How Caetano Veloso Revolutionized Brazil’s Sound and Spirit – The New Yorker

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One by one, the guests got up from the table and returned with their instruments. It was around ten-thirty on a warm, breezy night in December, and at the house of Caetano Veloso, Brazils most celebrated musician, an after-dinner custom was under way. One person came back with a guitar, another with a Brazilian-style ukulele called a cavaquinho, and a third with a tambourine and a tantam drum with a long, thick neck. They sat in a semicircle around a large coffee table in the living room. Behind them, a set of sliding doors had been opened to admit the coastline of Rio de Janeiro. The lights of Leblon Beach dotted the dark bay.

Veloso, who is seventy-nine, cracked a can of Coke, and sat down in a cushioned seat across from the players. He was all in whiteslide-on Vans, checked pants, a shirt buttoned to the neck. In the nineteen-sixties, Veloso looked like a Christ of the counterculture, with curly hair that reached his shoulders. When he was arrested by the military dictatorship, in 1968, for playing music judged to be desvirilizante (literally, de-virilizing), the authorities cut it off. Now his hair is gray and more sparse. His dark-olive complexion has lightened with age, and for years hes worn a pair of wire-framed glasses that give his handsome, birdlike face a look of subdued watchfulness.

The loose Brazilian term for the jam session unfolding in the living room was a roda de samba. Its staple is the samba, an Afro-Brazilian form with a two-four beat. Usually, the musicians remain seated, and are surrounded by dancers who press in close; here, the arrangement had the relaxed energy of a lounge show. The sambistas eased into some old standards with shuffling rhythms and choruses sung in shaggy unison. Mosquito, a trim singer in a T-shirt and sneakers, took a matchbook out of his pocket to add some sandy-sounding percussion. Linda, linda, Veloso purred from his seat.

Paula Lavigne, his wife and manager, sat next to him, rolling a joint. She describes the state of awe and ecstasy that her husband inspires as the Caetano effect. People talk fitfully in his presence. They rush to mention their favorite of his albums, or they quote from songs that have become de-facto Brazilian national anthems.

Brazilians arent the only ones pulled in. Madonna once bowed down to him on a stage in So Paulo. David Byrne, whos known Veloso since the eighties and has performed with him at Carnegie Hall, considers him an unclassifiable inspiration. Theres this guy whos got elements of Cole Porter and the Beatles and Bob Dylan, all these kinds of things that people might be familiar with, he told me. But that wouldnt do it to describe him. In addition to composing hundreds of his own songs, Veloso is known for idiosyncratic covers of Brazilian classics, Spanish-language boleros, themes from Italian cinema, and hits by Nirvana and Michael Jackson. He has recorded some fifty albums, and plays to sold-out theatres in Europe and the United States, to say nothing of Latin America, where hes regarded as a fine artist and a pop celebrity. Once, when Veloso was on tour for an album called Abraao, meaning Big Hug, an admirer embraced him so hard that he spent days in bed with a tweaked back.

Velosos preferred place in these gatherings at home is somewhere off to the side, so he can chat in relative peace. He is soft-spoken, even shy. As a boy, he once wrote, I was timid and extravagant. He can seem suspiciously modest for a world-famous musician. Many of his contemporaries are technically superior, hell say. But there is this more mysterious aspect to his talent, he told me: The atmosphere that comes with my voice. He described it as my presence, my personality, which echoed an old song of his, called Minha Voz, Minha Vida, or My Voice, My Life. His liquid tenor, melodic and trance-like, is one of the most distinctive voices in music. Away from the microphone, he listens intently, and goes into languorous digressions full of references to books and films. The theatre director Peter Sellars has written of Veloso, What if John Lennon was a world-class intellectual with an insatiable curiosity for Third World literature and a deep adoration for Hollywood cinema, as seen from the wrong end of a telescope? What if Stevie Wonder could see and he loved movies?

Lavigne took advantage of a brief lull in the music to direct everyone downstairs. I dont want our neighbors thinking this is the house of Ronaldinho, she said, referring to the soccer star notorious for his partying. The musicians moved to a stairway by the front entrance. Veloso grabbed another Coke and a fistful of cashews, and skipped over to join them.

The apartment is in a gated complex, on a steep, winding hill. Vast and luxurious, it became Veloso and Lavignes full-time home only recently. They were staying there in March, 2020, while their house was under renovation. Once the coronavirus pandemic began, they never left. A descending staircase led to what had become Velosos COVID bubble. There was a room with a massage table and medicine balls for daily exercise. Next to it was a recording studio, where he made his latest album, Meu Coco, which came out late last year.

By now it was well after midnight, and inside the studio, recording his own music, was Zeca, the second of Velosos three sons. All of them are musiciansand, like their father, insomniacs. The hours of high activity at the Veloso residence fall roughly between dinner and dawn. Eventually, the guests made it outside to a porch with an adjacent bar. The beach peeked through a curtain of lush palms, and a bluish light in the distance illuminated Rios famous soapstone sculpture of Christ the Redeemer, overlooking the city from Mt.Corcovado.

The music started again, and Veloso shimmied in a boyish trance. His feet scissored off the ground to the beat. One of the guitarists picked up the melody of a song from Velosos new album. Its title was Sem Samba No D, or Without Samba It Just Wont Do. The strumming grew soft as Veloso cut in, singingin a velvety voice barely louder than a whisper. The group leaned in as if he were about to share a secret.

The samba was born in the Brazilian state of Bahia, and so was Veloso, in 1942. The town where he grew up, Santo Amaro, was like something out of a Jorge Amado novel or a Fellini film; it was full of music, dancing, and voluble eccentrics. There were three cinemas, where Veloso watched daily showings of foreign movies. When he got restless, he visited the nearby capital, Salvador, which had a university and theatres that put on avant-garde plays and performances. His parents were modest, middle-class peoplea postal employee who worked from home and a housewife with eight children, two of whom were adopted. The house was large but crowded, filled with extended family and a regular procession of daily visitors. An older cousin, whom Veloso and his siblings called Bette Davis behind her back, professed a desire to live in Paris and be an existentialist. In one corner of the first floor was a small piano where Veloso, with the help of a sister, tried to replay, by ear, the songs they heard each day on the radio. A turn of the dial brought Portuguese fados, Latin American folk tunes, Brazilian crooners, and classics from the American Songbook.

In his late teens, he moved with his younger sister Maria Bethnia to an apartment in Salvador, where he traded the piano for a guitar, and took up painting and film criticism. Missing home, he would put Ray Charles on the turntable and weep while listening to Georgia on My Mind. Occasionally, he composed simple, nostalgic songs of his own, drawing inspiration from his childhood haunts. References to Santo Amaro abound in Velosos work. The years are passing by, he wrote in a later song. And I havent lost you/My job is to translate you. In conversation, Veloso likes to quote an old poet friend who says, Rio de Janeiro is Brazil. So Paulo is the world. Bahia is Bahia.

Velosos greatest inspiration was a Bahian by the name of Joo Gilberto. In 1959, when Veloso was seventeen, Gilberto released the album Chega de Saudade, which introduced a style called bossa nova. The music featured intricate yet understated harmonies, sly dissonances, and a repertoire of rediscovered Brazilian songs that had fallen into obscurity. It was a new old sound, Veloso told me. Bossa nova became an international sensation, particularly in the U.S., but Veloso experienced it as a private epiphany. Every aspect of the music appealed to him, from its samba rhythms and limpid vocals to the enigmatic personality of its evangelist. Gilberto, who had moved to the U.S. in 1963, visited Salvador, staying at the house of an acquaintance with his wife, Micha, who was pregnant. All the young musicians in the city flocked to pay their respects. Veloso was joined by one of his closest friends, a young singer named Gal Costa, who got nervous and ran off, leaving him alone at the bus stop. When Veloso arrived, Gilberto wouldnt come out of the bedroom. Eventually, the visitors coaxed him into the living room, but only after Gilberto ordered them to turn off the lights. It was the closest Veloso would come to meeting his idol for many years. Everything was a strange new joke with him, Veloso told me. It was dark. The light of the street lamps was coming in through the window. You could see, more or less, Michas belly and the outline of his face.

Other encounters in Salvador were less poetic but more eventful. Walking down Rua Chile one afternoon, Veloso bumped into the most important collaborator of his artistic life: Gilberto Gil, a buoyant Black musician with sharp, arching eyebrows and the charged air of a revolutionary. Gil was a prodigy of limitless interests and played the guitar unlike anyone Veloso had ever seen. They were the same age, and were united by a fascination with the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and the blues. I learned how to play the guitar by imitating the positions of Gils hands, Veloso said.

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How Caetano Veloso Revolutionized Brazil's Sound and Spirit - The New Yorker