Thirty-five years later, Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto's version of Antonio Carlos Jobim's "The Girl from Ipanema" is an icon, and the album, GETZ/GILBERTO, is a classic. They're the calling cards of bossa nova, the intoxicating mix of samba and cool jazz that composer Jobim,singer-songwriter Joao Gilberto, and others cooked up in Rio de Janeiro in the late '50s.

Ironically, "The Girl from Ipanema" came at what seemed the last gasp of an American bossa nova craze that had started in 1962 with Getz and guitarist Charlie Byrd's JAZZ SAMBA. After it went to No.1, and the single "Desafinado" -- a Brazilian hit for Gilberto -- hit the Top 20 on the Kennedy-era pop charts, everybody from Eydie Gorme to Miles Davis went bossa nova.

A year later, it was over: JAZZ SAMBA ENCORE, the Getz-Byrd sequel, topped out at No. 88, and the 1963 session that brought together Getz, Jobim and Gilberto was shelved.

"I had to beg the record company to release it," Getz said in 1990. After a year, they relented. A recent Jobim song was chosen as the single, mainly because, at Getz's insistence, some of it was in English.He felt "The Girl from Ipanema" needed an English vocal to offset Joao Gilberto's Portuguese. When a suitable singer couldn't be found, Joao's wife Astrud, an amateur, was enlisted, over the strenuous objections of her husband and songwriter Jobim. Astrud's beguiling vocals not only bring an undercurrent of understated allure to the recording, on the single version they're the only vocals you hear -- Joao's part was snipped out! The lyrics by Norman Gimbel were an approximate translation of the original lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes, and that, too, was a struggle.

"I had a big fight in a taxicab with Norman," Jobim said in 1985. "I couldn't express myself well and I was trying to explain to him that I wanted him to use the name 'Ipanema.' And he said, 'Ipanema doesn't exist, it's a toothpaste [Ipana], this makes no sense.' And I said, 'But this is a place in Rio de Janeiro, this is a beach.' But I couldn't speak well. And then the cabbie stopped the car and turned to me and said, 'You are wrong, your friend is right.' I was even more unhappy."

Jobim persisted and the rest is music history: Astrud Gilberto remained in America to become a star. Joao Gilberto returned to Rio to become a legend. Jobim's songs went on to become 20th-century classics. And Stan Getz went on his way.

"Sure," Getz said, "at that point I could have gotten a couple of singers with fruit on their head, put a little chihuahua on my arm, and become the Jewish Xavier Cugat. But I didn't want to play that stuff all the time; it's boring all the time. I come from a nitty-gritty jazz feel."

Getz and Jobim are gone. But bossa nova, like that tall and tan and young and lovely girl, keeps walking. And when she passes, each one she passes, goes, "Ahhhhh."

Lee Jeske