The legendary Gilberto Gil makes his Disney Hall debut
Gilberto Gil makes his debut at Disney Hall Tuesday night. There was a time and place in which pop music was a revolution. In Brazil, in the late 1960s, Gilberto Gil was a rising pop star, the leader of the ambitious and culturally voracious Tropicália “Afro power” movement that infused traditional rhythms from the rural northeast of the nation with psychedelia, poetry, and art rock. When the Gil and his “Tropicalistas” plugged in and played rock n’ roll rhythms at a São Paulo song festival in 1967, it was an unheard of act of rebellion. The crowd jeered, but Gil’s popularity soared: his music was a jolt heard not only throughout Brazil but the region and the world. Two years later, the military regime imprisoned Gil. Upon his release, he lived in exile until 1972, when he returned as a cultural hero and continued a career in which he covered as much artistic and stylistic ground as any artist in the world for the next four decades – his only interruption in musical output coming when he became the first black Brazilian appointed to the nation’s cabinet, serving as cultural minister from 2003 to 2008. As poet Torquato Neto once noted, “There are many ways to sing and make…
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