Music has surrounded Gilberto Gil’s life since childhood, when at the age of three he told his mother that, when he grew up, he wanted to be a musician and a father. His wish was fulfilled with an immense, oceanic career, almost as large as his family of eight children, many grandchildren and some great-grandchildren already. A troupe united by blood and music that Gil, singer, guitarist, composer and former Minister of Culture of Brazil, took on tour to share experiences and enjoy on stage the mix of genres that characterize the concerts of what considered the father of tropicalism and an icon of Brazilian popular music. “It was my daughter Preta María who suggested I do the tour,” recalls Gil from Zurich as he searches for the words in Spanish to tell his story. “She is a professional singer in Brazil, but she had never traveled through Europe with us and she really wanted to, as it was, 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 at the Fòrum auditorium, as part of the Millennium Festival. He performs accompanied by two of his children, a grandson and a granddaughter in the Aquele tour, like the samba he composed as a farewell before leaving Brazil in 1969 for London, expelled by the dictatorship. “It’s a very emblematic expression, and one of the best-known and most popular songs. In addition, it is a samba, which also represents the most valuable genre of all popular music in Brazil.”
With his comrade in arms, Caetano Veloso, Gil lived an exile in which he changed the silence intended by the dictatorship and turned it into connections with the music that permeated the English capital in those years, with Hendrix, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones Stones. Sounds he brought back to his country by adding the electric guitar to popular music. “It’s one of the lucks of existence, a negative thing that transforms into a positive thing”, he explains. “They wanted to silence me, but they allowed me to do something that amplifies the strength of the music I make”.
The result of this work is the wide presence of popular Latin American music around the world, “with the very strong influence of black people, of people of African origin”, he points out. “My generation, the one that started working in the fifties and sixties, has been very influential for music around the world, I can consider myself part of this process of general diffusion of popular music”.
Author of more than 50 albums, Gilberto Gil has always brought music hand in hand with social commitment, and even held the portfolio of Culture 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 this is political”, explains Gil about the relationship between music and society.
This social concern includes the environment, “for many years we have been warning of the influence of El Niño and La Niña, climatic 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. Even if it is a little more spiritual, music can be considered influential in changes, in the continuity of life processes”.
