The Girl from Ipanema by Antonio Carlos Jobim [Archive]

RonPrice

Nov 19, 2007, 07:03 AM

:cool:Five weeks before the Baha’i Ridván period of 1963, 21 April to 2 May 1963 and the election of the apex of the Baha’i administrative Order in Haifa, American saxophonist Stan Getz and Brazilian guitarist Joao Gilberto recorded an album which created the Bossa Nova craze in the United States and then internationally. The album was released in March 1964 on the eve of the beginning of a new Nine Year Plan in April 1964. Bossa Nova music has been variously described as: music with a swaying rhythm based on samba, a folk genre possessing a cool sensibility and a sound most commonly created and performed on an unaccompanied nylon-string classical guitar with vocals. One of the songs on the album was The Girl From Ipanema about a pretty girl walking down to the beach. This song was written the year my pioneering life began, 1962. The Bossa Nova movement lasted for the entire interregnum period, the period sometimes referred to as The Ministry of the Custodians: 1957-1963.1 Ruhiyyih Rabbani, Editor, Bahá'í World Centre, 1992. :cool:

Associated with complaisance was
the mood of this song and album--
about as far as one could get from
the tone and tenor, the process and
paradigm, the energies and efforts
of what I was into at the time with
my matric-uni studies, my bipolar
swings, my first sexual adventures--
or I should say sorry misadventures--
and a battle for the spiritual conquest
of this planet at the end of history’s
ninth stage and the opening of its tenth.

The convulsions and waywardness of a
godless and materialistic age, rolling up--
little did it know--the present social order,1
while half-blind, half-crazed, sex-starved
as I was, I tried to seize the opportunities
of the hour and go forward confident that
all things were in His mighty grasp and that
unconditional victory would inevitably be ours,
this community of the Most Great Name, of the
most precious Being ever to draw breath on earth.2

1 Wellspring of Guidance, p.27.
2 Ridván, 1990.

Ron Price
16 November 2007
(updated for: Mac Forums
19/11/07)