{"id":90118,"date":"2021-10-18T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/gilberto-gil-renaissances-africaines\/"},"modified":"2021-10-18T18:30:41","modified_gmt":"2021-10-18T16:30:41","slug":"gilberto-gil-african-renaissance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/gilberto-gil-african-renaissance\/","title":{"rendered":"Gilberto Gil: African Renaissance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For the artist from Salvador de Bahia, the ties to Africa have always been one of the driving forces behind his creative process and his political commitment. PAM focuses on this fruitful long-term relationship.<\/strong> Listen to the associated playlist on\u00a0Getup<\/a>.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Erected for 50,000 people from all over the world, the Festac 77 buildings were reminiscent of BNH social housing in Salvador de Bahia, with its cramped apartments constructed at the beginning of the 1960s to lodge the inhabitants of the favelas. This, at least, was the impression made on the singer and composer from Bahia, Gilberto Gil, when he arrived in Lagos in 1977 to represent Brazil at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts. This observation, point of departure for the artist\u2019s reflection on Black culture in an urban setting, influenced Gilberto Gil\u2019s work for the decades to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Already called Gil when he launched his career at the beginning of the 1960s, he described a rural world with subtlety, but did not seem to be particularly preoccupied with social issues. After his birth in Salvador in 1942, his family had returned to live in Itua\u00e7u, a small village in the sert\u00e3o, where he soon showed interest in learning the accordion. The son of a doctor and a teacher, the young Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira did not endure racism or discrimination during his childhood. It is only when he became famous nationally that Gil started to comment on Negritude, first by using the instrument typically associated with capoeira dancing, the berimbau, in the song Domingo no parque<\/a><\/em>. Performed live on TV Record with the group Os Mutantes and with an arrangement by Rog\u00e9rio Duprat, the song came in second at the Third Sao Paulo Popular Song Festival in 1967.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Caetano Veloso & Gilberto Gil, All Rights Reserved.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Tropicalia, Exile, and Black Awareness<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Three years after the military coup d\u2019\u00e9tat, the question of inequality, racism, violence, and civil liberties began to shake up Brazilian society. Boosted by the popularity of the major festivals, the MPB movement – M\u00fasica Popular Brasileira \u2013 in full effervescence, was searching for a new identity. The result was Tropicalia, spearheaded by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. Friends both on and off the stage from the beginning of their careers, the two companions shared the same aesthetic conception of pop music. Along with Tom Z\u00e9 and Os Mustantes, they made the fusion of traditional rhythms and psychedelic sounds the musical manifesto of two intense years of protests against the dictatorship, up to their arrest in 1968 under the pretext of a lack of respect towards the national anthem, and their exile to England the following year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tropic\u00e1lia (2012)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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In London Gilberto Gil went to museums, art galleries, recorded an acoustic album and made friends with counterculture personalities. Along with musicians from Hawkwind, he helped to organize the Ashtonbury Festival. A huge fan of British rock, he followed the careers of the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, from whom he learned precision and economy of means, was excited by Tyrannosaurus Rex, Pink Floyd and The Incredible String Band. This is also where he discovered reggae. In 1971, the Caribbean scene in Notting Hill, embodied by Jimmy Cliff, Burning Spear and Bob Marley, was exploding. \u201cI was fascinated by Rasta culture,\u201d <\/em>he later said. \u201cThis helped me to identify what was African in Brazilian culture.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In England, Gilberto Gil became truly aware of the weight of the problem of racial identity in the world, be it through the civil rights movement in America or the news coming from the African liberation movements. In this global context of the rediscovery and valorization of Negritude, Gil, who started sporting an afro and wearing Black Power clothing, now strove to understand what it meant to be black in a society that denied blacks any historical or cultural individuality. On his return home from exile in 1972, one of his first acts was to parade with the Afox\u00e9 Filhos De Gandhi, keepers of the memory of the carnival of the city of Salvador and followers of the candombl\u00e9 religion, in order to fight the ostracism it suffered from. Recorded the following year, Filhos de Gandhi <\/em>evoked the orix\u00e1s, the entities that connect man with his spirituality, before becoming in 1975 the bravura piece on the double-album Ogum, Xang\u00f4 <\/em>that he improvised during jam sessions with Jorge Ben.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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