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How Bebel Gilberto Left Brazil, and Hit Her Stride : Working Her Way Home

Bebel Gilberto was born in New York City, grew up in Rio De Janeiro, worked in both cities as an adult and now lives in London, which is convenient to her record company in Brussels. In addition to her unusual international perspective, she has great musical genes.

Her father is Joao Gilberto, one of the founders and the principle voice of bossa nova. The composer Antonio Carlos Jobim said that "without Joao there would be no bossa." Her mother, Miucha, has what has been called "one of the most beautiful voices in Brazil." The composer and singer Chico Buarque is her uncle. Her first solo album "Tanto Tempo," which means "so much time," was released in the United States this month and will be out in Europe in May. It did indeed take her much time.

Although she has collaborated over the years with people she had met around the house during her childhood — Caetano Veloso, David Byrne, Stan Getz and the composer Cazuza, as well as her father and her uncle — she is 33 years old, old for a first album.

"It's not easy to find your own place in such a successful and creative family, certainly in Brazil." Gilberto said. "The pressure was enormous. Brazilian people expected a lot from me. I did not want to call myself a bossa-nova singer. That would be pretentious. The pressure was one reason I left the country nine years ago."

Between the age of 7 and moving to New York on her own at 24, in 1991, she shuffled back and forth between Rio and New York and between her mother and father, who had separated.

"My father is the kind of person who plays the guitar 24 hours a day," Gilberto said. "He sat playing it in the kitchen, I could hear him in my room when I was reading. I'm going to visit Brazil soon. I'll spend a week with him for sure. He likes to talk to me, I'll hardly ever get to go out. I love it, I have to admit it. Sometimes I even ask him to tuck me in bed. I'm 33, but he'll still do that for me. Then he comes to play for me."

She went to acting school and never studied music formally, the better to avoid capitalizing on her bossa-nova name. But she seemed to get theater and television roles playing a singer, or women who strummed guitars. The handwriting seemed to be on the wall.

Her album was recorded in Rio and Sao Paulo and mastered in Brussels. Crammed Discs, her Belgian record company, has recorded music from folk to techno to North African fusion. Zirguboom, their sub-label, concentrates on new tendencies of Brazilian music. She considers herself to be one of them. Gilberto described her music as "pure Brazilian roots with ingredients from the 21st century. Loops and sampling and so on. I want to feel close to the time I am living in now."

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WITH her blue passport, she was surprised by how good she felt when the immigration agent at Kennedy airport said "welcome home." She settled in New York as an adult because she wanted to perfect her English, to learn the culture, because it was the place to get a record deal and because "once you learn how to live in New York you are cool to live anywhere else."

But New York turned into a sort of dead end for her. Brazilian music by her generation was featured at only a few clubs, and only a few nights a week. They paid only around $50 for performing from nine to three, and, "of course you start to drink to get through it. And you smoke all of those other people's cigarettes. The worst part is that the singers are expected to sing standards. The management wants songs the people know, no originals." She likes to write her own songs.

Moving to London last year to be with her French boyfriend who had a job there, she found a more active scene. There were more places to play and the audiences were larger. Still, she was frightened at first, as she looked to find and then engage the good young musicians. They knew nothing about her except her name, which was about as wrong as it could be. In New York she knew all the musicians. She even knew their telephone numbers "by hand." She put a hand over her heart, hesitated, and corrected herself: "By heart."

Hiring and working with male musicians had never been easy for her. Traditionally, instrumentalists resent "chick" singers who leave them little solo time. The musicians she hired for her album would talk to each other between takes, leaving her out of the loop. Firing them was even harder. She hired a well-known and respected Brazilian sideman with the proviso that he play acoustic guitar. She complained when he showed up with only an electric. "I don't play acoustic," he said. And she came back: "You can't tell me that a guitar player from Bahia doesn't play acoustic." Finally he admitted he could play it, he just didn't feel like it. Well, in that case, she said, "I guess I'll just have to hire someone who does."

"He was really mad," she recalled. "I told myself he'd probably lost another record date because of me and I'd have to pay some sort of a fine and reimburse him for the cab he didn't take and the coffee he didn't drink. It really shook me up. But a few months later, we ran into each other. I looked in the other direction, but he took me aside and apologized: 'You know you were right. It was your record, it was your sound, and I didn't respect you."'

She still has no manager or agent. Although Crammed Discs in Brussels is not far away and they are helpful and have experienced, well-connected people who work with other bands, she continues to send out her own e-mail, press kits and demo cassettes. Now, however, that her first real CD is on the market, she figures she's on her own way at last.

A version of this article appears in print on   in The International Herald Tribune. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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