The Brazilian musician and his thousand lives was in Brussels on Monday for a farewell tour. An emotional meeting with a musical institution that has been spreading the influence of Brazilian popular music around the world for more than fifty years.
Gilberto Gil © Hallit
"When they told me I was going to open for Gilberto Gil, I burst into tears". The emotion was palpable at the Cirque Royal in Brussels on Monday, both on stage and in the crowd, as they welcomed the legendary Gilberto Gil. This ambassador of Brazil's tropicalist movement came to present his compositions for the last time, which he described in impeccable French as "pas orthodoxes". A work that reflects the life of this artist from Bahia, who revolutionized popular music in his country.
Shortly after 8pm, 81-year-old Gilberto Gil calmly took his place in the middle of the stage, armed with his guitar, and launched into Expresso 2222, which was taken up by an appreciative Brussels audience. An intergenerational and multicultural audience, reflecting the universal scope of Gil's repertoire. With total mastery of his art, he delights the audience with his bewildering guitar and vocal notes. For over two hours, Gilberto Gil will show us the power of his voice, recognizable from miles away, and capable of surprising us with its unexpected turns.
The musician offers us a generous first part of his concert, centered on samba, bossa nova and baião. He sings tracks of his fellow musicians, reconstructing for a moment the galaxy of brilliant Brazilian artists of his generation. Of course, he covers his stage and exile companion, Caetano Veloso, who came to visit us a month earlier, but also another legend of tropicalism, Gal Costa, who died last year. The artist fully embraces his status as grandfather of Brazilian popular music, which he intends to show as powerful, complex and rich. Gilberto Gil takes this duty of transmission to heart, and doesn't hesitate to step aside at times to let his musicians shine, whom he then introduces as his "grandchildren". This benevolence is further expressed when he decides to play the guitar for Flora, his pianist, as she performs the Brazilian classic A Garota de Ipanema and the delightful Moon River from the film "Breakfast at Tiffany's".
Gilberto Gil © Hallit
As an ambassador of tropicalism, Gilberto Gil asserts the anthropophagy characteristic of this artistic movement. This musical cannibalism, this way of assimilating foreign rhythms and incorporating them into the Brazilian corpus, becomes particularly apparent in the second half of the concert. Gilberto Gil swaps his acoustic guitar for an electric one, and shows us the eclecticism of his catalog, inspired by his exile in London in the late 60s. He talks modestly about his arrest by the Brazilian military dictatorship and his months of imprisonment. "It wasn't very long, but it was more than enough," he says with a touch of humor. Forced to leave, uprooted, he went into exile in London, an interlude that reinforced his tropicalist anthropophagy. There, he collaborated with some of the greatest: Pink Floyd, Yes, Miles Davis and Jimmy Cliff, incorporating elements of reggae, jazz and rock into his work. With Cliff, he worked on a Portuguese cover of the Bob Marley standard, No woman, no cry. His version, which became Não chore mais, delighted the audience.
Tropicalism, repressed by the dictatorship, is full of humanity and spirituality. This avant-garde movement inevitably became a political commitment. Gilberto Gil, an environmental activist since the 80s, was appointed Minister of Culture during Lula's first term in office. He happily mixed his artistic career with a commitment at the highest level of government. Gilberto Gil created an anthological scene at the UN, where he sang, accompanied by Kofi Annan on percussion, for a room filled with ecstatic diplomats. For the Brussels concert, he chose to perform a song in French, Touche pas à mon pote, written especially for a charity concert for the "SOS Racisme" NGO.
Gilberto Gil then went on to perform all his greatest classics, to the delight of the audience, who gradually got up to dance. Aquele abraço, Toda menina baiana, Esperando na janela, Andar com fe, Esoterico... He never misses a beat. The audience gave him a standing ovation that lasted several minutes, and you could feel Gilberto struggling to leave the stage. Leaving the Cirque Royal, I feel as if I've sailed through the musical history of Brazil, led by a tender, sincere and generous captain. However, I can't help but feel a touch of nostalgia for this huge artist's farewell tour. Nostalgia for this glorious parenthesis of Latin American music that is slowly coming to an end. A committed, universalist music, a music for freedom.
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