Gilberto Gil (Frevo Rasgado)

Performer: Gilberto Gil
Distributor: MSI Music Distribution

Notes: Includes 3 bonus tracks. Brazilian singer-songwriter and Tropicalia pioneer Gilberto Gil made his self-titled 1971 album during the period when he and compatriot Caetano Veloso were political exiles in England. Like Veloso's contemporaneous work, the album is balanced between hippie-era optimism and a melancholy longing for home (the latter exemplified most obviously in a cover of the Blind Faith song "Can't Find My Way Home"). A mostly acoustic affair (except for the full-band rave-up of the tongue-in-cheek "Crazy Pop Rock"), the album mixes modified bossa nova rhythms with folk-rock influences and a pronounced psychedelic side (see "Three Mushrooms" and the bonus-track live versions of Hendrix and Beatles tunes). By 1968, the Brazilian Tropicalia movement was well under way. Young upstarts like the genre-bending Os Mutantes and the provocative chanteuse Gal Costa had released landmark full-lengths, while Jorge Ben, the elder statesman of Brazilian pop, demonstrated his support of Tropicalia with the lush, psychedelic JORGE BEN. Also in 1968, Gilberto Gil released his second full-length, GILBERTO GIL (FREVO RASGADO), a multi-hued concoction that married samba rhythms to the far-out sonic experimentation then being pioneered by Pink Floyd and the Beatles. Though the mournful orchestration and whispered vocals of tunes like the celebratory "Domingo No Parque" and the lovestruck "Luiza Luluza" are perhaps a shade more well mannered than the unrestrained cacophony of Gilberto's debut, they must have seemed nothing less than revolutionary to the young people of Brazil. Gil's sophomore outing is one of the high points of his career and represents a vital chapter in Brazilian musical history.

With a career that dates back to the early 1960s, Gilberto Gil is one of the major innovators of Brazilian pop. A founder of the Tropicalia movement, he has embraced a huge variety of influences, from traditional regional styles of the Brazilian Northeast to jazz, reggae, disco, rock, and African music. Romantic, political, and downright funky, Gil always has an eye on both the past and the future.

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