The stage: a song, a studio, the place where Gilberto becomes Gil

Though the singer loves the studio work and album preparation, it is on stage that he meets his audience again, shows new songs, new proposals, and, in particular, the with which crew he is working at the moment.

It is also on stage that Gilberto Gil shows his multimedia self, inserting speeches, playing with the audience, different scenarios. In an almost mystical way, the stage has a power over the singer and songwriter from Bahia.

Not for nothing, around the 1980s, when he considered quitting music, it was the stage itself that inspired him to write a farewell song, which ended up proving to be the very soundtrack of the renovation of his career.

Part of the track list of Luar (A Gente Precisa Ver o Luar), an album released by Gil in 1981, “Palco” went to the top of the charts and took the musician back to… the stages! And at full speed.

There were different phases in the life of Gilberto Gil as a stage man. In the beginning of his career, it was common to associate him with the same guitar and stool to which he used during the bossa nova era—the album cover of “Louvação,” from 1967, bears it out.

During the Tropicália, Gil was both the quiet musician he used to be in the time of the first songs and the popstar used to large gestures on stage, such as opening his arms and showing the guitar to the audience at the end of “Domingo no parque.”

It was around that time, too, that the bandleader figure first appeared, a man who whether with or without his Tropicália friends, would go up on stage accompanied by groups like Os Mutantes, Leif’s, and the Argentinians Beat Boys (with whom he recorded “Questão de ordem”).

The Bahia group Leif’s—with Pepeu Gomes, then bassist, in the formation—was with Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso during a delicate moment in the singers lives: the concert in the Castro Alves Theatre in July 1969, a few days before both friends left for exile.

It was a very psychedelic show, with colorful lights on the walls of the theatre and musicians dressed in hippie fashion. Afterwards, the show became part of the album called “Barra 69.”

Fogo eterno pra afugentar / An eternal flame to drive off
O inferno pra outro lugar / Hell to a different place
Fogo eterno pra constituir / An eternal flame to build
O inferno / Hell
Fora daqui / Outta here

The season in London defined Gil as a “school” for the new musicians. The singer, who used to value the acoustic guitar and stool format, moved on to having a series of instrumentalists gravitating around him.

At first, in 1972, the musicians on stage with him were the same ones that played in the LP Expresso 222: Perna Froes (keyboards), Tutti Moreno (drums), Lanny Gordin (electric guitar) and Bruce Henry (bass).

A Gilberto Gil’s concert began, more and more, to mean both the releasing of new songs, long before they were recorded, and breathtaking jamming (“Aquele abraço” even got a 19-minute long version on stage in 1972).

Gil, more light-hearted, started to dance in front of the audience, along with his electric and acoustic guitars. And he would over interact with the audience.

A show by Gil that involved the audience a lot - and was reissued four decades later - was Refavela, from 1977, defined by Nelson Motta in an article in the newspaper O Globo as "a terreiro audience dancing in a trance".

According to the journalist and producer, Gil performed a dancing concert, with a musicality inherited by the sounds he researched during his trip to Nigeria, that same year. Nelson also highlighted the “well-tuned band” and the modern “lighting resources” used by Gil on stage.

Live records from the 1970s show it, like during the medley of “O rouxinol” (a partnership with Jorge Mautner) and “Que besteira” (with João Donato), when the audience was urged to say whatever they felt like, while Gil would improvise verses.

This version was performed in 1974 during a concert at Tuca Theatre and would only be known by the public with the album box set “Ensaio geral,” released in 1998, bringing rarities.

Venho para a festa, sei que muitos têm na testa / I come to the party, I know many have on their foreheards 
O deus-sol como sinal, um sinal / the sun god as a signal 
Eu como devoto trago um cesto de alegrias de quintal, de quintal / Like a devotee I bring a basket of backyard joys 
Há também um cântaro, quem manda é deusa-música pedindo pra deixar, pra deixar / There is also a jug, the music goddess in charge of it, asking to let it be 
Derramar o bálsamo / Pour the balm 
Fazer o canto cantar, o cantar (lalaiá) / Make the chant sing the singing (lalaiá) 
[There is a word play in the last verses, as “cântaro,” in Brazilian Portuguese, has the same sound as “cantar, o” ]

The influence of his international experiences, especially the one he lived in the hippie London during his exile clearly appears in “Palco,” which ends in a joyful “lá, lá, iá.”

“The verse speaking of the ‘sun god,’ I would say that was connected to the Aquarius age, that hippie signs thing, the forehead sign, as if this god was conveying a baptism. These new boys, followers of a new idea, dreamers of a new world.”

Gilberto Gil

The Doces Bárbaros tour, launched one year before, reviewed the friendship among Gil, Caetano, Gal Costa, and Maria Bethânia, and brought new information for Gil’s stage display.

He would dance, play the guitar, and move around the stage, decorated with a huge flag created by Flávio Império, which almost worked as a circus tent.

As the years went by, dancing was more and more required in a Gil concert, as a communion of the artist with the audience.

It happened during the tours of Realce (1978), and Luar (A Gente Precisa Ver o Luar) (1981) or in the singer’s performance in the Montreux Festival (1978), impregnated with the Refavela style and reggae influences.

The devotion to the orixas would also appear on his stage clothes—he performed the Montreux concert dressed in white, in honor of Oxalá, and asked percussionist Djalma Corrêa to play the orixa summoning tune to open the concert.

The gratitude for what he had lived on stages made Gil name as Palco [Stage] the studio he had built within his production company, Gege Produções, in 2005.

During his performances, audiences can not only dance but also observe Gilberto Gil’s personal evolutions towards bringing different languages to the show.

Banda Larga Cordel, an album from 2008, had a tour in which the traditional warning “video and audio recording of this concert is prohibited without previous consent” was replaced by a friendly “record whatever you wish and manage to.”

“After ‘Palco’, I went through other moments of tiredness but have not thought again of quitting music. Not least because, from a certain moment on, there could be no return. I had established my career, the field of my survival…

“… I had finally professionalized in music, and there were no other professions in sight for me. I had no means of abandoning music anymore. My only radical moment gave me ‘Palco’.”

Gilberto Gil