My interview with the Brazilian star Bebel Gilberto was focused on her late producer, Suba. It was done for Word magazine, April 2003.

Our story starts in a pot of boiling water, deep in the Amazon jungle, some time in the mid 16th century. Peering inside this receptacle we discover its unhappy occupant, who is none other than the Bishop of Brazil! That is correct: Dom Pêro Fernandes Sardinha himself.
     If there is one thing worse than a dinner party with people you don't especially care for, then it is surely finding yourself the dish du jour. Had the Bishop only known, however, he might have been consoled by the contribution he was making to the history of Latin American music. You could almost draw a line between his demise and the writing, over 300 years later, of The Girl From Ipanema. For in boiling, carving and consuming Dom Fernandes, his cannibal hosts - a tribe of Amazonian Indians with issues around the Portuguese conquest of their land - were committing what later Brazilians would celebrate as "anthropophagism".
    Loosely defined as the act of eating another culture, this became the classic metaphor for describing a process in Brazilian art - of swallowing whatever the Western world brought your way and using it to make something distinctively local. In other words: devouring the enemy to assimilate his strengths. Nowhere has Brazilian anthropophagism been more marvellously successful than in music. Think of the Bossa Nova, that smoothly persuasive fusion of Brazilian samba and cool American jazz. Think, indeed, of The Girl From Ipanema, an almost peerless pop hit from 1964 which matched the talents of guitarist João Gilberto, singer Astrud Gilberto and saxophonist Stan Getz. The famous Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso (himself a leader in the Beatle-inspired "Tropicália" movement) actually said that "Brazil was born the day the Indians ate Bishop Sardinha."
    Now let's move a few years forward, to 1999, and the appearance of an album called São Paulo Confessions. It is one of the great albums of recent times. It was by a Yugoslavian musician named Suba, and released by an off-shoot of the Belgian label Crammed Discs. If you cared to look at its contents, you'd spot a track entitled Antropòfagus. As in anthropophagism. Now you know what he was on about.
    The point about Suba's São Paulo Confessions is that it's a brilliant example of cross-cultural experimentation in music. The canny Belgians knew their man: he had a fantastic aptitude for tuning in to other traditions. Exposing a host of Brazilian vocalists and players to his sophisticated electronic technique, Suba made a uniquely modern record. São Paulo Confessions has the crispest Western edge but also the dark, sensuous pulse of his adopted country. Earlier dance producers specialised in taking what was human and making it sound technological. With Suba, you sense the transformation is taking place the other way around. The machine is finally acquiring a soul.
    The next beneficiary of Suba's studio science was a Rio de Janeiro-raised singer, Bebel Gilberto. She would, in Brazil, pass for musical aristocracy because she is the daughter of Bossa Nova's founding father João Gilberto and the equally eminent singer Miúcha . (Just to be clear, Astrud Gilberto, who sang on The Girl From Ipanema, was an earlier wife of João's.) Together, Bebel and Suba created yet another extraordinary record.
    First released in 2000, Bebel Gilberto's album Tanto Tempo is one of the stealth success stories of the new century. Like São Paulo Confessions it was issued on the Ziriguiboom imprint of Crammed Discs. Last year it was picked up by the much bigger label EastWest, who have watched its sales rise ever closer to one million. Tanto Tempo has made Bebel Gilberto an international star, and it will doubtless keep on selling. You should certainly hear it, if you haven't already - her vocals are dreamily delicious, hovering seductively above the electro-tropical arrangements. It's one of those rare instances when music seems to speak to anyone, of every age and preference.
    The tragedy was, of course, that Suba would not live to hear it.

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"Suba? Aaahhh!" Bebel Gilberto remembers her late friend with a sad smile. "He was very intelligent and very funny. Completely Brazilian, he could speak Portuguese so well. A genius. And crazy, crazy, crazy - that's why he died the way he did. You know? He was probably smoking a cigarette and that's what happened... But anyway... He was pure music."
    From the city of Novi Sad in Serbia, Mitar Subotic was the son of a TV journalist. He was formally trained in classical music, but extended his studies to everything from ethnic folk song to electronic composition. In Belgrade and Paris he pursued an equally adventurous career, making funk, ambient and dance music as well as scoring films and fashion shows. When he received a grant to research Brazilian music, he moved to São Paulo and became infatuated. In the sleevenote to his album he wrote:-
    "São Paulo, Brazil. The world's fourth megalopolis with over 18 million souls, and more arriving every day. A stressful maze of massive skyscrapers, kilometric avenues and relentless chaos. Think Blade Runner in the Tropics. Life in São Paulo is fast, crazy and dangerous, as reality changes constantly. The city is full of people from all over Brazil and foreigners, all trying to make sense out of it. With time and patience to dig deep enough, you can make discovery after discovery, you find very strange people and very special places... Here, they call me Gringo Paulista. I've been in this city for ten years, and it already feels like I've led several, parallel Paulista lives."
    In late 1999, the 38-year-old Suba had almost completed work on Bebel's album and was due to visit Europe in support of his own record. In the early hours of November 2, smoke was discovered coming from his São Paulo studio/apartment. After contacting Suba on the intercom, the caretaker broke down his door and discovered him alive, but suffering from the smoke and flames. All might have been well, but Suba returned to his burning studio - reportedly to rescue back-up discs of Bebel Gilberto tracks. Stricken by the fumes, he died later that day in hospital.
    Suba, therefore, did not survive to see the release of Tanto Tempo. It might well have made him one of the sought-after producers in the world.

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Whatever the darkness in its history, Tanto Tempo will be for many a perfect accompaniment to the Summer of 2003. It's already brought Bebel Gilberto the sort of attention she has not known since she was the little girl of Brazil's first family of music. (She made her stage debut at Carnegie Hall, at the age of nine, appearing with her mother and Stan Getz.) Today she sits in a London photographer's studio, where there are stylists and stylists' assistants at every turn. Tomorrow there will be another session, this time for Vogue. Rarely has word of mouth worked such commercial magic.
    "I keep meeting people who don't know who I am," she says. Her accent is distinctly Latin, though she has lived in New York for many years now. "And when they discover they go, Oh! I've been listening to your album. Or my mother plays it, or my boyfriend plays it. So it is interesting, I can make old people happy, young people happy, which is really cool. It's a totally personal album."
    Gilberto's provenance made her career a forgone conclusion: "I couldn't be a lawyer, that's for sure. I left school pretty early. I always sang. I worked a lot as a child, doing jingles, helping my mother. So I think it was meant to be. I was born in New York then I moved to Mexico because my father was making an album there. We watched the World Cup in the '70s. Then we went back to Brazil and I was raised there. When I was 25 I put some money aside and decided to move back to New York and I never came back to Brazil, except to visit.
    Her decision to leave Brazil suggests that being the daughter of João Gilberto was a mixed blessing. "I was a lot under my father's shadow, and it was very difficult for me. When I moved to New York I studied music, I studied English, I worked as a babysitter, as a model for a painter, and I'm glad I did all that. When people saw me I was not the daughter of a talent guy that really helped me out; I was the daughter of a talent guy that really ignored my talent because he was so into his own talent. Which I don't blame him. My mother was trying to fight against his talent too. I was not raised to be a prodigy girl. I was not Shirley Temple.
    "I had to prove on my own. My father and mother did not even listen to Tanto Tempo until it was done. I think they like it. There are things that they don't understand very well, but they definitely respect me. There is a different attitude now."
    During her years of struggle she spent a while in London, living with her French boyfriend. She even made her TV debut on Jools Holland's show. Back in New York she performed with David Byrne. But it was through the eclectic Brussels label, Crammed Discs, that she formed a musical partnership with Suba. Initially, Bebel remembers, it was not a matter of chemistry so much as practicality. "He was one of the few producers that wanted to work with me for free, to invest time and money. I didn't doubt him. I'm like the daughter of the traditional Bossa Nova guy - pure, pure music. Then I met Suba, who's the king of the samples, and computers and playing tapes backwards. I was fascinated but I thought, How could I do that? Sometimes I would think this was not going to work. But in the end it did work."
    At the personal level they found themselves to be as different as their respective Brazilian homes: "I am very Carioca," Gilberto explains, "which is how you call when you are from Rio. And from São Paulo is Paulista. And they are very different; it's like I am from LA and Suba is from New York. Rio, where I am from, is totally more laid back. There is less money and the people are looser. In São Paulo are lots of yuppies running around after the money. Not that Suba was like that. Suba just got his own studio there, and I think that's why he settled. But Suba was more Brazilian than any Brazilian in the end."
    I ask her for her favourite memory of him.
     "Waking me up. We used to stay at the studio until six in the morning, then I would stay at my uncle's house which is in the same street that he had his apartment. I had to lock myself in my uncle's house, switch my cell-phone off, then sleep-sleep. Then, around two in the afternoon I would switch the phone on, because I knew he was going to wake me up. It would ring, I would answer, and he was, 'Good morning Princess! Let's have breakfast!' So at three we would walk to the boulangerie and have coffee, pretending it was only eight o'clock."
      The final tracks of Tanto Tempo were completed in the weeks after Suba's death. They include the song that Bebel wrote in his memory, Lonely.
    Bebel Gilberto is currently finishing her next album, and is quick to admit the difficulty. "I am without Suba. It's been a terrible frightening. It's the worst to make an album after an album with a producer that died. It's like double-killing. But I guess I'm taking over my instincts as a musician. This album is more acoustic, less electronic, lots of composition by me. It's more Bebel now. Every day I ask myself if someone's gonna like it. But hopefully they will.
    "On Tanto Tempo is Suba's touch. But there is a lot of me too, because he gave me freedom. When you move away from a country, and I lived away from Brazil for 12 years, you have to change because you hear different influences. If I was still in Brazil I would not have made this album. I am definitely influenced by electronics, samples, classical, jazz, contemporary, rap, house, and this is the result."
The next album should be ready by late 2003. Whereas Tanto Tempo was allowed to emerge and grow slowly, its successor will face the weight of expectations. She must also deal with a degree of stardom. "I know," Bebel says. "I would rather be in the situation I was in with the first album. It's more healthy. I don't know how people manage. I don't know how Madonna manages to be Madonna. If I knew the recipe I would give a course! You gotta be really strong to face all that. Or really pretentious. And I'm not. I'm totally into the music. I wanna do right instead of being commercial, so it's kind of a game."
     I launch upon a boring, convoluted question about the place of "anthropophagism" in her music. Naturally she looks quite baffled. Perhaps it lost something in the translation. But I would not be surprised to learn that Bebel Gilberto has never eaten a bishop in her whole life.