Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

DAUID GLAZER INC NY THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, MAY 9, 1999 Brazilian Original And His Origins 1 212 691 6123 Continued From Page 45 Eric Clapton in "Nega (Photograph Blues)," from Mr. Gil's self-titled 1971 English-speaking album (his three-year political exile in London was his third period). ated by the fashion of bossa nova; you don't quite know who Mr. Gil is. That posture toward him changes radically one year later, when we enter the ríext period and find Mr. Gil in the thick of the self-questioning, bricolage-happy Tropicalia move- ment, whose aim was to shake up Brazilian popular music by conflat- Ing electric guitars and folk forms of the outback. His self-titled album from 1968 bears the thumbprints of the producer Rogério Duprat and is backed by the rock band Os Mu- tantes. Without carrying explicit messages about Brazilian politics, the claples in the songs are aud- denly stronger; he sings about hun ger, death, bombs. But luckily for non-Portuguese speakers, so many of the delights here are musical. The album creates shocking superimpositions with a purpose: blaring horn sections, sug. gesting television advertisements, sitting on top of indigenous folk What makes Mr. Gil specia: is that rhythms. It's a brilliantly colortul, as a Brazilian of mixed ancestry and polyglot album, the closest pop mu. mixed cultura influence, he telt mul- sic ever came to the restless esthetic tiple citizenships and used it. As a prowling of a Godard film. The mos- black pop artist in the 70's, he ab- sages don't have to be articulated in sorbed the music of Stevie Wonder political rhetoric; the signals are and Bob Marley: in his London so- there in the music like raisins in a journ, he became a band leader, cake: It's a record about a sad popu- comfortable with the informality and lace stuck between the archaic and adventurousness of rock, and as a the modern. Satisfactorily remas- Bahian he had a natural understand- tered at last, it's one of the best rocking of Afro-Brazilian culture. The albums ever made, though Mr. Gil is so much more than a rock musician that one might not consider charac. terizing it as such. But after his return to Brazil in 1972, which initiates the fourth peri- od, the rock influence ends, or be comes a good deal less direct. The album "Expresso 2222," from 1972, has all of the delicious denouement- of-an-era moodiness that character izes the canon of early-70's rock mu- sic - that of Sly and the Family Stone, the Grateful Dead, the Ger- man art-rock group Can. But the album is also deeply Brazilian: it includes a track by a folkloric flute group from the Northeastern interi- or of the country and a remake of the 1959 Brazilian hit by Jackson do Pan. deiro, "Chiclete com Banana." In the proper context of this collection, one can see that the music of the Tropi. cália period has been a bit overrat- ed; it wasn't until the 1970's that the movement's main creators came into their own. There are moments when you're aware that English-speaking pop rubbed off on Mr. GIL. Traces of the Beatles's "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" can be found in the tape-edited interactions between orchestral music and rock on the 1968 album; the lead guitar is pure result of this mixture, when you get to the full-barid tracks on the double disk 1972 live album "O Viramundo," is densely rhythmic, well-organized music with strong melodies and a lot of improvisation like the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers in their own ways, this is rock that comes close to achieving the state of jazz. There is much of significance among the set's four disks of unre- Gilberto Gil performing at Summer Stage 1995. leased material. They include two CD's worth of sessions that were to go into a lost album, "Cidade do Salvador," from 1974, fonturing the first-rate band Mr. Gil had assem- bled upon his return to Brazil. By this time Mr. Gil was a full-fledged ex. perimental poet, playing with sound alike words to make their meanings blend and transform, and the sound of the records indicate that he was listening to Miles Davis's wildest stu- dio experiments as well as to his compatriot Milton Nascimento. "O Viramundo," two disks of mostly Bolo live acoustic performances that demonstrate Mr. Gil's facility at meshing voice and guitar improvisa tion, is also unreleased, as is a hippie- folk soundtrack to the 1970 film "Co- pacabana Mon Amour"; & fourth disk collects rarities from 1975 and 1977. The box set, which has been sold at around $250 when sighted in this country (if record stores don't carry it, try www.dusty groove.com) com. prises only Mr. Gil's recordings for the Philips label it ends at 1977, when his interest in the black diaspo nificant albums were yet to be re ra was crystallizing. Many more sig corded. But till now there has been no possibility in America for a reason able understanding of his work. "En- saio Geral" is a start. TOTAL P.03