Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

Most Viewed Articles news business tech sports entertainment Vacation policy at Netflix: Take as much as you want Pelosi right in demanding Iraq deadline Father: Son's theft charges familiar Kawakami: New voice, but 49ers won't talk about stadium cost San Jose police officer injured by flying debris Microtel Inns & Suites Gore warns of planetary emergency Ads by Google Terrorists Profiled World's most comprehensive open source database www world-check com Cyber liability Insurance 10 Top Things you Need to know to Protect your Tech Co - Free Webinar www.wiredforgrowth com Is Osama Bin Laden Dead? Full story and analysis on rumours of Bin Laden dying of typhoid www.thefirstpost.co.uk Based On A True Story An Uplifting Tale of Terror From The Ukraine To America www.inda.com Off Duty Officers Armed Security Company 24/7 Armed Security Services www offautyofficers.com Advertise on this site life & style opinion my city help San Jose, California Now: 52°F High: 70'F Low: 46°F 5-day forecast By Andrew Gilbert Mercury News Your Mercury News Online: Register | Sign in | RSS Digg Reddit - Yahoo My Web Google D what's this? RePrint Print Friendly View Email Article Brazil's ambassador of music TROPICA'LIA FOUNDER GILBERTO GIL TAKES TIME OUT FROM GOVERNMENT DUTIES FOR SOLO TOUR 2007 Acura RDX jobs cars real estate Get weather for: city or zip From prison and exile to the top levels of government, music has taken Gilberto Gil on an extraordinary ride. Since the mid-1960s, when he helped launch the psychedelic Tropicalia cultural movement, Gil has been at the center of Brazil's teeming music scene as a composer, bandleader and charismatic performer. Though often referred to as South America's John Lennon, there's really no equivalent for the role he has played as pop star, political activist and hero for Brazil's huge black population In the latest leg of his amazing journey, which saw him jailed by Brazil's military junta in 1969 and later exiled, Gil has served as minister of culture in the government of leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva since 2003. His responsibilities don't leave him much time to tour, which makes his Bay Area concerts next week particularly welcome. Although he spoke at the University of California-Berkeley in 2005, he hasn't performed in the region since 1999 classifieds shopping place an ad "It's a rare opportunity to exercise what's so flesh and bone for me," says Gil, 64, who performs Wednesday for Villa Montalvo at Redwood City's Fox Theatre (Sunday's Cal Performances concert is sold out). "So from a ministerial perspective, it's like going on holiday from the job." What's different about this holiday is that Gil is traveling solo. After the release of his first album focusing only on his voice and guitar, "Gil Luminoso," he's touring as a one-man band. Featuring spare, Advertisement stripped-down arrangements of songs drawn from his 40-year career, the ravishing album sustains a mood of quiet, ineffable spiritual joy and longing. In concert, he also will draw on the music of Bob Marley, which has played an important role in his life since his 1980 recording of "No Women, No Cry popularized reggae in Brazil. "This record was produced and conceived by a friend who wanted to focus on the more mystical and spiritual songs from my repertoire," Gil says speaking by phone from Rio de Janeiro, his English still carrying traces from the year he spent exiled in London, where he collaborated with Yes and Pink Floyd. "The album is very intimate, soft and tender." The son of a doctor, Gil was born and raised in Salvador, the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia and the heart of Afro-Brazilian culture. He started gaining attention in the early 1960s as a second-generation bossa nova singer-songwriter deeply influenced by Joa-o Gilberto. By 1967, he founded a movement with fellow Bahians Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa (and Sa-o Paulo's outrageously creative band Os Mutantes) that brought an internationalist perspective to Brazil's insular music scene. Inspired by British rock (particularly the Beatles), the avant-garde Poetry Concrete movement and Brazilian roots styles like forro and samba, the early Tropicalia projects adopted a cut-and-paste aesthetic, incorporating distortion, found sounds and elaborate sound design. Infuriating leftist students, who saw the use of English lyrics and rock instrumentation as capitulating to American cultural imperialism, Gil and Veloso insisted that Brazilian music had nothing to fear from the rest of the world Print: Home Delivery Service Now Gil is in the vanguard of a movement seeking the free flow of information. As culture minister, he's championing the Creative Commons concept, which seeks to establish an alternative to the international copyright protection that enables license holders to greatly restrict the dissemination of sounds, images and text. 2007 Acura RDX SPECIAL I FASE OFFER