Gilberto Gil: Immersed in Reggae's Roots

Gilberto Gil's Jamaican odyssey started a long time before his first visit to the country. It really began in the early 1970s, when Brazil was under a military dictatorship and Gil was living in exile in London.

Based in Notting Hill's Portobello Road, he got to know the largely Jamaican West Indian community and came into contact with reggae for the first time.

Gil was already interested in macrobiotics and he also experimented with Jamaican food, which is a mix of African and British cuisine. Many Jamaican dishes are spicy, with different seasonings giving the food an intense flavor.

In 1973, when he was back in Brazil, Gil heard Bob Marley's album Burnin' and was instantly captivated. So much so, that he considered Marley and Luiz Gonzaga as his biggest idols, and reggae as one of his favorite rhythms alongside samba and baião. 

Six years later, he wrote a Portuguese version of Marley's hit No Woman No Cry, titled Não Chore Mais. The single was released in May that year and became a huge hit for Gil, selling around 750,000 copies at the time.

The song heralded a new project in the shape of his Realce (1979) album, which he began recording in the US and released that August.

He performed 51 shows in 30 Brazilian cities on the album tour, with the Jamaican reggae star Jimmy Cliff joining him on stage in five state capitals.

The pair also recorded a TV show together for the TV Globo network.

In 1984, Gil became even more deeply immersed in reggae. In April that year, Gil and Liminha—the producer on his Raça Humana album— traveled to Jamaica to record with The Wailers, who had been Bob Marley's backing band right up to his death in 1981.

Gil recorded three of his own songs in the Tuff Gong studio (Marley's record company): Probe, Gimme Your Love, and Jamaica Sunday Morning. Only the second of these made it onto his Raça Humana album. Translated into Portuguese and given the new title Vamos Fugir, Gil shared the songwriting credits with Liminha.

While at Marley's studio, Gil was joined by reggae legends such as Aston "Family Man" Barrett (bass), Carlton Barrett (drums), Earl "Wire" Lindo (piano), Ras Michael (percussion), Earl "Chinna" Smith, and Lloyd Willis (electric guitars). 

The recordings also included a brass section, which was something Gil had never tried before in Brazil.

Producer Liminha with studio sound engineer of Tuff Gong.

The album's song list included 16 covers of Bob Marley classics and the previously unrecorded track Table Tennis Table, which Gil had written in Jamaica. The album was recorded partly in Rio de Janeiro and partly in Kingston.

While in Jamaica, Gil spent time with with Bob Marley's widow, Rita, and one of his sons, the entrepreneur and former football player Rohan Marley. 

Kaya N'Gan Daya featured the bass and drum duo Sly & Robbie, who were one of Marley's favorite rhythm section bands and among reggae's most prolific and longstanding performers. They're on the track Could You Be Loved.

Kaya N'Gan Daya also featured The Wailers' backing singers, Rita Marley, Marcia Griffiths, and Judy Mowatt—known as The I-Threes. In the album's insert, Gil wrote that it was somewhere "between cangaceiro [a rural bandit from northeastern Brazil] and Rastaman."

On the album, Gil recalls one of Bob Marley's songs called Lick Samba and Rita Marley making a point of telling him how close she felt Brazilian music was to Jamaican culture.

The album led to a documentary and a live CD. The film, Kaya N'Jamaica, was made by Lula Buarque de Hollanda and Carolina Jabor, and told the story of Gil's visit to Jamaica. 

In it, Gil recalls the details of arriving at the Tuff Gong recording studio for the first time with his team (who had arrived in Jamaica two days before him) and talks about the work of his producer Tom Capone, who died in 2004.