Music has surrounded Gilberto Gil's life since his childhood, when at the age of three he told his mother that, when he grew up, he wanted to be a musician and father. His wish was fulfilled with an immense, oceanic career, almost as extensive as his family of eight children, numerous grandchildren and some great-grandchildren already.
A troupe united by the blood and music that Gil, singer, guitarist, composer and former Minister of Culture of Brazil, took with him on tour to share experiences and enjoy on stage the mix of genres that characterize the concerts of the considered father of tropicalism and icon of Brazilian popular music. “It was my daughter Preta María who suggested I do the tour,” Gil recalls from Zurich while searching for words in Spanish to explain his story. “She is a professional singer in Brazil, but she had never traveled through Europe with us and she really wanted to do it the way she did, with the other brothers and nephews.”
After taking the whole family with him last year, on a tour that passed through Barcelona, this 2023 Gil returns to the city to perform tomorrow Saturday in the Fòrum auditorium, within the Mil·lenni Festival. Club Vanguardia members have a 15% discount if they purchase tickets through the website. He does it accompanied by two of his children, a grandson and a granddaughter on the tour Aquele abraço, like the samba that he composed as a farewell before leaving Brazil in 1969 for London, expelled by the dictatorship. “It is a very emblematic expression, and one of the best-known and most popular songs. Furthermore, it is a samba, which also represents the most valuable genre of all popular music in Brazil.”
Together with his companion in battle, Caetano Veloso, Gil lived an exile in which he changed the silence intended by the dictatorship, converting it into connections with the music that permeated the English capital in those years, with Hendrix, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Sounds that he brought back to his country by adding the electric guitar to popular music. “It is one of the lucks of existence, a negative thing that becomes something positive,” he explains. “They wanted to silence me, but they allowed me to do something that further amplifies the power of the music I make.”
The result of this work is the broad presence of Latin American popular music throughout the world, “with the very strong influence of black people, of people of African origin,” he highlights. “My generation, the one that started working in the 50s and 60s, has been very influential for music around the world, I can consider myself part of this process of general dissemination of popular music.”
Author of more than 50 albums, Gilberto Gil has always carried music hand in hand with social commitment, and he held the Culture portfolio during Lula da Silva's first term (2003-2008). “Every human act, every action protected by intelligence, spirit, language, forms of communication in general, all of that is political,” explains Gil about the relationship between music and society.
This social concern includes the environment, “for many years now we have warned about the influence of El Niño and La Niña, climate phenomena that are now more dramatic and more relevant,” he recalls. From this human perspective, art “is transformed into political content that helps the discussion about citizenship, to be active in social and collective life. Although it is something more spiritual, music can be considered influential in the changes, in the continuity of vital processes.”
At 81 years old, and far from giving up, Gil dares to do anything, whether it be a “reality” documentary like the one he starred in with his family (At home with the Gil family, 2022), or participation in the opera Amor Azul, created and written by Gil and Aldo Brizzi, which was presented at the end of last year in Paris. “It has been almost three years of work to present the opera, the objective is to finish the complete scenic part in two years,” he comments on a work based on the Guitá Govinda, an epic and romantic poem from the 13th century about the relationship of Krishna and Radha. . “As a musician and as a natural admirer of music I already had some knowledge about the subject,” says Gil, to highlight that the proposal that came to him to create the opera included “a popular dimension, for which I am more prepared.”
