Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

(left) Gilberto Gil with his sister Gildina, his mother Claudina, and his grandmother Lydia. (right) Gilberto Gil with his parents at the day he graduated, receiving his degree in business administration. Arquivo Pessoal Gege. (previous spread Photo by Paulo Salomao/Ed. Abril/Content xp. a very interesting neighborhood, with a lot of street football and other games, and occasional Catholic feasts, and then San João, Saint John's Day, in the middle of the year, and Carnival in February. It was very Bahian. Were you involved in Carnival at an early age? Oh yes, as a spectator. And also my family used to gather all the kids in the nearby families and dress them with the Carnival outfits and masks and perfume bottles. And there was music and dancing and blocos parading, doing samba and Carnival marching songs. Was your family affiliated with any particular Car- nival group? No, they were independent, so I was able to appreciate all the diversity. The Pelourinho neighborhood, which is now the cen- ter of cultural life in Salvador, experienced a long pe- riod of social deprivation before being revitalized dur- ing the 1990s and designated a UNESCO World Heri- tage site, although many residents were moved out of the area in the process. But what was it like during the early 1950s? My house was actually very close to the Pelourinho, like, less than a kilometer. And the way of life was very similar to today, though it was less commercial. Now you have lots of shops and restau- rants and small hotels, but then there were basically families liv- ing there. It was very open, with intermingling all the time, the families going from one house to the other, children playing in the streets, and a lot less traffic than we have today, just a few cars and buses. In fact, the whole city was served by public transportation, which was made by a tram company. So it was a whole different landscape, human and humanistic, and it was an ordinary lower middle-class, working-class neighborhood. The decline came in the '60s, but I left there in the late '50s. You studied business administration? in music? Yeah, in Salvador. I left when I graduated, and then I went to São Paolo, because I was invited there by an internation- al corporation, Unilever. I went to work for Unilever as a trainee on management, and I stayed there for a year and a half. Then I abandoned the job at Unilever and started my music career. When did you concretely become Or was it something that was always around? It was, from childhood, and very early. I was inclined towards and affected by music a lot, as a subject in my life. It was some- thing that was occupying a special place, a special segment in my interior. And then, at the age of ten, my mother sent me to a music school to learn accordion playing, which I was very much interested in, because of Luiz Gonzaga, the Brazilian folk singer and composer, who was very impressive and very stimulating for my generation. I started to play accordion, and I stayed four years at music school. So I graduated, and I became an accordi- onist, and then my mother gave me a guitar, (when I was) age sixteen to seventeen.