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San Jose, California Now: 52°F High: 70'F Low: 46°F 5-day forecast
By Andrew Gilbert
Mercury News
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Brazil's ambassador of music
TROPICA'LIA FOUNDER GILBERTO GIL TAKES TIME OUT FROM GOVERNMENT DUTIES FOR
SOLO TOUR
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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
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"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,
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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
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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.
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