BEBEL GILBERTO

• Reduced mobility

João

Saudade and rhythm. Sweetness and dance. Texture and cadence. Legacy and the present. For Isabel Gilberto de Oliveira, each one is as important as the other. The daughter of João Gilberto and niece of Chico Buarque, she has been the queen of electronic bossa nova (but not only) for a little over two decades, ever since Tanto Tempo (2000), her third album, became one of the sensations of the year and launched her on a successful career that has seen her sell more than two million records and enjoy collaborations with artists such as Arto Lindsay, Thievery Corporation, David Byrne, Towa Tei, Caetano Veloso or Chico Buarque himself, not to mention remixes and productions by some of the leading sound engineers of recent decades, such as Marius De Vries, Mark Ronson or Mario Caldato Jr.

Paradoxically, what Bebel Gilberto had never done until now was an album of covers of her father’s compositions, and that is exactly what she does on her latest recording, João (2023). As she herself says, it is a love letter to her father, who died in 2019, with whom she began singing when she was a child and whose legacy as the father of bossa nova inspired not only her, but half of humanity.