Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

Print Story - canada.com network canada.com WHERE PERSPECTIVES CONNECT Brazil's Gilberto Gil takes break from government job for U.S.- Canada tour Michael Astor Canadian Press Thursday, March 15, 2007 RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) - For most performers, a three-week North American tour is work. For Brazilian pop superstar Gilberto Gil, it is more like a vacation. For the last four years, the 64-year-old singer and songwriter has been working a government job as the nation's minister of culture, funding endowments, working to preserve historical monuments and promoting the arts. "As minister, I'm not allowed to exercise my career as a full-time musician, so it's kind of like going on a holiday from the job," said the rail-thin Gil whose unruly greying dreadlocks now top blue button-down shirts and black slacks, making him look like a rebel investment banker. Gil, who won a Grammy in 1998 for best world music album, kicks off his first North American tour in eight years on Thursday in Toronto and begins a three- week string of U.S. appearances Friday in Ann Arbor, Mich., that will also take him to New York City's Carnegie Hall and Los Angeles' Royce Hall. The mix of traditional bossa nova with rock 'n' roll and reggae that Gil created with sometimes collaborator Caetano Veloso was revolutionary for Brazilian music and Gil has sold millions of albums over his 45-year career - though he is largely unknown in the United States. In fact, many Americans who meet him confuse him with bossa nova legend Joao Gilberto. "People are always coming up to me abroad and telling me 'I love your records, I'm your fan for many years,' but they're talking about Joao," Gil laughed. Gil will perform alone with his acoustic guitar on this tour, promoting "Gil Luminoso," a career retrospective of 15 songs reworked for solo guitar and voice originally recorded in 1999 but only just released. "The album was conceived and produced by a friend of mine who wanted to focus on the most mystical and spiritually oriented songs of my repertoire, so that album goes in that direction," Gil said. But after calling the album "very religious," he concedes a moment later in an interview that he is now toying with agnosticism. "I began as Christian, then I got interested in the Eastern religions, then I moved to the elemental African religions, then I got interested in theosophy and now I feel I just want to be outside all that," he said. It seems like a contradiction but Gil has made a career of taking conflicting concepts and joining them together. http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id-4e23768b-3f6c-40f8-a32b-c97baeOffcb7&k=16355 03/16/2007 03:25 PM Friday » March 16 » 2007 Page 1 of 3