João Gilberto, known in Brazil as O Mito (the myth), revolutionized global music by teaching himself to whisper into a microphone. This episode traces his path from a wealthy merchant family in Bahia, where a guitar gifted by his grandfather at 14 caused a permanent rift with his disapproving father, to his move to Salvador at 18 as a radio crooner and then to Rio de Janeiro in the early 1950s. There he connected with composer Tom Jobim around 1956 and engineered a new recording approach: two microphones, one for guitar and one for voice, kept at equal volume, which forced him to drop his singing to the level of hushed speech and distilled an entire samba percussion section into his right hand. After playing on two Elizeth Cardoso tracks in July 1958, he released Chega de Saudade in August, followed by a full LP in March 1959 that captivated the country.

The 1963 sessions with Stan Getz and Tom Jobim produced the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto and The Girl from Ipanema, whose English vocal was an unrehearsed take by his wife Astrud, who was only visiting the studio. The record won Album of the Year at the 1965 Grammys, the first jazz album to do so, plus Best Jazz Instrumental and Best Engineered Album. The episode then follows the dark side of that perfectionism: 28 takes to get the vowel O in Rosa Morena, a 1997 lawsuit against EMI over CD remastering that dragged on for more than a decade, a disastrous 2003 Hollywood Bowl show where he skipped the sound check and the audience walked out, total reclusion from 2009, a 2011 eviction from his Leblon apartment, his daughter Bebel seeking legal control of his affairs in 2017, and his death in Rio in July 2019 at 88.

• How mid-century Brazilian studio limitations pushed Gilberto and Jobim toward a stripped-down, laser-focused sound
• The two-microphone technique that made the acoustic guitar an equal partner to the voice
• The accidental creation of The Girl from Ipanema and its historic 1965 Grammy sweep
• Obsessive perfectionism turning into lawsuits, cancelled legacies, and a Hollywood Bowl walkout
• Isolation, debt, and decline in his final years, alongside a 2001 Grammy for Best World Music Album and a Rolling Stone ranking among the greatest singers of all time