Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

BY EVELYN MCDONNELL emcdonell@Miami Herald.com hemispheric politics and recent enshrinement in a globe-travel- ing museum exhibition, a peer to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury heyday and the Parisian student uprising. Tropicalia fused nationalistic interest in native cultural forms with the heady changes of international pop culture - it mixed samba and AUSTIN, Texas - Gilberto Gil has a quietly intense energy. The elegant pioneer of Brazilian song and gentle politician pulls his hair back in a ponytail, keep- ing the vestige of '60s rebellion discreetly maintained. His long, tapered fingers strum the air as he speaks. The Brazilian minis- ter of culture would seem to be a model of diplomacy. But beneath the Zen surface lies a life? What do I do with my time? What do I do with my boredom? What do I do with my "What's at stake is the shar- ing, not the gaining, not the what I take from you; it's what we both take from life that matters," says Gil. He's sitting in a hotel room on the eve of his first tour in the United States since taking office in '03 (the tour brings him to the Knight Concert Hall tonight in a copresentation with the Rhythm Foundation) and several days after President Bush's visit to Brazil, about which he's pontificating, "This is the new cultural ingredient, this is the novelty, this is what I categorize as a soft power, the power that's not con- quering anything. It's not there to conquer it, it's there to share. This is the new concept of power. This is hippie." Gil should know. Forty years ago he was one of the founders of Tropicalia, the most impor- tant countercultural movement in Latin America and, given its continuing impact on cross- - GILBERTO GIL, recalling thoughts he had behind bars rock. As Gil said in a presenta- tion at the South By Southwest conference here, it was "the last modernist movement and the first postmodernist one." For his innovations, Gil was imprisoned by Brazil's military dictatorship in 1969 and then exiled. As Gil has said, "Once I was the stone-thrower, now I am the glass." But this glass reaches out to the stone. The appointee of Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is using his politi- cal power to make the sort of changes he might have envi- sioned as a young radical: fund- ing community cultural centers that, among other things, are training grounds for Brazil's politically charged rappers; cre- ating a cultural dialogue with Africa; and reimagining intellec- tual property rights in the digital age. "We were projecting on the future screen then. Some of the - ideals and expectations and what we were trying to produce are getting results now. The fruit is ripe. Environmentalism, the peace movement, the inter- cultural processes - It's the talk of the town now." And then he quotes the title of a book that few government bureaucrats would know but is classic for an old hippie: Timothy Leary's The Politics of Ecstasy. Gilberto Gil's life story embodies the changes in the region from a culturally rich but economically strapped entity that struggled, sometimes vio- lently, to assert itself in a sphere still shrugging off European con- trol to an increasingly self-em- powered voice. It's a global leadership role that Gil says he has always found antithetical to his humble disposition, and which he wields with enviable aplomb. Gil was born in 1942 in Bahia, the province where Brazil's con- nection to Africa is most pro- TURN TO GIL, 9G MIAMIHERALD.COM: HEAR A CLIP FROM GILBERTO GIL'S AQUI E AGORA. CLICK ON TODAY'S EXTRAS GILBERTO GIL'S LIFE STORY RUNS PARALLEL TO MINISTER OF CHANGES IN HIS NATIVE BRAZIL CULTURE D G MiamiHerald.com | THE MIAMI HERALD FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2007