Gilberto Gil’s history with the accordion

The accordion that Baião King Luiz Gonzaga sounded from the backlands of Pernambuco to Brazil echoed in Gilberto Gil since the artist from Bahia was a boy with colorful dreams in Ituaçu, in the countryside of Bahia, where he grew up.

These colors remind us of Saint John’s festivities which he eagerly followed from his house’s balcony ever since he was little. In the Northeast of Brazil, the countryside culture, just like that of Bahia, is especially one of the land worker, the contact with the land and its people.

Something that makes the worker relax and withstand the uninterrupted working hours under a hot sun. And the backlands are hot, very hot. Music, especially in times of party, harvesting, and abundance, takes colors, sounds, and landscapes to this hard work..

And it plants the hope for better days in those who, despite all difficulties, refuses to leave their land and story behind. In all of the artist’s work, this effort for fruitfulness, for the place, for the return to the roots is always present wherever he is.

“This whole frame of reference in my world, in the end, refers to Ituaçu, the basis of this whole permanence of the rural world image inside me. All the other places I saw in the countryside, every small river bank, every mountain…

“… Everything I saw around the world brought me back to Ituaçu, this place that occupies a mythic function in my life,” said, moved, the singer and songwriter during the documentary Tempo Rei, from 1996.

These first parties and musicality were followed by the young Gilberto Gil’s eyes and ears before he could even read and write. In the eve of Saint John, still in the early morning, the bands would go out on the streets of the village, which, at the time, had only 900 inhabitants.

“… My father took me to see the viola players, the singers, the spoken poets, this whole world of cordel literature. I had a lot of contact with them,” said the artist in an interview.

This Northeast of which the artist is very intimate comes up as a direction for his fifth studio album, Expresso 2222, from 1972, recorded after his return from exile in London; and then in Refazenda, from 1975, a record that is entirely permeated by the backlands sonority and fertility.

But the “thing with Northeastern music itself,” as the artist himself says, really came on when he met singer and songwriter Luiz Gonzaga (1912–1989), through the radio waves and the speaker services in the city where he lived.

The appearance of the man who introduced the accordion, the zabumba bass drum, and the triangle to national pop was essential for the musician to have his first turning point as an instrumentalist: learning to play, in the 1950s, the accordion at the famed Regina Academy, in Salvador.

Gil moved with his family to the capital of Bahia to finish secondary school. Later, he would become part of the instrumental band Os Desafinados, who performed in city events.

“When Gonzaga appeared with those verses about showing how to dance baiao, pay attention… and everything that came along with that great hit of his, I was naturally compelled to become one of his disciples…

“… I became a disciple of that great idol that he became in all of Brazil,” says Gil about Luiz Gonzaga.

The creator of the anthem “Asa branca” shows up various times in the artist’s work: “Respeita Januário,” “Vem, Morena,” “Macapá” are some of the songs from the album Gilberto Gil e as Canções de Eu, Tu, Eles, from 2000, which had the whole soundtrack for the movie Eu, Tu, Eles 

A student and deep connoisseur of the Baião King’s work, Gil was also in Exu, Gonzagão’s native town, in the backlands of Pernambuco, during the recordings of the 2002 documentary Viva São João!

The guitar, which ended up being the instrument that would define him on stage, only came later, and through the influence of two Bahia-born artists: João Gilberto’s very urban bossa nova and Dorival Caymmi’s very beachy sound.

But the musicality from the country side was already in him, and he tried to take his compasses, footprints, and melodies to compositions that mixed a bit of each of those worlds.

“This sound with more guitar was something I heard with Dorival and in the melodies my grandmother recalled. Records by Paraguassú, Dilermando Reis, more of a guitar mode…

“… I only came to find this many years later, when I developed the memory of Luiz Gonzaga’s accordion, it drove me to find certain fingering techniques. ‘Expresso 2222’ is the clearest example of this type of thing,” said Gil in the 1996 documentary Tempo Rei.

But in his first album, Louvação, from 1967, whose title is already reminiscent of the religious parties typical of the countryside—in honor of some patron saint or other—the artist’s singing and its guitar, in several moments, very explicitly emulates this influence.

This shows in the songs “Louvação,” “Procissão,” “Roda,” and “Viramundo.” In his second album released in the following year, Gilberto Gil, who was already creating the Tropicália rhythms, writes the song “Domingo no parque".

The hit Gil took to the stage of the TV Record music festival with band Os Mutantes took his career to another level. After that, all Gil had to do was be Gilberto Gil: show his own self to the world.