A Review of Bossa Nova, U.S.A.
Walking in the collegial warmth of Virginian Indian summer, so heavy here in Roanoke as to be reminiscent of this year’s lost county fair and escaped from only in the cool, damp alleys, reminds me of another eternal summer. I mean the Dave Brubeck Quartet's Bossa Nova, U.S.A., of course.
While a little shorter than Jazz at the College of the Pacific, the album boasts four more songs and is less episodic, all blending together in an adventure. Panned as pedestrian at the time, I praise it for the same reason: it is very much a song about walking around the town that I met in it.
Bossa Nova U.S.A.'s titular song is waking up in San Francisco on a summer’s Saturday morning, distilled to two-minute perfection, even to the point of ending to soon. If you wake up early enough, San Francisco is drowsily silent, something Los Angeles cannot achieve; but sleeping in slightly means you lift your eyelids to the tattoo of a cable car and light traffic shunting up the hills; the rhythmic throb of a foghorn, or in this song’s case, Eugene Wright on bass. The song pushes you out onto the street; despite the churn of fog overhead the stucco of art deco buildings is clear and lively and Union Square is bustling with the usual suspects; tourists, shoppers, creative panhandlers, monolithic security men in front of the monolithic Apple store; high above, the Star Room disappears into the receding fog. Somewhere overhead, the sun is acting on the Pacific cloud but it is putting up a fight.
Every morning in San Francisco has that sudden moment of fatigue, usually when the sun punches a hole in the fog and in the distance you can see the San Mateo Bridge golden with sun and know that beyond those San Leandro Hills, it is upwards of ninety; here, you button up your sweater. “Vento Fresco” (aptly, "Cool Wind") captures this moment perfectly. The inertia from the morning subsides; the stucco of the all the buildings seem out of place in what feels like a northern climate; you feel out of place in what is a mecca of talent and highly-paid programmers. Many nouveaux riche in San Francisco do not attempt too hard to belong, but I think it is this moment where even those trying hard feel a bit like impostors. The song is consolatory, but not reassuring. The mood will pass.
“The Trolley Song” may be Julie Garland property, but here Brubeck and Desmond are one of those renters who, by love, have developed an equal claim to the place (a common occurrence in San Francisco). When Joe Morello lets loose on the top hat and snare, it's as good an escape from the blues of “Vento Fresco” as a cable car is from the tent-riddled and luxury-store-infested offshoots of Union Square: up Nob Hill and around several corners, beneath leafy green trees as the sun pushes the fog back for a day. San Francisco will forever be responsible for my bias against most public transportation: if it is not possible to hang off the side, I want no part of it. As quickly as it begins in a burst of thrill, it is over.
“Theme for June” was intended for a lady of that name, no doubt, but it is a good summary of an idle summer day in San Francisco. A bit less doleful than “Vento Fresco,” it is almost inquisitory; the sort of introspection induced by the Bay Area's almost excessively abundant greenery, when you are not distracted by cellphones. Despite the dense population, there are reliably small parks tucked away along the streets where you may reliably go to be alone in this mood. The bums mill about in the warmth of the just-arrived sun. Panhandlers and destitute in San Francisco straddle the line between pathos and bathos, but one’s sympathy mounts comparing them to the trim young adults walking by, discussing their Pelotonias. You learn to pretend to ignore them, but can never ignore them. They are inextricably part of the scenery, as they have been in all great cities.
“Coração Sensivel” continues the introspection, a bit more upbeat, though — there is less distraction from nature, in this one, like walking down from Russian Hill into the worldly diversions of Polk Gulch or Cow Hollow. There is always something delightful cooking in these streets, but for some reason the one smell that dominates the senses is beer from the night before — a heady, barley malt-memory well-known to servers and waiters. One of those chief instances of where a smell is enough; you can continue walking without stopping in for a pint. San Francisco is still a poor man's town — with the Pacific wind dining and dashing through a hundred open doors and windows, you may eat a dozen meals for free.
“Irmão Amigo” is an impish song, if imps can be good. In San Francisco, especially, there is this urge that comes over you often to be terribly clever, somehow, and it has resulted in most of the startups you see today. It also results in taking electric trams to the end of their routes, buying a round of beers to consume in Dolores and possibly buying some of the suspicious, fluorescent cocktails sold by a man from a red wagon because, as the song seems to ask, “why not?”
That is a dangerous question in San Francisco.
“There'll Be No Tomorrow” reminds me of downtown, where some investors and venture capitalists tended to act, pre-COVID, as if that were the case. I spent little time downtown, despite working there; San Francisco’s downtown is interesting, and storied, and colored, but there are so many other neighborhoods who cannot help be more interesting than suits and fleece jackets with the Twitch logo on them. You can look down any street, and like the piano cascades at the end of “Tomorrow” you are reminded of distant worlds you can get to in a half-hour’s walk: Little Italy, Telegraph Hill, Nob Hill, the Castro — hell, even the Tenderloin (I repeat myself there, though). Downtown is a good place to work, essential for the city's being, but it is not the city’s raison d’être.
“Cantiga Nova Swing” brings the album back to life, and it's the feeling you get leaving downtown, too. Many have faulted this album as flat imitation of Brazillian bossa nova for not featuring the ubiquitous wood block (which would make for a good modern band name); this song is often cited as the worst offender, with a driving staccato that feels like sixties Pontiac commercial. But Joe Morello’s subtle skill is that he can utilize the drums to their fullest without being loud, and it gives this song the fresh lightness required to pass as bossa nova. Not unlike San Francisco's tendency to never do anything the proper way; a cold town in a warm region, a progressive epicenter with more tightly-held history than most Republican county parties, a tech center with cable cars. It works, and well at that.
“Lamento” is not the doleful song it pretends to be. Halfway through, when its spell is nearly complete, it grows playful: it is the song of an early fog; softly approaching, then suddenly ensconcing the city when it is not yet ready to go to bed (sometimes as early as three in the afternoon). It may be high heat in the Central Valley, but suddenly drinks by the fireside at Zeke's seems an impossibly good idea, and you feel young for having this much energy this late in the evening (it is, of course, only five). Unexpected youth — that, too, is San Francisco.
“This Can’t Be Love,” in classic Brubeckian humor, starts off just like “Bossa Nova U.S.A.” and you fear a simple reprise. But no, this song's sachet towards a burst of Desmond, as unexpected as a rocket launch might have been in the sixties, is a fitting farewell. It captures the wondrous incongruity of San Francisco, the suddeness of a green peninsula among the mountains and the wide waters, the vaulting Golden Gate towers from the primordial inlet, the chances and hopes that swirl about the world but seem to collect here. You turn a corner to find a neon sign for a sushi bar in an otherwise quiet neighborhood, read long-forgotten yard sale advertisements at the laundromat, gravitate like a moth towards the neon signs of ice cream parlors and dive bars, watch the fog scrape the tops of hilltop trees illuminated in orange lamplight. To satisfy many artists, San Francisco must be many things.
And for one writer, San Francisco was love.
