There was a moment during his show at Massey Hall, when Gilberto Gil, sitting alone on the stage, bathed in white light, relaxedly playing his acoustic guitar, found the relationship to the audience that made the show. Gil has been numbered among the musical masters, one of the world’s great musicians since he released the single of “Aquele Abraço” almost 40 years ago, in 1969. That’s long enough for the infectious, up-tempo love song to Brazil to seep into the minds and hearts of every Brazilian; and on a cold night in Toronto, it was the first song to find its way to the lips of every brasileiro in the audience.
The Brazilian relationship to music is not the same as Canada’s, or really much of anywhere in the world. There’s nothing unusual about a song in Brazil that mentions Brazil, or some part of Brazil fifteen times, without irony, although Brazilians themselves are anything but unironic about their country. In Brazil, it is said that Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be…every Brazilian knows this, from the poorest favela kid to the Minister of Culture.
Brazil is music, although it’s a lot of other things, too. Aquele Abraço – literally “that embrace” is about a love of the country – and in this case specifically, Rio – that Brazilians have that is indistinguishable from the love they have of their music: in a way, every Brazilian can carry Brazil with them in song. So when Gil called out, “E um abraço pra tudos os Brasileiros em Toronto” – and an hug for all the Brazilians in Toronto – Gil and his Brazilian dominated audience were one.
Gilberto Gil has been playing since he was 8, about 56 years now. He reminded us of his age when, three or so songs in, he delivered a beautiful samba of McCartney’s “When I’m 64”, sung in the sweet accented English of Brazil. ‘64’ was released just a couple of years earlier than Aquele Abraço, and although probably no-one in London would have known of “Abraço” in the year it was released, it was a huge hit in Brazil. 1969 was the same year that Gil, and his somewhat more famous compatriot and frequent musical collaborator, Caetano Veloso found themselves in exile in England, after having been detained by Brazil’s increasingly despotic and violent military dictatorship. That exile was a lucky misfortune, and another step in the process of voraciously absorbing cultures that Veloso and Gil had pioneered with ‘Tropicalismo’, a musical movement that attempted a radical incorporation of influences both traditional and pop, local, national and international, that Veloso and Gil had become national celebrities for at the time of their arrest. It was that, and Tropicalismo’s radical criticism of both the military government, and of ideas of purity in culture that contributed to their problems of the time. So Gil’s delivery of the Beatles’ hit was, early in the night, a statement of the sweep of material that he would take on, as well as a poignant reminder of the distance that lies between that radical time and now.
Of course, North America is rife with musicians of that era, once, and in a few cases still with a radical edge, but not above parading the old hits for a mass audience that couldn’t care less about their Nixon era politics. Mind you, none of them have, as Gilberto Gil has, become Minister of Culture of their federal government; making Gil simultaneously the thinnest and coolest, to say nothing of the most talented Minister of Culture anywhere.
Even for those without portuguese, Gil, however, provided a great deal to love. It’s unlikely that for any Canadians but fans, much of the material he covered would have been familiar, apart from When I’m 64, until his gorgeous, affecting version of “No Woman No Cry”. But the sweet, strong and sensitive Bossa Nova guitar that he played for much of the evening would be familiar, and very much the sound that many would think of first when asked to describe Brazilian music. Bossa Nova has its roots in the Rio de Janeiro middle class of the mid fifties, but Gil is from Bahia, something makes all the difference. Bahia is less about the coolness of Bossa, but its originator, the astounding Joao Gilberto, with whom many people misidentify Gilberto Gil, is also a Baiano, and Gil’s first group, Os Desafinados was named for one of Joao Gilberto’s first huge Bossa hits: Gil himself started out with that group as a Bossa Nova guitarist, which necessarily meant that Joao Gilberto had the status of living god to him. Throughout the evening, that background kept returning in the fluent, lovely, stripped down bossa rhythms that Gilberto Gil played.
But for the Bob Marley hit, Gil broke out of the bossa style, as he did from time to time throughout the evening, in that case giving props to another superstar of african origin, who is sometimes like Gil, thought of more for his songwriting than his mastery of his instrument. Salvador, Bahia is a strongly African city whose origins are sugar cane and the slave trade, and there is a very direct connection between it, along with the entire north east of Brazil, to the caribbean. That’s certainly part of why Gil has become such a noted, and capable interpreter of Marley, having translated, recorded and performed many of his songs. So on the night at Massey Hall, he moved between Portuguese and English, “everything’s gonna be alright” becoming “todo todo todo vai bem bem”, and all sides singing along.
The staccato repetition of syllables has always been part of Gil’s unique vocal/lyrical approach, along with piercing falsetto lyrical flights that he still pulls off convincingly. Even if once in a while he misses the high note, or drops a chord, a great deal of this can be put down to the fact that Gilberto Gil is, indeed a Minister for the Government of 180 million people: music is not his focus these days. But as he said to the audience, “Back there, its politics: here, it’s Music”
Gil, as a lyricist, has the tendency to move in to a weird but often successful kind of philosophical pop, where lyrics become discussions or at times manifestos of Gil’s beliefs about poetry, science, herbal remedies, the internet, myth and truth. ‘Metafora’ was one of these, and while the lyrics are a little leaden even in portuguese, Gil’s extraordinary soulfulness, and lyrical delivery saves everything.
More of the material was of the other kinds that Gil is the master of: hook-laden samba based tunes, like his interpretation of Adriana Calconhotto’s ‘Marina Morena’. Or his Tropicalismo hit, ‘Maracatu Atómico’. ‘Samba de Los Angeles’, he explained, was about time spent in Los Angeles. My portuguese wasn’t good enough to catch when specifically, but the song was on his breakout album ‘Nightingale’ that brought him to a broader North American audience – one that seems to evade him a little here in Toronto. Palco, was another early hit he played; along with Tempo Rei (King Time), Superhomem – A Cançao (Superman – the Song). The close out, at the end of a long and satisfying encore, was “Toda Menina Baiana”, another masterpiece of Gil’s, and delivered in a driving, convincing way that, in a place other than the Massey Hall, would have had everyone up and dancing.
While much of the material was older, Gil seems neither stuck in the past, nor dismissive of it. This was no nostalgia tour, but it did have the fascinating aspect of watching this master player reinterpret material from four decades, in the bossa style that he first mastered, that he later helped turn on its head during Tropicalismo.
This isn’t surprising: in his autobiography, Tropical Truth, Caetano Veloso emphasizes the love and admiration that he and the other Tropicalistas had for Joao Gilberto, the ultimate bossa musician. Joao in his own turn, was a master of the earlier Samba Cançao style of samba before radicalizing it with his infinitely flexible Bossa Nova. Gil also found his way into styles like Reconcavo, a more african sound that originates in Bahia, as well as sounding at times like his peer in Brazil, Jorge Ben, another guitar virtuoso.
Music in Brazil tends to continually redigest and reexamine the past in terms of its present. Rhythms – samba, maracatu, forró, afoxé and many others – endure . Old songs return; the latest pop artists forever return to octogenarian sambistas to learn and enrich each other. Gil is the latest of these, returning to himself, and the products of an astounding career.
Despite this, he remains a little less well known here than he might be. Following his ‘Maracatu Atómico’, Gil played “Outros Viram”: literally ‘Others Came’. In it a parade of past visitors to Brazil is named, from Teddy Roosevelt to Mayakovsky, each reported to admire various aspects of Brazil. This is another of Gil’s philosophical songs, but the one where it didn’t seem quite right: the only wrong note that he didn’t quite recover from. Something in the song tells more than he might think about the anxiety that Brazilians feel in the world; largely ignored by the North American/European culture they are so acutely aware of, hungry for outside approval, but amazingly integral, flexible and, in short, beautiful in themselves and their own culture: what the 27 year old Gilberto Gil must have been, in London in 1969, hearing the Beatles singing “When I’m 64”, and reflecting on his string of hits and adoring audiences back home that no-one had an inkling of in the place he found himself. Like Marley, Gil is a radical and a critic, besides an astounding musician and lyricist, who remains unfairly bound in the mind of North Americans in the shackles of ‘world music’.
Those who were there on Thursday saw the shackles fall off, and one of the world’s great musical voices, world or otherwise step forward and take absolute, beautiful control af a magic evening. Let’s hope more can free their minds as Gil continues his tour.
