Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

MiamiHerald.com Posted on Sat, Mar. 31, 2007 Blending of genres make a soulful mix By ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ It makes sense that Gilberto Gil is Brazil's minister of culture under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The music that primarily he and fellow artist Caetano Veloso created in the '60s under the rubric Tropicalia, now called Musica Popular Brasileira or MPB, was a self-conscious attempt to integrate Brazilian pop culture into the broader world of what Gil now officially heads: Culture with a capital C. The music itself is wondrous, as Gil demonstrated Friday night at the Carnival Center's Knight Concert Hall. It follows the earlier bossa nova in adding sophisticated grooves from other parts of the world to Brazilian traditional genres like samba. But where bossa nova mixed in jazz, MPB mixes in rock, funk and the large field known as world music. And like so much of what is striking and alluring about Brazilian music, Gil's songs are rich in soulfulness. Friday night, Gil conjured a wealth of musical tradition with only his voice and an acoustic guitar. He visited styles from samba to bossa nova, from Mexican waltz to reggae, from rock to sweet ballads -- all in the purest acoustic format. And his voice. While Gil sometimes sang with the classic timbre of Brazilian vocals, a soft whisper that can rise to a wavy falsetto -- a style that can make all MPB singers sound alike, albeit pleasantly -- more than not he would fill the hall with a hoarse baritone. And then he would climb up to the heights of his contemporary Milton Nascimento, ending the song, quite literally, on a high note. All of this with complete control of dramatic effect, as well as handling the guitar with the deftness of a classical performer. The heavily Brazilian crowd that filled all levels of the hall ate it up. They sang along -- usually on cue, as when Gil did his Portuguese-language version of Bob Marley's No Woman No Cry. And they listened to this artist, who has enthralled more than one generation, with awe. Gil wears the admiration well. He appeared genuinely humble, in spite of his superstardom. And his neverfading smile radiated intelligence, as if he were enjoying an inside joke that was paradoxically shared by everyone. The Brazilian singer spoke mostly English, articulate and fluent even if charmingly accented. And he sang songs from Marley as well as the Beatles' When I'm 64, pointing out that Paul McCartney, like Gil himself, is that age now. Aging, like everything else, seems humorous to Gil, so many of his songs as well as the way he performs them are imbued with a wry sense of humor. Even when he touched (lightly, as befits his unflagging elegance) on political issues, he would twist out a small joke. For the encores, instead of hitting the enthusiastic audience with crowd-pleasing uptempo hits, he turned out the spiritual songs from his most recent release, Gil Luminoso. The effect, as with everything he did