding a plane coming in for a landing at Rio de Janeiro\u2019s\u00a0Gale\u00e3o Airport, and looking down at the town as one goes.<\/a> \u00a0(Not coincidentally, I\u2019m sure,\u00a0 Gale\u00e3o is now called Antonio Carlos Jobim<\/a>.)\u00a0 And maybe a word needs to be said about exactly why this is so exciting<\/p>\n

Avi\u00e3o is just Portuguese for airplane.\u00a0 But this was an era in which airplanes were conjuring up new feelings.\u00a0 Take a look at the TWA-branded cover of Come Fly With Me<\/em>, Sinatra\u2019s 1957 smash album (well, recorded in 1957, released in 1958).\u00a0 Notice something odd to modern eyes about the aircraft?\u00a0 They were prop-driven.\u00a0 Yet in the iconography of that cover, these old-timey planes are the \"\"<\/a>magic carpets to carry the lucky listener to all the destinations Sinatra sings about: New York, Paris, Capri, Brazil, Hawaii, etc.[5]\u00a0 1957 was also the year the Boeing 707 was first licensed for commercial flight.\u00a0 And people my age will recall that the 707, followed shortly by the DC-8, changed everything, glamorized everything, about air travel.<\/a>\u00a0 By 1965, a song about taking off in an airplane (all right, this <\/em>song is about coming in for a landing, but I didn\u2019t know that) would have had the listener thinking about being thrust unaccustomedly back against the cushions, about plunging recklessly upward, about sexy stewardesses (sorry, \u201cflight attendant\u201d was a neologism years away), and about getting to interesting places ridiculously fast.\u00a0 Not to mention that the most glamorous folks in the world were called the Jet Set then.\u00a0 And this was all new.[6]<\/p>\n

Even if it weren\u2019t, it had the association of forbidden fruit for me.\u00a0 My Luddite mom and stepdad were deathly afraid of my flying.\u00a0 As a result, with but one exception (still in the prop craft era), all the comings and goings between my home in Ann Arbor and my home in New York were by car or rail.\u00a0 I had some wonderful rail and road experiences that way, but obviously the fact that my mom wouldn\u2019t let me made me all the eagerer to fly.\u00a0 And the song made it possible to do in my imagination, at least.<\/p>\n

So that song carried those associations for me.\u00a0 I\u2019d also seen That Man from Rio<\/a><\/em>, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Fran\u00e7oise Dorl\u00e9ac, twice, the previous year.\u00a0 So I knew what the statue of Cristo Redentor that the singer admires looked like, and about the staggering hills above Rio.\u00a0 I knew it was an exotic land well worth visiting.\u00a0 In short, I was a sitting duck for the way the song, even in a language I didn\u2019t grasp much of, [7] evoked its subject.<\/p>\n

So this was a part of my introduction to the stereophonic effect, to the sounds of bossa nova<\/em>, and to the lust for travel.\u00a0 And that\u2019s why it’s a Theme Song for me.<\/p>\n

\n

[1]\u00a0\u00a0 This is not the version on the album (Jobim shares the singing with others), but it gives you an excellent idea of the meaning of the song.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

[2]\u00a0 \u00a0At the heart there was a Bogen tube amp, which I believe was sold with or without a cover, and my dad opted for the without (probably as an economy measure), but that way I could see and marvel at the vacuum tubes, so I never minded.\u00a0 This amp included preamplification, so I never had a separate unit.\u00a0 The amp fed an AR-15 speaker in a heavy solid wood casing; Acoustic Research being the dominant quality speaker manufacturer of the day.\u00a0 Feeding signal into this assemblage was a 3-speed turntable, which I think was a Garrard, though I barely remember this item (and haven’t included a photograph), and a KLH FM-only tuner, although very little of interest to me was yet found on the FM band.\u00a0 The KLH was also encased in solid wood, and was just elegant to the eye.<\/p>\n

[3]\u00a0\u00a0 In terms of my radio station influences, I\u2019m guessing this one came by WJR rather than my rock stations, though I can\u2019t be sure about this, as the Top 40 format was pretty catholic in its breadth, extending as far as jazz, country, and folk at times.<\/p>\n

[4]\u00a0\u00a0 There\u2019s also an interesting black-and-white TV transcription of Astrud Gilberto singing and Stan Getz playing his unforgettable saxophone accompaniment here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[5]\u00a0\u00a0 Interestingly, an Amazon poster has shared a poster from the Sands Hotel of what must have been about the same era, that updates the image with a jet.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

[6]\u00a0\u00a0 WJR had an all-night program called Night Flight<\/em> (described by one listener as a \u201cclassics, light music, and light jazz show\u201d) that I frequently fell asleep listening to, described in various comments here<\/a> (see especially the remarks of Don Stoffel).\u00a0 \u00a0And I think that maybe some version of\u00a0Samba Do Avi\u00e3o was the theme; if not, then something along the same lines.\u00a0 The gimmick was that the commencement of the show would be the takeoff, and you\u2019d set course for somewhere, often somewhere exotic, and at the end of the show you\u2019d come in for a landing with airplane landing sounds.\u00a0 (Frequently those sounds would awaken me.)<\/p>\n

[7]\u00a0\u00a0 I don\u2019t claim I understood all the words in 1965.\u00a0 But I recognized a reference to the statue of Cristo Redentor, got it that the singer is looking down at Rio from above, and the only thing I actually got wrong was, as described above, that I thought the plane was taking off, not coming in for a landing.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn (except for photographic elements of the posting which may belong to others)<\/p>\n

\u00a0Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0| Next Theme Song<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Damn! This was stereo! I just kept playing it. I\u2019d keep coming back to those two speakers and the fact that I could close my eyes and lose myself in an imaginary space. I was so taken with the sound that the music almost didn\u2019t matter to me for a while. Eventually I stopped listening to the sound and started paying attention to the record. I\u2019m not sure I found the music overwhelming. I think the effect was subtle, like the very sound of the bossa nova itself. Still that rich Nelson Riddle orchestral palette elucidated part of the truth about bossa nova, which is that, while it may be quiet and subtle, it\u2019s often about passion and excitement. It\u2019s not just in the breathless frustrated eroticism of The Girl From Ipanema On this very album you can hear Surfboard, which somehow captures the thrill of waiting for and then riding a wave.And then there\u2019s Samba Do Avi\u00e3o, which is about riding a plane coming in for a landing at Rio de Janeiro\u2019s Gale\u00e3o Airport, and looking down at the town as one goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,968],"tags":[2070,2131,2119,2087,22,2068,2109,2130,2134,2071,2092,2117,2129,2105,1546,2115,2072,2128,2118,2076,2138,2080,2122,2127,1736,2108,2132,2095,2102,2116,2091,2083,1238,2126,2123,2133,2075,2124,2097,2113,2137,2114,2081,2088,2104,2082,2060,2112,2120,2107,2067,2136,2090,2135,2084,2096,2101,2121,2100,2106,2086,2074,2073,2125,2094,2093,2069,2111,2103,2089,2085,2110,2079,2077,2078,2098,2099,1946],"class_list":["post-1818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-2070","tag-acoustic-research","tag-air-travel","tag-amplifiers","tag-ann-arbor","tag-antonio-carlos-jobim","tag-antonio-carlos-jobim-airport","tag-ar-15-speakers","tag-astrud-gilberto","tag-audio-technology","tag-blu-ray","tag-boeing-707","tag-bogen-amplifiers","tag-bossa-nova","tag-brazil","tag-capri","tag-consumer-electronics","tag-cristo-redentor","tag-dc-8","tag-dementia","tag-don-stoffel","tag-electric-typewriter","tag-flight-attendants","tag-francoise-dorleac","tag-frank-sinatra","tag-galeao-airport","tag-garrard-turntables","tag-grammy-record-of-the-year","tag-guitar","tag-hawaii","tag-headphones","tag-hi-gi","tag-ipods","tag-jean-paul-belmondo","tag-jet-set","tag-klh-tuners","tag-long-distance-calls","tag-luddites","tag-nelson-riddle","tag-new-york","tag-night-flight","tag-paris","tag-pc","tag-per-amps","tag-percussion","tag-personal-comuter","tag-piano","tag-propeller-aircraft","tag-rail-travel","tag-rio-de-janeiro","tag-samba-do-aviao","tag-sands-hotel","tag-speakers","tag-stan-getz","tag-stereo","tag-stereo-review","tag-stereophonic-effect","tag-stewardesses","tag-string-instruments","tag-surfboard","tag-tape-recorders","tag-telephone-operators","tag-television","tag-that-man-from-rio","tag-the-girl-from-ipanema","tag-the-wonderful-world-of-antonio-carlos-jobim","tag-tom-jobim","tag-trans-world-airlines","tag-trombones","tag-tuners","tag-turntables","tag-twa","tag-typewriter","tag-vct","tag-videocassette-recorder","tag-warner-bros","tag-warner-brothers","tag-wjr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1818"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5472,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818\/revisions\/5472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}