João Gilberto do Prado Pereira de Oliveira was born on June 10, 1931, in Juazeiro, a town on the São Francisco River in the interior of Bahia, the son of a merchant, Joviniano Domingos de Oliveira, and Martinha do Prado Pereira de Oliveira. He was given his first guitar at fourteen, formed a vocal group called Enamorados do Ritmo, and in 1947 moved to Salvador, where he left his studies to sing as a crooner on Radio Sociedade da Bahia at eighteen. In 1950 he went to Rio de Janeiro to join the vocal group Garotos da Lua. The group recorded two 78 rpm discs in 1951, he was dismissed soon after, and he cut a solo 78 for the Copacabana label in 1952 in the full-voiced radio style of his boyhood idol Orlando Silva. None of it made him known.

The sound he became famous for was worked out in isolation. In 1955 he went to Porto Alegre and spent eight months studying harmony with the composer and teacher Armando Albuquerque, then stayed with his sister in Diamantina, Minas Gerais, where he found that singing softly and without vibrato let him place the melody slightly ahead of or behind a guitar pulse that never wavered. Back in Juazeiro he wrote "Bim Bom." In Rio again by the late 1950s, he reconnected with Antonio Carlos Jobim, by then an arranger and producer at Odeon, who heard a way of updating samba in Gilberto's right hand and went looking for a song to carry it.

The song was "Chega de Saudade," by Jobim and the poet Vinícius de Moraes. In July 1958 Gilberto accompanied the singer Elizeth Cardoso on it and on "Outra Vez" for her LP Canção do Amor Demais, the first recordings of the bossa nova guitar beat. A month later he released his own 78 rpm of "Chega de Saudade" backed with "Bim Bom" on Odeon, with arrangements by Jobim, contributions from Dorival Caymmi and Aloysio de Oliveira, and the drummer Milton Banana among the players. He asked for two microphones, one for voice and one for guitar, so that both could sit at the level of ordinary speech and be heard in equal balance. The LP Chega de Saudade followed in March 1959 and sold well, and O Amor, o Sorriso e a Flor (1960) and João Gilberto (1961) completed the three LPs that define his early work. The second of them was released almost simultaneously in the United States as Brazil's Brilliant João Gilberto on Capitol.

The music reached American jazz musicians first. On November 21, 1962, a concert billed as the first North American bossa nova concert was presented at Carnegie Hall by Gilberto, Jobim, Luiz Bonfá, Roberto Menescal and Sérgio Mendes among others. Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd had already had hits that year with Jazz Samba, and after the concert the producer Creed Taylor set out to bring Jobim and Gilberto together with Getz. The sessions took place on March 18 and 19, 1963, at A & R Recording Studios in New York, with Phil Ramone engineering, Antonio Carlos Jobim on piano, Sebastião Neto on bass and Milton Banana on drums, and Gilberto singing in Portuguese. Gilberto spoke almost no English, so his wife, Astrud Gilberto, who had not sung professionally before, was asked to take the English-language parts of "The Girl from Ipanema" and "Corcovado." The album was held back for nearly a year and released by Verve in March 1964. At the 1965 Grammy Awards Getz/Gilberto won Album of the Year, Best Jazz Instrumental Album and Best Engineered Recording, and "The Girl from Ipanema" won Record of the Year. It has sold more than a million copies. The partnership was not easy. Getz and Gilberto disagreed over takes, which Taylor settled, and the live follow-up recorded at Carnegie Hall in October 1964, Getz/Gilberto #2 (1966), gives Getz's quartet one side and Gilberto alone with guitar the other.

Through the 1960s and 1970s he lived mostly abroad, in New York and Mexico City. João Gilberto en México appeared in 1970. In 1973 he recorded the self-titled album known as the white album at Rachel Elkind's brownstone studio in Manhattan, with Wendy Carlos engineering and Sonny Carr on percussion. In 1976 he reunited with Getz for The Best of Two Worlds on Columbia, with Miúcha, the singer he later married, taking the English vocals, and in May played a six-day engagement with him at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco, backed by the Getz band of Joanne Brackeen, Clint Houston and Billy Hart. Those live tapes were issued in 2016 as Getz/Gilberto '76. Amoroso (1977), with strings arranged and conducted by Claus Ogerman and produced by Tommy LiPuma and Helen Keane, was his first recording to include English, "'S Wonderful," and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. He settled in Brazil again in 1979, recorded a television special in 1980 that was later issued as an album, and in 1981 made Brasil with Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Maria Bethânia.

Concert albums mark the later years. He played the 19th Montreux Jazz Festival in 1985, issued as Live in Montreux, and later released Live at Umbria Jazz (2002) and In Tokyo, drawn from one of four shows he played in Japan in 2003. João Voz e Violão, his first studio album since 1991 and made with nothing but his voice and guitar, won the Grammy for Best World Music Album in 2001. He was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame in 2002 and played the JVC Jazz Festival in 2008. From the 1990s he was also in a long legal dispute with EMI over remastered reissues of his early records. Columbia University awarded him an honorary doctorate in music in 2017, though he did not attend. He had two marriages, to Astrud Weinert, with whom he had a son, João Marcelo, and to Miúcha, with whom he had a daughter, Bebel Gilberto, and he also had a daughter with the journalist Claudia Faissol. He lived alone from about 2009, his last years were marked by money problems and declining health, and he passed away at his apartment in Rio de Janeiro on July 6, 2019, at the age of 88. He was buried in Niterói.

Gilberto's contribution was a method, and it is one of the few in popular music that can be described exactly. The right-hand thumb keeps a steady bass pattern while the fingers play chords in block form, compressing the layered percussion of a samba school into one instrument; the voice is small, close to speech, and free to lag or push against that pulse. Brazilian sources trace the technique to samba itself, and to singers such as Orlando Silva and Dorival Caymmi, rather than to jazz. Bossa nova has no tag of its own among the jazz subgenres, so the closest fits are used above, Samba-Jazz for the Getz collaborations and Vocal Jazz for the jazz-vocal Grammy nomination for Amoroso. His own records are bossa nova and Brazilian popular song, and they are not jazz.

The jazz connection is real but runs through repertoire and collaborators. Historians of the style note that samba guitarists had been using comparable chord structures since the 1920s, so bossa nova is better described as a parallel development than as a jazz derivative, though Gilberto and Jobim did build harmonies with American music in mind. What made it a jazz story was what American musicians did next: Getz and Byrd recorded Jazz Samba, the Carnegie Hall concert and Getz/Gilberto put the music in front of jazz audiences and the Grammy electorate, and "Desafinado," "Corcovado" and "Estate," which he recorded in 1977, became standards. Jon Hendricks recorded a whole album in his honor, ¡Salud! João Gilberto, in 1963, and musicians as different as Stacey Kent, Lisa Ono, Toninho Horta and Hamilton de Holanda name him among their formative influences. Rolling Stone placed him at number 81 on its 2023 list of the 200 greatest singers.

He was also famously exacting about sound. He is reported to have insisted on 28 takes of "Rosa Morena" to settle the pronunciation of a single vowel, and he sued EMI over remasters of his early albums that he said altered the originals. That perfectionism is audible: his records are quiet, close-miked and almost free of overdubs, and João Voz e Violão was made in three or four sessions with no accompaniment at all.