Veloso, Caetano

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CAETANO VELOSO

Born: Caetano Emanuel Vianna Telles Veloso; Santo Amaro da Purificacao, Bahia, Brazil, 7 August 1942

Genre: World

Best-selling album since 1990: Tropicalista 2 (1993)

Brazilian singer/songwriter Caetano Veloso is a creative musical force with few peers. He is a prolific artist who projects palpable intimacy with a tender voice over acoustic guitar. He demonstrates structural mastery in his soundtracks for Academy Award-nominated films. Veloso has a signature sound—nuanced vocals that may comment on politics or romantic love—but he seldom repeats himself.

Having followed his sister, the singer Maria Bethania, to Rio de Janiero from their home in eastern Brazil in the early 1960s, Veloso won song competitions with lyrics he wrote for her and was contracted by the international recording giant, Philips. He was already in awe of bossa nova composer/performer Joao Gilberto, and he had met fellow musician Gilberto Gil while studying philosophy at the Federal University of Bahia.

With Gil, Gal Costa (Veloso's collaborator on his debut album, Domingo [1967]), Tom Zé, and other like-minded musicians, writers, painters, and filmmakers, Veloso established the tropicalia movement, politicizing Brazilian popular media in the manner of the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and others of the era. The movement ran afoul of the Brazilian military dictatorship that seized power in a coup in 1968; Veloso and Gil, the movement's chief proponents, were jailed for two months and placed under house arrest for four more for "disrespecting the national anthem and the Brazilian flag." After defiantly performing together, they chose voluntary exile in England and were not allowed to return to Brazil until 1972.

Upon their return tropicalia was thriving along with their reputations; Brazilian artists had been recording Veloso's and Gil's songs all along. Veloso worked to expand his frame of reference; he is credited for being the first Brazilian to use reggae elements in the rock tune "Nine Out of Ten" (1972). By the 1990s Veloso considered no music off limits or unusable. His album Noites de Norte (2001) embraces raucous electric guitar, gentle acoustic guitars, strings, percussion (including "knife and plate"), brass, and reeds; he sings mostly in Portuguese but also in English when the whim strikes.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Veloso stretched in many directions, teaming with Gil, Costa, and Bethania for an album, tour and film; publishing his articles, poems, and lyrics in a book, Alegria, Alegria (1977); and touring Africa, France, Israel, and, in 1983, the United States, where he won over influential New York critics and began to build a devoted American audience, even though all his albums were hard-to-find, expensive imports. He maintained popularity at home, co-hosting "Chico e Caetano," a television talk and variety show, with singer/songwriter Chico Barque in 1986.

Caetano Veloso (1987), his first U.S. release, introduces songs from his twenty-year repertoire, sung with only his own guitar accompaniment. Estrangeiro (1989) couches his mostly Portuguese vocals in spiky "downtown" electric tracks, as does Circulado (1991); both are produced by Arto Lindsay, a "fake jazz" singer/guitarist who was raised in Brazil and produces sophisticated MPB-style records of his own. Tropicalia 2 (1993), Veloso's duet album with Gilberto Gil, celebrates twenty-five years of Tropicalia and their thirty-year friendship. The release, which further enhanced their critical and public standing in the United States, features a cover of Hendrix's "Wait Until Tomorrow." Circulado ao Vivo (1997) contains Veloso's renditions of Michael Jackson's "Black and White" and Dylan's "Jokerman." Its release launched his extensive American tour in 1997.

Livro (1998), released concurrently with the publication in Brazil of Veloso's well-received historical memoir, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil, won a 1999 Grammy for best world music album. Simultaneously, Veloso became involved in film-related projects: soundtracks for Tieta (1997), O Quatrilho (1997), the Carlos Diegues film Orfeu (2000), Ommagio à Federico e Giulietta ("homage to the films of Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina") (1998), and the song "Cucurrucucu Paloma," which he performed at the Academy Awards in New York City in 2003, written for the soundtrack of Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002).

Noites do Norte ("Nights of the north") (2001), a meditation on race and slavery in Brazil's pursuit of national identity, is one of Veloso's most serious thematic works and won a Latin Grammy Award in 2001. Live in Bahia (2002), a 2-CD set, attended the publication in English of Tropical Truth. Boxed-set retrospectives and collections of Veloso's recordings of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s proliferate. However, Veloso shows no sign of resting on his laurels, and there is every indication that he will continue to explore Brazil's cultural legacy, while adding to it with inspired creations of his own.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Caetano Veloso (None-such, 1987); Circuladô (Nonesuch, 1991); Caetano Veloso—Personalidade Series (Verve, 1993); Tropicália 2 (Nonesuch, 1993); O Quatrilho (Blue Jackel, 1996); Circulado Ao Vivo (Polygram, 1997); Livro (Elektra/Asylum, 1998); Ommagiò à Federico e Giulietta (Elektra/Asylum, 1998); Orfeu (None-such, 1999); Cinema Caetano (Universal, 2000); Noites do Norte (Nonesuch, 2001); Live in Bahia (Nonesuch, 2002).

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

C. Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil (New York, 2002); C. McGowan, The Brazilian Sound: Samba, Bossa Nova, and the Popular Music of Brazil (Philadelphia, 1991).