Brazil's voice, and its soul

By Hector Tobar

Oct. 27, 2002 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Rio de Janeiro — Caetano Veloso has been called “the Bob Dylan of Brazil,” and on this day there is something definitely Dylanesque about his appearance. He enters the room with a messy mop of salt-and-pepper hair, dark Moorish eyes and jeans that cling tenuously to his skinny frame.

It’s the end of a long working day. A Rio sunset shimmers through the windows of his production office, tropical hills bathed in tangerine light, the sky painted various hues of violet. The artist looks a bit worn out. You could even say Caetano Veloso looks bored -- though he would really prefer you didn’t.

The last time Veloso revealed as much to an interviewer, it set off a nationwide controversy. “I am bored by Brazil,” he said. In the days that followed, newspaper columnists, politicians and critics all weighed in on what he could have possibly meant.

It was like hearing Bruce Springsteen say, “I am bored by New Jersey,” or Woody Guthrie say, “I am bored by being American,” because to millions of people here and elsewhere Veloso has helped define what it means to be Brazilian.

For more than three decades, Veloso has told the story of his country in songs, in marchinhas (little marches) about the Flamengo beach in Rio, in gentle ballads about the “concrete poets” of Sao Paulo, and sambas about the celebrations in Salvador on Emancipation Day -- almost 40 albums in all, and hundreds of songs.

“What I meant was that I was bored of Brazil as a theme, that I just didn’t want to do things where I always had to pick up the story of Brazil,” he says by way of explanation. And, anyways, it was only a momentary hesitation. The music he brings to UCLA’s Royce Hall on Tuesday and Wednesday -- is inspired, precisely, by Brazil and the crime at the heart of its 500-year history.

The idea for “Noites do Norte” (Northern Nights) came to Veloso the same way his artistic inspirations usually hit him: A friend gave him a book to read, an intellectual problem to ponder. He quickly became unbored with Brazil as he devoured “Minha Formacao” (My Formation), a memoir by 19th century abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco.

“As I read it I started thinking again about the central, the key aspect to grasp the phenomenon of Brazil, which is race,” Veloso says in fluent English. “I wanted other people to listen to what he had written. Because in fact what we need to talk about in Brazil is a second abolition [of slavery], and he was one of the first people to see this.”

Spend time in the company of Caetano Veloso, the 60-year-old thinker-troubadour of this country, and you realize that ideas are what drive him. Talk to him about a book, about the thinking behind an especially complex musical composition, and you will see that famous, seductive gleam return to his eyes.

Once upon a time, before he became a pop star, he was a gaunt and restless young man who studied philosophy at the Federal University of Bahia. He dreamed of being a painter or a filmmaker.

Since then, Veloso has made a career of creating art from his country’s vast encyclopedia of sound and imagery. Using his prodigious talents as a songwriter, he has transformed this cultural raw material into a musical oeuvre all his own, music that questions, and delights in, all the contradictions that come with being Brazilian.

What’s more, he’s stayed in the vanguard of Brazilian music for three decades, winning a Grammy in 2000 for his critically acclaimed album “Livro” and another the following year for co-producing an album by his childhood musical hero, Joao Gilberto.

And Veloso is wildly prolific. In the past three years, he has released the soundtrack to “Orfeu” (an updated version of “Black Orpheus”); a homage to Federico Fellini inspired by the music of Nino Rota; the two-disc “Noites do Norte” recording; “Live in Bahia” (another double-CD package); and his latest, a collaboration with fellow artist-thinker Jorge Mautner.

“There is no way to talk about Brazilian music without thinking about Caetano, without talking about Caetano’s generation,” says Antonio Miguel, music critic at the Rio daily newspaper O Globo. In the late 1960s, Veloso helped lead a movement that revitalized Brazilian popular music by infusing it with a potpourri of British pop, regional music from a variety of Latin American sub- cultures and a big dose of hippie attitude.

“Over the decades he’s kept on reinventing himself,” Miguel continues. “He’s always incorporating new musical elements without losing his essence, which is that of a young guy from the interior of Bahia, and of a man with a great sense of culture, and a passion for popular culture.”

A musical revolutionary

Veloso catches sight of the book a reporter has brought to the interview, a review copy of the English translation of his memoir, “Tropical Truth.” Thanks to the vagaries of the American publishing business, The Times has received a copy before he has.

He takes the book and examines the cover photograph. It shows a line of young people in bohemian garb and holding various props, including a feather duster and an umbrella, a sort of Brazilian version of “Sgt. Pepper.”

“It was in 1969,” he says. “About a week before we left Brazil to live in London. You know, in exile.”

Veloso and several other people in the photograph helped launch a pop music revolution in Brazil that was inspired, in part, by the Beatles. Unlike the Fab Four, however, Veloso and his friends were driven out of their country for doing so.

The new brand of music -- created by Veloso with Gilberto Gil and other collaborators -- came to be known as “tropicalia” and the ideas behind it “tropicalismo.” The birth of tropicalia is detailed at length in “Tropical Truth” (released this month by Knopf), which traces Veloso’s musical formation from his childhood in Bahia to his exile in Britain.

Veloso was a teenager about the same time Elvis films were reaching the movie screen of his provincial hometown. He wasn’t a fan. In the context of 1950s Brazil, Veloso recalls, listening to Elvis made you a conformist -- wannabe Americans listened to him. And Veloso’s sharp musical ear couldn’t help but notice that the guitar on “Love Me Tender” was badly out of tune.

Instead, what really excited Veloso the teenager were the silky, sophisticated melodies of a bossa nova, and its founder, Joao Gilberto, who fused traditional Brazilian samba with jazz.

Veloso would become a bossa nova singer. In his early 20s he won a nationwide songwriting contest and moved to Sao Paulo to begin a music career.

Thrown into the vibrant cultural milieu of Sao Paulo -- arguably the Southern Hemisphere’s best imitation of New York City -- Veloso watched the films of Jean-Luc Godard and went to exhibitions by Brazil’s growing circle of avant-garde painters. After watching one especially raw and angry movie of the Brazilian Cinema Novo school, he decided he needed to do something equally subversive in his own art.

So he sat down and started to write music that tossed aside bossa nova’s conventions. In its place came tropicalia, which embraced much that “refined” Brazilian popular music hated.

“We were trying to work with what was considered rubbish,” Caetano says as he closes the book. “Argentine tangos, Cuban and Mexican boleros, music that was considered kitsch, too sentimental. And a Brazilian imitation of rock-ish international pop too. None of this was respected by people who supposedly worked with good, high-quality popular music.”

At the first public presentation of a tropicalia song -- at a Sao Paulo music festival -- Veloso startled the audience by forgoing the usual tuxedo for a checkered brown suit and bright orange turtleneck. More shocking, he had an Argentine rock band behind him.

On the surface, Veloso’s songs were seemingly playful and innocuous -- they included references to things like Esso gas stations and Brigitte Bardot. But under the surface, there was a bitter rejection of the conformity engendered by Brazil’s military dictatorship.

One morning before dawn, Veloso was arrested by the police at his Sao Paulo apartment and spirited off to jail. The police turned him over to the military. Veloso would spend two Kafkaesque months at a variety of jails without anyone telling him why he was being held.

Finally, he was brought before an especially erudite army captain who said he had been disturbed by an interview in which Veloso had used the word “deconstruct” to describe his music.

“He denounced the insidious subversive power of our work,” Veloso wrote in “Tropical Truth.” “He said he clearly understood that what Gil and I were doing was much more dangerous than the work of artists who were engaged in explicit protest and political activity.”

Soon after, Veloso was released from jail but sent to Bahia, where he had to live under house arrest. The military forced him into exile along with other artists, including Gil.

When he returned in 1972, Brazil had changed dramatically, even though the dictators were still in power. It was slowly becoming a more cosmopolitan society.

Today, after almost 20 years of democracy, Brazil is more culturally confident than ever.

“We used to feel we were at a lower level,” he says. “Now things are almost the opposite. We feel we can invent new things for ourselves. Even when I was very young, Brazilians believed that we are a sad people. That changed from the ‘70s on. Now it’s almost official that we are happy.”

These days, Brazilian artists experiment and expropriate without inhibitions, much like the tropicalistas did a generation ago.

“Sometimes Brazilian popular music has this ambition of being even better than American popular music,” he says. And yet “we are supposed to be a failure. A tropical failure. I love being Brazilian and facing these contradictions. I wouldn’t have preferred being born anywhere else, even though I have suffered for it. I know people who say, ‘Why was I born in such a backward country?’ but I don’t feel that way. I feel I’ve been gifted.”

A nation in turmoil

Outside, it has been one of those normal Rio de Janeiro days of chaos. Just up the hill from Veloso’s office in the neighborhood of Gavea, a group of Greenpeace activists with mountaineering gear has been arrested after climbing the 260-foot tall Christ statue on Corcovado mountain, hanging a protest banner from its arm.

A blimp floats past Jesus. It’s a remote-controlled eye in the sky spying on the lives of people below, the latest police tool in the fight against the city’s rampant lawlessness. A few days later, the crime wave will reach even to the Ipanema neighborhood where Veloso lives with his second wife, Paula Lavigne, and their two young sons. (Veloso splits his time between his apartment here and a home in Bahia.)

The drug dealers who run many of Rio’s poorest neighborhoods will order a citywide day of “protest,” ordering businesses to close in an effort to improve the treatment of crime bosses behind bars. Even the merchants in Ipanema will be forced to comply.

But there are larger issues. The economy is slowing, and Brazil’s foreign debt is reaching critical levels. The country’s currency, the real, is plummeting in value because the financial markets are afraid that a leftist -- Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva -- is about to be elected president. (The runoff is today.)

Veloso, who made no endorsement in this election, says he feels apprehensive about the future. “In the end, what we all want and need is a transformation of this inhuman distribution of wealth.”

Millions of poor and disenfranchised people are still pressing for change. More and more black Brazilians talk about recovering their cidadania (citizenship) and fighting exclusao, discrimination. For the first time in Brazilian history, there is an affirmative- action movement.

Veloso’s time in jail during the dictatorship opened his eyes to some of the grimmer aspects of Brazilian racism. In “Tropical Truth” he writes about seeing firsthand that a dark-skinned man is much more likely to be tortured than a light-skinned man, a reality that persists today in Brazilian prisons.

It is one of the many paradoxes of race in Brazil. Like other corners of the Americas, it has a clear racial hierarchy that confers status to those of European descent. At the same time, the races mix more freely here than almost anywhere else.

“In the USA, if you’re not entirely white, then you’re black,” Veloso observes. “It has never been like that in Brazil. Here most people believe that everybody has at least one drop of black blood in their veins. It’s part of our national myth.”

In “Minha Formacao,” Nabuco muses on these contradictions. Even when slavery existed, the categories were not as rigid as they were in the United States.

“A black slave could buy his freedom,” Veloso says. “And once free he was like any other free person. He could even buy a baby slave that might be the child of his ex-master.”

“Minha Formacao” set Veloso to thinking about modern black identity in Brazil, and eventually took him to the streets of Bahia and a collaboration with some of the city’s young, hip-hop-loving drummers. On the title track of “Noites do Norte” -- whose lyrics come entirely from a paragraph in Nabuco’s book -- drums filter in and out of a string-orchestra arrangement.

Slavery, Veloso sings, “breathed into the land its childish spirit, its sadness without substance, its tears without bitterness, its unfocused silence.... “

The subject of race touches on many topics for Veloso, even on the question of his age. He just turned 60 and is of the same generation as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who are touring the United States, enduring the usual questions about whether they are too old to be rock ‘n’ roll stars. Veloso doesn’t understand why.

“Think about black artists like James Brown or Little Richard. I never hear people saying to them, ‘You’re too old to move your hips, or whatever.’ If you’re white, it’s different. I think it has to do with the aspect of self-disrespect that rock ‘n’ roll includes. It’s not acceptable for the mature white man.”

Veloso considers this for a moment and then says, “Let them rock.”

As for himself, he adds, “I’m not black or white. I’m both.”

The L.A. visit

Who: Caetano Veloso

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday

Where: UCLA’s Royce Hall

Price: $60, $55, $45; $20, students

Times staff writer Paula Gobbi contributed to this report.