Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

TheStar.com - artsentertainment - A hero's welcome return 2 of 2 voice was sometimes little more than a sweet whisper, at others a mighty, soaring holler or a soulful, guttural moan. He whistled and tooted, shouted and yelped, hummed, and shifted flawlessly into falsetto cascades and back to a full-lunged vocal attack. Language aside, no two songs sounded as if they were subject to the same generic influences. In a crisp white shirt and slacks, sneakers but no socks, and with his trademark dreads locked in a ponytail, Gil looked every inch a more mellow version of the proud rebel he used to be. He was the co-founder with compatriot composers Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa of the immensely popular all-inclusive Tropicalia music movement in the late 1960s. Its protest songs angered the country's military dictatorship and forced the musical visionaries into exile in England and Europe after a year in jail. And Gil proved last night that what we know now to be world music probably began with him. The adoration heaped on him time and again in this first of a dozen scheduled North American concerts attested not just to Gil's musical accomplishments - 30-odd albums in 40 years and sales in the millions (he made appearance at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Tex., this week) - but more importantly to his status as one of the cultural icons of his age. In North America, we know little of his supreme importance in Brazil. A national hero there, and a powerful reminder to Latin American expatriates here of the richness and warmth of the music he fostered all those years ago, Gil bathed in their applause, and served up a more generous helping of himself than should be expected of any solo artist his age. That generosity was never more evident than in the pre-encore closer, a hypnotic fusion of Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry" and "Don't Worry." Drifting in and out of a loose, loping reggae feel, into bossa nova and calypso, and over to gospel, the song became a kind of international humanist anthem, a healing hymn, a song of all-encompassing hope, joy and sympathy. After a long standing ovation, Gil reappeared looking triumphant and stood at the front of the stage, victoriously embracing the "one love" he said he felt from the crowd. He then thanked our city, our government, the promoters of his tour - even a U.S. air carrier - for making his concert comeback possible. That part was pure politics. 3/29/2007 9:43 AM