The ageless master from Brazil

81-year-old Caetano Veloso, one of the great songwriters of the 20th century, delivered a grand performance at the Paramount last night.

I am a huge fan of Brazilian music, but I didn’t know much about one of its masters, Caetano Veloso, until, well, yesterday. Thirty years ago I fell in love with a gorgeous tune of his titled “Voce e Linda,” which he performed with the great harmonica player Toots Thielemans on the second volume of a wonderful two-CD set called The Brasil Project. Those albums featured Toots playing with many of Brazil’s leading musicians, including Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil, Djavan, Ivan Lins, Edu Lobo, Chico Buarque, and many others. I knew that Caetano was one of the great Brazilian singer-songwriters, but that was like knowing that Harold Arlen wrote a lot of good tunes. The Great Brazilian Songbook, to give it the name it deserves, is of Shakespearean length and quality, and I didn’t get too many chapters into it. Still, when I heard that SF Jazz was presenting Caetano at Oakland’s Paramount Theater, it was a no-brainer to get tickets. The guy was a legend and he was 81 years old. Done!

I also was vaguely aware that Caetano had been one of the leaders of a Brazilian musical and cultural revolution called “Tropicalismo.” I knew this because a few years ago I had picked up a used book called Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil, written by…Caetano Veloso. I had glanced at a couple of pages, enough to see that he was highly intelligent and articulate. But I didn’t read enough to know what “Tropicalismo” was. I had a vague, muddled (and, it turned out, completely false) idea that it was some kind of protest against Brazil’s military dictatorship.

So yesterday, in preparation for the concert, I started reading Caetano’s book. I got about halfway through it. And I was blown away.

Caetano Veloso is not just smart, he’s staggeringly smart. He’s a full-blown intellectual, with a vast range of knowledge and a remarkably nuanced mind. He could legitimately be a professor in five or six fields—popular music, musicology, sociology, history, film. And he’s an excellent writer. Musicians of Caetano’s lofty standing have written some great books—Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and Bob Dylan’s Chronicles come to mind—but none that I know of are as analytical, as self-reflective, as powerfully left-brain, as Tropical Truth. The fact that one of the 20^th century’s great songwriters could write a non-fiction book this sophisticated, with an argumentation this advanced, seemed almost unfair. It was like discovering that Theodore Adorno could play Jimi Hendrix’s guitar solo on “All Along the Watchtower.”

As I read Tropical Truth, I soon discovered that Tropicalismo was not at all what I thought it was. It was far more interesting—and relevant to the culture wars in the U.S. today. It turned out that the movement that came to be called Tropicalismo was actually an assault not on Brazil’s right-wing military dictatorship (although the tropicalistas despised that) but on left-wing Brazilian populism. When Caetano, who was born in Bahia, came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, the Brazilian intelligentsia was largely in thrall to a kind of sentimental left-wing nationalism that insisted that only “authentically Brazilian” music, as they defined it, was legitimate. American imports like rock and roll were viewed with disdain as imperialist invasions. Some leftists went as far as to attack bossa nova, Brazil’s immortal contribution to 20^th century music. Caetano writes, “The first long article I ever wrote was a diatribe against Jose Ramos Tinhorao’s book on popular music, a sociological exercise in which bossa nova was characterized on the one hand as being a cultural submission to the American model, and on the other hand as an undue appropriation of popular culture by the middle class. It was an articulate defense of the national ideology that circumscribed all value judgments by the Brazilian Left, the ‘national-popular’ style demanded of every work of art and entertainment.”

In other words Tropicalismo, without being in the least reactionary, was the Brazilian counterpart of the critique of cultural Stalinism offered by Eastern European intellectuals like Milan Kundera. In that regard, it can also be seen as a precursor of today’s anti-“woke” movement in the U.S., which is critical of the pious and coercive dogmas, often having to do with race, that “circumscribe all value judgments by the (American) Left.” Caetano’s intellectual sophistication, his free thinking, and his refusal to adopt simplistic positions, were clearly shaped by, and shaped, this passionate Brazilian culture war. (If only Americans could take culture seriously enough to fight over it!)

But neither Tropicalismo, nor Caetano’s IQ, nor anything else in the book I was madly cramming to read yesterday, had much to do with the fantastic concert Caetano put on at the Paramount—although it was cool to know, looking at him, that he was not only a great musician, but a super smart dude. What the wildly enthusiastic, sold-out audience saw was a master, still at the top of his game at 81, performing a superbly varied selection from the vast book of wonderful songs he has composed over the last 60-plus years. It was a grand and memorable evening.

I was lucky enough to somehow end up in the front row. Caetano, still lithe, lean and incredibly youthful-looking in a white linen outfit, stood about 20 feet away. I was sitting right next to a young Brazilian woman, maybe 28 years old, who knew every song and sang ecstatically along with most of them. At most concerts, having someone singing loudly in your ear, even if they have a good voice, is not an optimum experience. But the singing of that young woman, and the many others who joined in, only enhanced the joyousness and, somehow, the meaningfulness of the occasion. It wasn’t just that she had a good voice, and could accurately navigate Caetano’s not-easy songs. It was a proof and confirmation of the profound and fun impact one artist’s life’s work can have on countless people. And it was a celebration of Brazil and Brazilian-ness—the country and the sensibility that brought us one of the world’s great musical gifts—that was delightful to behold.

Caetano joked before he began speaking in English, “There must be a few people who don’t speak Portuguese here.” I was one of them. And alas, those of us who didn’t speak Portuguese missed half of the evening’s aesthetic experience. I did enough research into Caetano’s songs before the concert to learn that he is a superb lyricist, with a literary and poetic sensibility that seems far more common with Brazilian songwriters than with their American counterparts. (Check out the astonishing lyrics written by the great Vinicius de Moraes, matched by few if any American songwriters—yet another proof of the towering achievement of the Great Brazilian Songbook.) All of Caetano’s words, which he delivered standing with utter self-assurance with an expression alternately sly, professorial, passionate, and wide-eyed, soared into space over my ignorant ears. If only I knew what he was singing!

But music needs no language, and what wonderful music it was. I only knew a few of the songs Caetano played (he never did the classic “Voce e Linda,” which shows how deep his book is), but they were all excellent, and some of them were really first-rate, with the long melodic lines, altered chords, propulsive rhythms and often complex harmonic structures that are part of the vernacular of Brazilian popular music. (Just how deep in the vernacular was proved by the audience’s ability to sing along with those sophisticated tunes). Accompanied by a fine six-piece band (three percussionists, bass, guitar and keyboard), Caetano, often accompanying himself expertly on guitar, served up a musical and literary banquet. And even if some of us could only appreciate half of that banquet, it was soul food—sustenance for the body and the spirit.

Muito obrigado, Caetano! Live long and come back soon!