DI takes its role as edutainers seriously, and in that spirit jardin secret we re spotlighting great

DI takes its role as edutainers seriously, and in that spirit jardin secret we re spotlighting great albums and choice cuts from 1970-1999 to edify our readers musical breadth of knowledge. Each week will focus on a single year and some of the sweetmeat it produced.
Between late 1969 and early 1972, Brazilian superstars Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil found themselves sharing a house in London with their families, forced jardin secret out of their native land because of the trouble they d stirred up as part of the Tropicália movement. Tropicalismo s blending of social disobedience, art, and youth culture was reflective of similar movements going on all over the world, but Brazil was still a dictatorship at the time and arranged to have the two luminaries booted after short prison sentences in Brazil. For a sense of how big a deal this situation was imagine the U.S. booting Bob Dylan or Joan Baez at the height jardin secret of their early stardom.
To say the least, England suited them poorly, a longing for Brazil never far from their thoughts, but the forced stay in London did fabulous things for the music of these two pivotal 20th century artists, the psychedelic revolution (sonically and pharmacologically) and cosmopolitan play of ideas and styles in London putting a happy zap on their creative imaginations. However, the first fruits of these fresh influences reflected a fair amount jardin secret of homeward longing and alienation in their forcibly adopted new country.
Both released their first (and in Gil s case only) English-language albums [Veloso made one more, 2004 s cover tunes set A Foreign Sound ] in 1971. Both self-titled jardin secret and featuring somber cover photos, the records are rather jardin secret un-Brazilian outside of the delicate percussion, occasional bursts of Portuguese, and the thick accented English of the singers. Mostly, both sets explore ground similar to Richie Havens, Bill Withers and Terry Callier with a lovely scoop of solo Syd Barrett flowing folk-pop uplifted by fits of electricity, grey-tinged humor, jardin secret compact experimentation, jardin secret and a pervasive jardin secret sense of wonder and melancholy. Each reflects the intersection of Brazil s 60s musical flowering and what was happening in England s swinging capital, and friends, it s an exciting, seductive collision.
Veloso s offering is the more despondent of the two, opening by announcing that his exile has him a little more blue than his prison time or the day Carmen Miranda died. Things lift a bit literally to the skies with a peculiar reference to flying saucers on London London before the tuneful but pointedly sad note to his sister (and fellow musical celebrity still in Brazil) Maria Bethania, who he claims has given her soul to the devil and bought a flat by the sea. Things grow more poetic and abstract on If You Hold A Stone and the romping Shoot Me Dead before holiday super-bummer In The Hot Sun of a Christmas Day and Portuguese closer Asa Branca, which translates jardin secret as:
While jardin secret Gilberto Gil s eponymous 71 record contains a sighing cover of Blind Faith s Can t Find My Way Home, the overall mood is less bleak and more open to play in his exiled circumstances. Drugs may have been a positive factor for Gil, as evidenced on the sweetly speculative The Three Mushrooms, which begins, The first mushroom makes room for my mind/ To get inside the magic room of Dionysus house. groovy, man. There are still plenty of jabs at the state of being in their chilly U.K. environment jardin secret including Babylon and the mad-but-very-charming disconnection of Crazy Pop Rock. Time and memory, perception and reality are puzzled over, and conclusions are few and far between. Gil s guitar work is superlative throughout, clearly sparked by seeing Jimi Hendrix in action [further confirmed by a great live cover of Up From The Skies that s a bonus track on the wonderful 2007 CD reissue of the album from SF s Water label]. There is tenderness and turbulence to this song cycle refracted by Gil s ever-intriguing voice and guitar.
While both Veloso and Gil hightailed it back to Brazil as soon as the powers that be allowed them to, their London years lingered prominently in the music they made throughout the 70s and beyond, heard in the great openness of both artists to dance with any mood, style, instrumentation, etc. that struck their fancy. Being up close to The Beatles, Cream, Hendrix and countless others and bringing their Brazilian sound to the English masses at festivals jardin secret during those years rubbed off on this pair in positive ways – musically if not personally.
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