Here, I can tell you the date (March 23, 1999) but otherwise I accidentally stumbled upon this live recording of Joâo (read almost “shoàn”) Gilberto (“shil-bertu”) and Caetàno Velóso, in Buenos Aires. Some folks expected Caetano to introduce Joâo by singing “better than this/only silence/better than silence/only Joâo” to a thunderous applause.

 

Instead, on that evening, I'm quoting the Argentine critic Diego Fischermann (www.pagina12.com) here, the ritual of the concert made sure “that silence took over this moment, that the tepid, very timid applause - as if not to break a climate that seemed almost to have more value than anything else - were swallowed up like light by black holes”.

 

Joâo cries when he hears Caetano sing next to him, sitting with his hands clasped and his forehead sometimes furrowed, Chega de Saudade (“enough with sadness”), the immortal popular love song, and who doesn’t cry with him?

 

Here we hear the popular wisdom commenting over the lover a-far from his loved one and the pleasure of seeing her again (“ah if she came back what a beautiful thing, what a crazy thing: because there are fewer little fish in the ocean than kisses I would give her on her mouth, in my arms.”)

 

Above all, as Fischermann says, there is silence. Which is the secret of the true musician: of Frank Sinatra, of his emulator (in the timing of his phrasing) Miles Davis, and that foxy John Cage erected as a monument to the “end of music”. But everyone knows that, without silence, there would be no music but cacophony and Churrigueresque horror vacui.

 

The strings of João's guitar, gently cradled by 68-year old nails, occasionally jump in syncopation and create with small brush strokes a soundscape in which each of the two sings in the way it was done in the ancient times: without amplifiers, or electric plugs; two voices that complement each other seamlessly, and yet, in their strong similarity, proudly indicate the origins of their respective genes and psyches.