Stan Getz ft João Gilberto ft Astrud Gilberto - The Girl From Ipanema (Verve Records 1963)

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"Garota de Ipanema" ("The Girl from Ipanema") is a well-known Brazilian bossa nova song, a worldwide hit in the mid-1960s that won a Grammy for Record of the Year in 1965. It was written in 1962, with music by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes. English lyrics were written later by Norman Gimbel.

The first commercial recording was in 1962, by Pery Ribeiro. The 1964 single performed by Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz, shortened from the version on the 1963 album Getz/Gilberto (which also included the Portuguese lyrics sung by Joao Gilberto), became an international hit. In the US, it peaked at number five on the Hot 100, and went to number one for two weeks on the Easy Listening chart. Overseas it peaked at number 29 in the United Kingdom, and charted highly throughout the world. Numerous recordings have been used in films, sometimes as an elevator music cliché. It is believed to be the second most recorded pop song in history, after "Yesterday" by The Beatles. The song was inducted into the Latin Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001. In 2004, it was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. In 2009, the song was voted by the Brazilian edition of Rolling Stone as the 27th greatest Brazilian song.

During a recording session in New York with João Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Stan Getz, the idea of cutting an English-language version came up. João's wife, Astrud Gilberto, was the only one of the Brazilians who could speak English well and was chosen to sing. Her voice, without trained singer mannerisms, proved a perfect fit for the song.

The song was inspired by Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (now Helô Pinheiro), a nineteen-year-old girl living on Montenegro Street in the fashionable Ipanema district in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Daily, she would stroll past the popular Veloso bar-café, not just to the beach ("each day when she walks to the sea"), but in the everyday course of her life. She would sometimes enter the bar to buy cigarettes for her mother and leave to the sound of wolf-whistles. In the winter of 1962, the composers watched the girl pass by the bar, and it is easy to imagine why they noticed her—Helô was a 173-cm (five-foot eight-inch) brunette, and she attracted the attention of many of the bar patrons. Since the song became popular, she has become a celebrity.

Astrud Gilberto (March 29, 1940 – June 5, 2023) was a Brazilian samba and bossa nova singer and songwriter. She gained international attention in the mid-1960s following her recording of the song "The Girl from Ipanema".

Astrud Gilberto was born Astrud Evangelina Weinert, the daughter of a Brazilian mother and a German father, in Salvador in the Brazilian state of Bahia, on March 29, 1940. She was raised in Rio de Janeiro. Her father was a language professor, and she became fluent in several languages.

She married João Gilberto in 1959. His affair with Miúcha, a Brazilian singer, caused the couple's separation. According to the Associated Press, their marriage ended in divorce in 1964;[6] but a 2019 Facebook post by their son, João Marcelo Gilberto, said they had "merely separated" and never divorced. Astrud Gilberto had another son, Gregory LaSorsa, with a second partner; Gregory performed music with his mother. She immigrated to the United States in 1963 and settled there permanently.

Astrud sang two songs on the 1963 album Getz/Gilberto, featuring João, Getz, and Antônio Carlos Jobim. While it was her first professional recording, Astrud Gilberto was not entirely a novice. She grew up immersed in music; her mother played multiple instruments.

She was the recipient of the Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. Gilberto died at home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on June 5, 2023, aged 83.

Olha que coisa mais linda
Mais cheia de graça
ela é a menina que vem e que passa
num doce balanço a caminho do mar
Moça do corpo dourado do sol de Ipanema
O seu balançado á mais que um poema
a coisa mais linda que eu já vi passar

Ah, por que estou to sozinho?
Ah, por que tudo é tão triste?
Ah, a beleza que existe
A beleza que não é só minha
Que também passa sozinha

Ah, se ela soubesse
Que quando ela passa
O mundo sorrindo se enche de graça
E fica mais lindo por causa do amor

Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes
Each one she passes goes "ah!"

When she walks she's like a samba that
Swings so cool and sways so gently
That when she passes,
Each one she passes goes "ah!"

Oh, but he watches her so sadly
How can he tell her he loves her?
Yes, he would give his heart gladly
But each day when she walks to the sea
She looks straight ahead not at him

Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes he smiles
but she doesn't see