Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

So it was no longer a shock? No. On the contrary, it was like, "Whoa, now we have the guys, they can be good agents to the whole new democracy, the new culture, and the aegis." Did you settle in Rio? I came straight to Salvador, stayed here for one year, then in 74, I moved to Rio, and stayed in Rio until '88, when I came back here for the political thing During the 1970s, you made collaborative works with Jorge Ben, Caetano Veloso, and other prominent peers. What do you remember about that period? So many things and so many friends and colleagues, doing things with Rita Lee, Caetano and Chico Buarque)...and then I went to Africa, in '77, when we were invited for a big Black- arts festival in Nigeria, FESTAC. I stayed one whole month in Lagos, and I used to go every two or three days to Fela's Shrine, And I met Stevie Wonder at the Shrine Did you jam? Yes! And Fela was there, dealing with the multitude that the Shrine was, with so many wives, and his mother, and the chil- dren, and the friends, especially at that moment, with the festi- val happening, many friends from all over Africa coming to his place. He was a kind of loffshoot) festival, his own thing going on to the point of re-attracting the rage of the government. The day I left lages, they set the Shrine on fire When they threw his mother out the window? Yes. I was at the airport, then we saw the smoke from some point in downtown, and we asked, "What is that?" And they said, "It's Fela's place that's on fire." I met him in California in 1985. He struck me as one of those figures who skated that fine line between genius and madness Definitely. Especially coming from Africa, from Nigeria, from that incredible tribal mass, with the political mass of the state, and the poorness of the society. Plus, he had the kind of sexual thing going on, with the HIV that came later, when he refused treatment. He was really one of a kind, Was FESTAC your first trip to Africa? I had been to Angola in 67. That came also as an invitation by the Brazilian foreign department, to represent Brazil in one of those bilateral cultural things that they had at the time. So I went with a music group and played in Luanda never went back to Africa until 77. Did either experience directly impact your work? Especially the FESTAC, after one month of staying, with a lot of exposure of those African and diaspora things. All the disaporic culture was represented from South America, Central America, North America, from Europe, from everywhere. We had fifty thousand Black artists united in Lagos, and every day, multi- performing situations, twenty-four hours a day. And living all together in sort of an Olympic village that they had built, fifty thousand Black artists from all over the globe in Lagos for one month. And then we went to different villages in the country, like Benin City, Kaduna, Oshobo. When I came back, I did the album Refael, and the song "Refavela" was about resettling Black people and Black culture in a new situation. It's our final request for the recognition of our values and our contribution to the Western civ- ilization, to the process of modern society and modern civilization. And the spiritual and intellectual impact for causing this reaction was basically the time I spent in Lagos Tell me about the 1979 album Realce, where you cov- ered "No Woman, No Cry." I was under the impact of the song already for three years, I was on a beach in Maranhão one day when I heard that song, but it was Jimmy Cliff's version, the first time I heard it, and that particu lar version of "No Woman, No Cry" was very popular there. The song was catchy, and I was really moved, so that was when I started introducing the reggae taste in my own songs. In '78, I did my version of "No Woman, No Cry, and that became a huge hit in Brazil that helped the Brazilian general audience to be a little more interested and informed about what reggae was. Then in 1980, Jimmy visited, came to Bahia. His agent asked me to join him in a tour, putting together Jimmy and Gil in Brazil. How was he received in Brazil? He was like a king. Here in Bahia, we had twenty thousand people at the airport, receiving him. Ar the stadium, we had cighty thousand people.