Astrud Gilberto, 83, Dies; Shot to Fame With ‘The Girl From Ipanema’

Astrud Gilberto (1940 Salvador de Bahia, Brazil - Philadelphia PA 2023) whose soft and sexy vocal performance on “The Girl From Ipanema,” the first song she ever recorded, helped make the sway of Brazilian bossa nova a hit sound in the United States in the 1960s, died on Monday. She was 83. The Girl from Ipanema was the first song she ever recorded. And it played a key role in making the Brazilian sound known as bossa nova a phenomenon in the United States. Ms. Gilberto enjoyed a four-decade recording career, cutting albums with celebrated musicians like Gil Evans, Stanley Turrentine and James Last as well as working with George Michael and others. But her biggest success came with “The Girl From Ipanema,” written by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, with English lyrics by Norman Gimbel, which she sang on record with the American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz. When Ms. Gilberto recorded that song, she was married to João Gilberto, the Brazilian singer and guitarist often referred to as the father of the bossa nova. In 1963, the two of them traveled from Rio de Janeiro to New York City, where he was set to record a joint album with Mr. Getz, who had already released three albums that mixed jazz with samba and bossa nova.“The Girl From Ipanema” became one of the most-covered songs in pop music history. It has been featured in more than 50 films, many of them using the original Getz-Gilberto version. Astrud Evangelina Weinert was born on March 29, 1940, in Bahia, Brazil, to a German father, Fritz Weinert, a language professor, and a Brazilian mother, Evangelina Weinert, who was also an educator. When Astrud was a girl, her family moved to Rio. There, during her teenage years, she befriended a group of young musicians who later became celebrated in Brazil, among them the singer Nara Leão and the songwriter Roberto Menescal. She met Mr. Gilberto when she was 19, and they married several months later.