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	JOÃO GILBERTO: A MATTER OF TIME

João Gilberto is renowned for his subtle sense of rhythm. But when the legendary singer and guitarist, now in his early 70s, shuffled onto the stage at the Wang Theatre Sunday, one day and 90 minutes late, it was a different feeling for time — or lack thereof — that had created the atmosphere in the house. A missed airplane flight had led to the postponement of the event for a day, changing a Saturday-night date into an early-Sunday-evening concert; and then an unexplained hour-and-a-half delay to the start of the show had begun to turn this eagerly awaited Boston debut of a master musician into a disastrous night at the theater. Gilberto hadn’t played a note and already there were babysitters to pay, dinner reservations to lose, hungry dates to feed.

Nevertheless, Gilberto took his time, which is what had brought so many people there in the first place. For more than two hours, he demonstrated the profound swing that has made him, and the bossa nova tunes he popularized, so famous. Song after song, his voice and hands locked in a bizarre race to be last — each a bit more behind the beat than the other, they threatened to lag into oblivion before yet another surprising harmonic turn-around would bring them back to the top of the song and falling toward the chorus again.

For all this rhythmic drama, Gilberto looked like nothing so much as a professor during office hours: rumpled, weary, bored or maybe bemused, but above all distracted — not from the subject at hand, but by it. Staring at the neck of his guitar, he studied the chord changes he was playing — changes he has been playing for more than 40 years — and seemed lost in thought over them. It was as if each chord were suddenly suggesting a new idea for how to proceed to the next. And if he played two choruses the same way during the entire evening, I missed it.

I also doubt that he ever so much as raised his eyes toward the audience. Never has a solo act been more alone on stage. Lost in thought, his famously whispered vocals sinking at times into a mere mumble, Gilberto appeared unaware of the several thousand other souls in the room. The songs occupied him utterly. Reharmonizing the familiar tunes, rearranging the rhythm of their melodies, he also seemed unwilling to let any of them go, repeating choruses four, five times, stretching these two-minute hits into dissertations on chord inversion and substitution. Without dynamics — his voice never rising above that whisper — and without interrupting the flood of plucked chords by even one sequence of single notes, he found infinite variety within the strict formula of his music.

Those who made for the exit before the evening was finished had to be forgiven; this was a demanding night on the audience. But those who missed the encore missed the highlight of the performance. Dogged by out-of-tune strings throughout the evening, Gilberto’s guitar finally eased its way into pitch — did someone tune it for him off stage? and was that a hint of a smile that flashed across his face? Among a series of more lightly playful takes on his signature songs — "Chega de saudade," "Desafinado," and, yes, "Garota do Ipanema" — he included a memorable version of the Gershwins’ " ’S Wonderful" that his Brazilian accent altered so that it seemingly (and fittingly) included the lyric "I can’t help feeling morose."

Then he shuffled off, to miss his next flight.