‘Girl from Ipanema’ singer Astrud Gilberto dead, 83

RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP) - Astrud Gilberto, the Brazilian singer whose soft, beguiling voice made "The Girl from Ipanema" a worldwide sensation in the 1960s and provided a huge boost to the budding bossa nova genre, has died at age 83, her family said.

"I come bearing the sad news that my grandmother became a star today and is next to my grandfather Joao Gilberto," Sofia Gilberto wrote on social media early Tuesday, later confirming the death to AFP.

The singer died at home in Philadelphia, in the United States, where she had lived since the 1960s.

Gilberto was born in Salvador, capital of Brazil's northeastern state of Bahia, in 1940 and was married to Joao Gilberto, a pioneer of the bossa nova genre who died in 2019. Astrud recorded 19 albums in her career, but she had little professional music experience when she turned "The Girl from Ipanema" – the now-classic song by Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes – into a global smash, singing the English verses alongside American saxophonist Stan Getz and her guitar-playing thenhusband.

The version made Astrud Gilberto the first Brazilian to be nominated for a Grammy – which she won, for song of the year, in 1965.

Queen of bossa nova

The silky-smooth song changed Gilberto's life, turning it upside down both personally and professionally.

As she told the story, she owed her popularity to an off-the-cuff suggestion by Joao Gilberto while they were recording it in New York to try singing a verse in English.

"That song is going to make you famous," Getz told her in the studio.

It was apparently not just her music that wowed the saxophonist – and vice versa.