When musicians from a certain era are still performing past a certain age, there’s a tendency to believe that we need to lower our expectations: nothing could beat the good old days when all this was new and exciting, but the memories evoked of those times might be powerful enough of a reason to go along anyway.
But when it comes to the legendary Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil, who turned 84 last month, this could not be further from the truth. At a sold-out performance at London’s Roundhouse last week, backed by a band composed of his own children and granddaughter, Gil gave the energy of someone singing each song as if it were the first performance, his voice every bit as powerful as it was 50 years ago. Take it from somebody who wasn’t even alive 50 years ago: there was no time to think about the past. The most exciting thing was happening right there in the room.
Part of this will come from the nature of the music itself. Gil’s career began in the 1960s, and, like so many folk musicians of that era, he sees his trade as essentially one of free, collective endeavour: a thing shared and built upon by many people over an extended period, where traditions are respected but, at the same time, nothing is off limits. Over the decades, Gil’s own sound has evolved from Brazilian folk and samba into reggae and rock, and while the music is always unmistakeably his—not least for that cantering voice!—it never feels as though it belongs to another age.
Any introduction to an artist like Gil can only be partial—a bit like beginning a piece on the Beatles by referring to them as “a hugely successful band from Liverpool”—but it also feels sadly necessary. Despite millions of worldwide sales, some 100 releases and several Grammys to his name, the anglosphere’s tendency to overlook non-anglophone artists means Gil remains a relatively obscure figure in this country.
While the music is always unmistakeably Gil’s, it never feels like it belongs to another age
Gil is still releasing new music, but notably this performance—supported by the British Council through the UK/Brazil Season of Culture initiative—was largely a selection of greatest hits and iconic Brazilian numbers, many of them not Gil’s own. Playing the part of cipher for understanding an entire culture can be risky territory for any musician, but Gil has a greater claim to it than most. Not only is his work still hugely influential to Brazilian music, but he also served as culture secretary in Lula’s first administration in the early 2000s; he is, quite literally, an elder statesman.
And so it was in this spirit of representation—and in between some of his own foot-tapping numbers, such as “Expresso 2222” and “Palco”—that Gil gave an interlude of samba tracks, the point being to highlight the diverse range of a genre that can sometimes be unfairly dismissed as mere elevator muzak. It’s true that one of samba’s most obvious qualities is its smoothness: rolling drumbeats, satisfying guitar harmonies, hushed singing voices. There aren’t really any crescendos in a samba song, no climaxes or buildup to the big moment. The experience is more like a long, sauntering journey where you end up right back where you started—but this is part of the magic, as if to suggest here is where you’re meant to be.
One of those songs, “Garota de Ipanema”, composed by Antônio Carlos Jobim with lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes—easily the most famous bossa nova track in the world, covered in English by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald—Gil performed as a moving duet with his granddaughter Flor. Emblematic of a tradition certainly, rich in saudade regardless of language, but also a classic example of the limits of translation. In Moraes’s original Portuguese chorus there is something of a mutual loneliness between the onlooker of the girl walking by and the girl herself: “A beleza que não é só minha / Que também passa sozinha” (“The beauty that is not only mine / That also passes by alone”). In the English rendition, this is changed to be more exclusively within the eye of the beholder: “But each day when she walks to the sea / She looks straight ahead not at me.”
Longing is not an incidental sentiment for Gil, and neither is London as a place. He spent the late 1960s and early 1970s here in exile from Brazil’s military dictatorship, and it was here he discovered the likes of Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles, which led to a more rock ’n’ roll texture emerging in his work. One of the songs played last week, “Back in Bahia” (note the English title), was written as a defiant antidote to homesickness, with riffs straight out of Chuck Berry; played now, back in the city it was composed, it becomes an unusual ode of gratitude to that very place away from home.
Yet while longing is an endlessly inspiring subject for music, Gil also knows that a performer who longs for something better than the here and now will never put on a good show. Starting the gig sat down with his guitar and ending it dancing across the stage, he seemed to grow younger with every number he played: and in this he brought his audience, raucous and also dancing, to a realisation. There is no such thing as a golden age—and the best music you’ve ever listened to is the music you’re listening to right now.
