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  ...