An album canceled by Gil and considered lost is found almost 40 years later

Gilberto Gil learned about all this while he was in the United States. Having wrapped up his tour for his Luar (A Gente Precisa Ver o Luar) album, which he had released the previous year, Gil and his wife, Flora Gil, set off for the land of Uncle Sam.

The singer would spend two months away from Brazil as he worked on an album in New York: that same album which, for almost 40 years, would be considered lost. When Google Arts & Culture was cataloging the collection, the North American album finally came to light.

 "My interest had been piqued and I was eager to go back to that album and, perhaps, make my peace with it and release it. But then the album disappeared. But now it's turned up again!" said Gil, expressing his surprise on hearing the news that the album he canceled had been rescued.

The suggestion to expand Gil's career beyond Brazil's borders first came from André Midani, the then CEO at Warner Music. He came up with the idea of a new album for the North American market in the wake of the 1979 release, Nightingale, which Gil had recorded with Sérgio Mendes.

The subsidiary Elektra Records was commissioned and the album was produced by Ralph MacDonald—a Trinbagonian-American percussionist and specialist in Black music—and Richard Alderson, a recording engineer. 

Ralph brought Richard Tee (keyboards), Grover Washington (saxophone), Steve Gadd (drums), and Marcus Miller (bass) into the studio, as well as William Eaton to co-write the songs. With Eaton's assistance, Ralph helped Gil to put the finishing touches to the songs and versions that would feature on the album.

One of those songs was Deixar Você, which would feature, in Portuguese, on the playlist for Gil's very next project following his US adventure, namely his Um Banda Um album. The track, with its English lyrics and title When The Wind Blows, can now be heard for the first time. 

During the weeks that they spent in the Rosebud Recording Studio on Broadway, the musicians recorded nine songs and Gil was anxious the whole time about doing a good job.

"Ralph was really happy to make the connection between Brazilian pop and North American pop, adding that Caribbean influence, some Jamaican traces, and a bit of Puerto Rican. Seen in that light, it's a nice album," Gil remarked.

With Gil, he wrote several tracks but, over time, Gil forgot their names and, if formal recordings ever existed, they too were lost. Gil's recollections:

Gil talks about Estrela, a song that he would not  record again until he released his album Quanta in 1997. It is the only song in Portuguese on the North American album, with the English translation Star appearing in brackets after the Portuguese title on the label.

One of the album's English highlights is Jump for Joy, which Gil recorded as a duet with Roberta Flack. Ralph was producing Flack at that time and she also provided backing vocals for other tracks on the album, including Estrela, where she can be heard along with other singers trying to sing in Portuguese.

Roberta Flack had started her career in 1969 but success only came with her hit singles First Time Ever I Saw Your Face in 1972 and Killing Me Softly With His Song in 1973.

The cassette tape containing the already-mixed album, with all the tracks in order, was sent to Gil in the 1980s. With no title and only "Produced by Ralph MacDonald" on the label, the tape ended up in the archives at the Gege Produções production company, and we were led to believe that Gil never got round to naming the album.

In mid-2019, while planning the task of organizing the Gilberto Gil collection to set up this museum, we looked through rooms at both the current and former headquarters of Gege Produções. 

In one of them, we found close to a thousand items, which, while obsolete, were still full of history. They included reel-to-reel tapes, DATs, VHS tapes, cassettes, mini DVs, and various other formats, just gathering dust and awaiting disposal. 

Following digitization and some basic editing, mostly of audio tapes, this thousand-strong collection became over three thousand audio and video files. Many were already in the public domain but they had certainly never before been consolidated in one place. 

Among these rarities, the journalist and researcher Ricardo Schott identified the canceled album on two of the digitized tapes. 

In the photo, Schott interviews Gil in 2020. Also present are some of the Arts & Culture team who worked on identifying and cataloging the items in Gil's collection.

In the midst of research, Chris Fuscaldo and collaborator Laura Zandonadi put the album tracks for Gil to hear. Curator of this museum, Fuscaldo took some statements from the musician.

As well as the cassette tape, we also found the album on the DAT tape which you can see in this picture. The label on the tape was handwritten, albeit not by Gil. The audio you can hear here was taken from the DAT as, once digitized, it offered better sound quality. 

One of the songs we identified was Moon and Star Girl, an English cover of the Vinícius Cantuária hit Lua e Estrela. The song was also a hit for Caetano Veloso during Ralph's visit to Brazil. The producer Liminha recalled that Caetano and Cantuária both visited the studio in New York.

The songs, in the order in which they appear on the tape, are You Need Love, Jump For Joy, Estrela (Star), Fill Up The Night With Music, Come On Back Tomorrow, Somebody Like Me, Moon and Star Girl, When The Wind Blows (the English version of Deixar Você), and Take a Holiday.

Come On Back Tomorrow (which begins with "When I first met you ...") mixes Nigerian ijesha and pop and it was probably co-written by Gil, Ralph, and William.

The sixth song, Somebody Like Me, is an ijesha track and so it sounds as if Gil composed the tune. 

On the last track, Take a Holiday- which begins with the line "If lately you've been feeling like nothing is ever going right -" Gil's guitar playing can be clearly heard, as can the significant traces of Caribbean influence. 

Finally, all the rediscovered songs reveal a phase in Gil's career that the singer himself feared had been lost in the mists of time. In other words, this was the one small piece needed to complete Gilberto Gil's work.