“Caetano Veloso ganhou um perfil na aclamada revista norte-americana The New Yorker.
O “Efeito Caetano” é descrito numa
matéria, assinada por Jonathan Blitzer, que traça um perfil completo do cantor.
Os momentos mais emblemáticos da carreira deste artista que “revolucionou o
espírito e o som do Brasil” são pontuados com riquezas de detalhes, que vão
desde a sua mudança para o Rio até o lançamento do seu álbum mais recente, “Meu
Coco”. A matéria destaca também a importância do seu posicionamento político,
resistência cultural e fala do seu processo criativo e inspirador:
“A inspiração ataca com frequência, mas imprevisivelmente, para Veloso. Na maioria das vezes, ele começa uma composição com um som nos ouvidos que ele chama de “palavras cantadas”. Pode ser uma frase, uma única ideia, uma referência. Mas ele sabe que está em algo quando as palavras estão presas a um pedaço de melodia. […]”
Uns
Produções e Filmes / Instagram 7/2/2022
“Na New Yorker, o escritor Jonathan Blitzer publica excelente perfil de Caetano Veloso, um artista brasileiro universal, como Glauber Rocha, Tom Jobim, João Gilberto e Carmen Miranda. Na prosa de Jon, destaco a fina percepção de aspectos da personalidade pública e privada de Caetano, da sua presença vigilante nas reuniões em sua casa aos traços de melancolia em certas fases de sua vida. Para além de si mesmo, as responsabilidades assumidas em relação ao Brasil, traduzidas em poesia e discurso – e algum messianismo sebástico-tropical. À parte, um bom retrato de Paula Lavigne. Recomendo a leitura também porque Jon ilumina o processo composicional de Caetano, e com tal clareza que se torna surpreendente que tal descrição venha de um olhar estrangeiro. É uma contribuição original ao estudo de sua obra. Certa vez Gilberto Gil me disse que o processo criativo de Caetano era misterioso também para ele, Gil, que o acompanhava há tanto tempo. Nesse perfil, acessamos uma parte desse mistério. No mais, me alegra que Caetano, um leitor do mundo, ocupe esse lugar no texto de Jon: fino observador do tempo, das circunstâncias políticas e dos impasses estéticos de mais de uma geração. Como disse João Gilberto, Caetano acompanha tudo com o pensamento. E por ele somos tocados.”
Claudio Leal, jornalista, 7/2/2022
Revista “The New Yorker” faz perfil de
Caetano Veloso e o denomina como “entidade”
Por Glamurama
7 de fevereiro de 2022
Caetano Veloso é o artista perfilado na mais recente edição da The New Yorker, uma das principais revistas de jornalismo literário do mundo publicada pelo “The New York Times”. Escrito pelo jornalista Jonathan Blitzer e sob o título “Efeito Caetano: Como Caetano Veloso revolucionou o som e o espírito do Brasil”, o repórter se debruça sobre a carreira e história pessoal de um dos principais nomes não só da música, mas da arte brasileira. A matéria resgata a criação do movimento Tropicalista, a prisão do artista durante a ditadura militar, sua relação com a cidade de Santo Amaro, na Bahia, seu lugar de nascimento, e a admiração pela Bossa Nova de João Gilberto.
Partindo de uma roda de samba na casa do compositor, em dezembro do ano passado, Blitzer percorre os principais momentos da vida do cantor e compositor. Ano passado, Caetano lançou o álbum “Meu Coco” com músicas que enaltecem a canção popular brasileira e criticam o atual governo.
Para escrever o perfil, Blitzer passou uma semana com Caetano. Nesse período, o cantor escutou Marília Mendonça, entre outras referências que não são costumeiramente relacionadas a ele. “O samba nasceu na Bahia, assim como Veloso, em 1942. A cidade onde ele cresceu, Santo Amaro, parecia saída de um romance de Jorge Amado ou de um filme de Fellini; estava cheio de música, dança e excêntricos volúveis”, escreveu o repórter, que fez questão de frisar o status quase de entidade que Caetano tem por aqui e pelo mundo.
“Paula
Lavigne, sua esposa e empresária, […] descreve o estado de admiração e êxtase
que o marido inspira como ‘o efeito Caetano’. As pessoas falam de forma
irregular em sua presença, se apressam em mencionar seus álbuns favoritos, ou
citar músicas que se tornaram, de fato, hinos nacionais. Os brasileiros não são
os únicos a serem atraídos. Madonna uma vez se curvou
para ele em um palco em São Paulo. David Byrne, que conhece
Veloso desde os anos 1980 e se apresentou com ele no Carnegie Hall, o considera
uma inspiração inclassificável”.
“Como Caetano Veloso
revolucionou
o som e o espírito do
Brasil”.
“A perseguição política do músico o empurrou para
uma
carreira que ele nunca teve certeza de que queria”.
How Caetano Veloso
revolutionized Brazil’s national
sound and spirit.
The musician’s political persecution pushed him
into a career he was never sure he wanted.
By
Jonathan Blitzer
February 7, 2022
 |
| “I’ve always noticed the singularity of Brazil,” Veloso said. “I perceived a mission for us to take to the world.” - Photograph by Rodrigo Oliveira for The New Yorker |
"Eu sempre notei a singularidade do Brasil. Percebi uma missão para levarmos ao mundo."
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, Brazil’s 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 white—slide-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 he’s 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 aren’t the only ones pulled in. Madonna once bowed down to him on a stage in São Paulo. David Byrne, who’s known Veloso since the eighties and has performed with him at Carnegie Hall, considers him an unclassifiable inspiration. “There’s this guy who’s 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 wouldn’t 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 he’s regarded as a fine artist and a pop celebrity. Once, when Veloso was on tour for an album called “Abraçaço,” meaning “Big Hug,” an admirer embraced him so hard that he spent days in bed with a tweaked back.
Veloso’s 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, he’ll 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 don’t 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 Lavigne’s 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 Veloso’s 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 Veloso’s three sons. All of them are musicians—and, 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 Rio’s 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 Veloso’s new album. Its title was “Sem Samba Não Dá,” or “Without Samba It Just Won’t Do.” The strumming grew soft as Veloso cut in, singing in 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 people—a 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 Bethânia 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 Veloso’s work. “The years are passing by,” he wrote in a later song. “And I haven’t 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. São Paulo is the world. Bahia is Bahia.”
Veloso’s greatest inspiration was a Bahian by the name of João 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, Miúcha, 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 wouldn’t 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, Miúcha’s 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 Gil’s hands,” Veloso said.
In Salvador, then in Rio and São Paulo—wherever there were gigs—the Bahians were a unit: Veloso, Gil, Bethânia, Costa, and a girl with short hair named Dedé Gadelha, who was Veloso’s girlfriend and, later, his first wife. (Gil married Dedé’s sister, Sandra.) Bethânia found success first, receiving an invitation to perform in a musical show in Rio called “Opinião.” Veloso joined her in a somewhat ambiguous capacity—part chaperon, part writer and manager, and part aspiring singer.
In 1964, a group of Brazilian military officers, acting with the clandestine support of the U.S. government, staged a coup, seizing control from João Goulart, the leftist President. But, for Veloso and his friends, the real national crucible was the fight over the future of Brazilian popular music in the wake of bossa nova, whose artistic and commercial success opened up a field of cultural combat over where the music should go next. The movement known as Música Popular Brasileira, or M.P.B., coalesced as a debate about the parameters of a national style. A right-wing dictatorship was consolidating its power, but Brazilian musicians were staging street protests against the imperialism of the electric guitar. On a July night in 1967, some four hundred people marched through downtown São Paulo behind a large white banner that read “frente única da música popular brasileira.” Veloso retreated from the factionalism, watching the march in disgust from the window of a hotel room, where he sat with the singer Nara Leão, known as “the muse of bossa nova.” As the crowds chanted “Down with the electric guitar,” she turned to Veloso and said, “This looks like a fascist march.”
That year, Veloso released his first record, with Gal Costa. It was the work of someone still in thrall to bossa nova. The songs were elegant and spare, sung with a frictionless timbre. On the back cover of the album, though, Veloso wrote, “My current inspiration is leaning toward paths very different from those I’ve followed up to this point.” The first track on the album, “Coração Vagabundo,” carried hints of restlessness. “My vagabond heart wants to hold the world inside me,” he sings over flinty chords. Entering the world has turned his heart into the “smiling shadow of a woman / that slipped out of a dream / without saying goodbye.” “This is a source song for Caetano,” Gilberto Gil told me, in Rio. “A genius can be presented very early in life or very late in life. In his case, he was twenty-one.”
One night in October, 1967, Veloso appeared on a stage in São Paulo, before a large, howling crowd, wearing a checked blazer several sizes too large over a mustard-colored turtleneck. Without the armor of a guitar in front of him, he smiled broadly through his nerves. Each year, a TV show held a competition for the best Brazilian song. Musicians pleaded with the audience in between verses to hear them out, but they were routinely shouted down mid-song or pelted with eggs. Jurors sitting next to the stage wore headphones piping in the music at an audible volume. The show was attended by all the major musicians of the day—there was Roberto Carlos, from the rock camp known as the Jovem Guarda; Chico Buarque, a dashing singer-songwriter who appealed to both traditionalists and progressives; and Edu Lobo, an embodiment of early bossa nova. Veloso was there as the emissary of a movement he and Gil were starting, called Tropicália, or Tropicalism. Eclectic and unruly, it fused Brazilian folk forms and British rock. Veloso said, “We wanted to achieve the liberty of finding inspiration both in pre-bossa, supposedly bad-taste stuff, and in post-bossa, supposedly violent imperialist rock.” Onstage with him were five Argentineans called the Beat Boys, with electric guitars and bowl cuts.
Veloso began singing “Alegria, Alegria,” a sunny anthem about a young searcher “walking against the wind” and venturing into a world of “bombs and Brigitte Bardot.” A gust of boos buffeted the stage. Veloso swayed slightly, looking unsure what to do with his hands. His smile never dimmed. Gradually, he reached his arms out to the audience, and, as he did, the heckling petered out and gave way to rapturous applause.
The responses to Tropicália weren’t always so enthusiastic. The movement came to include the work of poets, filmmakers, and visual artists who put on provocative concerts, performances, and exhibitions, all meant to goad Brazilians and to expose them to the influences of the wider world. Veloso elicited violent reactions from students and doctrinaire activists on the left. He had grown his hair out and wore crop tops and tight-fitting pants that emphasized his androgynous features; he and his sister Bethânia looked identical. At one event, Veloso appeared in a green-and-black plastic jumpsuit, his chest covered in necklaces made of electrical wires. He did an erotic dance while reciting a mystical poem by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. The louder the crowds booed, the more intensely he writhed. A group of frequent collaborators, the rock band Os Mutantes, who were playing beside him, turned their backs to the audience. Gil jumped onstage to stand next to Veloso in solidarity. Abandoning the poem, Veloso shouted, “So you’re the young people who say they want to take power! If you’re the same in politics as you are in music, we’re done for.”
On December 13, 1968, the military introduced Institutional Order No. 5, which shut down Congress and authorized the government to detain and torture anyone it considered subversive of the public order. Veloso, who was then twenty-six, was writing songs such as “É Proibido Proibir” (“It’s Prohibited to Prohibit”), with his leftist detractors in mind. He had no idea that he was the subject of a thick government file, dating to 1966, with a list of his putative crimes, such as attending protests and cultural events. An appendix included the typed-out lyrics of his songs.
Two weeks later, a group of federal police officers arrived before dawn at the apartment he rented in São Paulo. Then they went for Gil. The two were taken in a police van to Rio, a six-hour drive, where the policemen turned them over to the military, who locked them up in a barracks. The most violent phase of the military dictatorship was just beginning. Hundreds of Brazilian leftists would be murdered, and thousands more tortured and held incommunicado. Dedé knew where Veloso and Gil were only because she’d followed the police van all the way to Rio in her car.
After several weeks, Veloso noticed a young guard looking at him in his cell and fighting back tears. When they made eye contact, the soldier shook his head apologetically. A sergeant appeared with two other men and ordered Veloso to get dressed. Once the four of them were outside, the soldiers drew their weapons. The sergeant told him to walk ahead of them, and not to look back. The cobblestone streets around the military complex were deserted. After a few eternal seconds there was another order: “Stop!” Veloso paused, waiting for gunshots. Instead, the sergeant instructed him to go through a closed door. Inside, a barber was waiting with large shears. It had been two years since Veloso had cut his hair.
Veloso’s persecution pushed him fully into a career he was never sure he wanted. He had dreamed of making movies. After his imprisonment, though, “it was a lot less possible to say I’m going to change my life,” he told me. “I was passive. The music took me.” He and Gil were released, but were later ordered to leave the country. They were accorded some minor privileges because of their celebrity status: given a chance to raise money for their exile, they staged a concert at the Castro Alves Theatre, in Salvador, in 1969. From there, police officers escorted them to the airport. Portugal was in the midst of Europe’s longest-running dictatorship, Franco was still in charge in Spain, and France was smoldering from the unrest of 1968. Veloso and Gil settled in London, at a three-story house that their manager found for them in Chelsea.
Depression and homesickness marked Veloso’s years in Britain, where Dedé lived with him. He learned English haltingly, and he socialized almost exclusively with Brazilians, who reinforced his sense of dislocation. “London represented for me a period of utter vulnerability,” he wrote in his memoir, “Tropical Truth.” “I never once went to see an English play, attended not a single classical music concert, never entered a library or a bookstore.” Veloso and some of the old Tropicalists saw Brazil’s Communist left as an ally against the worsening military repression. When a famous guerrilla fighter named Marighella was killed by government forces, Veloso felt almost jealous. “We are dead,” he wrote in a newspaper column. “He is more alive than we are.”
 |
| Veloso in the seventies, after a period of exile imposed by the military government. Photograph from Everett |
In
early 1971, he returned to Bahia to attend his parents’ fortieth wedding
anniversary. Bethânia had made arrangements with a contact in the military beforehand.
But, at the Rio airport, plainclothes policemen took him into custody and drove
him to an apartment where they issued new threats. He returned to London in a
state of agitation, convinced that he couldn’t go home again. His exile now
looked indefinite, so he decided to teach himself how to appreciate his adopted
city. “I started liking the grass first of all,” he told me. “Then those
benches, and the taxis that seemed like funeral cars.” It also helped that
English record producers loved the way he played the guitar. In Brazil, he’d
felt self-conscious alongside so many technical virtuosos. In London, he said,
“I lost my sense of embarrassment.”
Later that year, he was in the midst of recording a new album, called “Transa,” when his phone rang. It was João Gilberto, calling from a studio in São Paulo. “Caetano, come sing with me and Gal,” he said. He and Gal Costa were recording a television special. Veloso told him it was impossible. Gilberto said, “Don’t worry, everyone will smile at you. No one will stop you at the airport.” Gilberto was admired for many things, but not for his political or practical acuity. How did he know it was safe? “It’s God,” Gilberto said.
“I was anti-religious,” Veloso told me. “But João Gilberto was my religion. Everything he said to me was sacred.” Veloso and Dedé flew to Paris, to confer with friends who had political ties and could help them evaluate the dangers. He chose to take the risk. It was like a prophecy fulfilled. The flight attendants on the plane smiled at him. There were no cops waiting for him at the airport, nor were the black Volkswagens of the undercover security forces idling in the parking lot. “I said to Dedé, ‘João Gilberto couldn’t be that magical.’ But he was.”
Inspiration strikes frequently but unpredictably for Veloso. Most of the time he begins a composition with a sound in his ears that he calls “sung words.” It can be a phrase, a single idea, a reference. But he knows he’s onto something when the words are attached to a scrap of melody. When that happens, he usually follows the melody through as it unspools, singing it to himself before the rest of the lyrics start to materialize. Often, when he finally fetches a guitar, he told me, “I have already sung a little piece of the song, and I know what chords will go along with it.”
These flash points of revelation can take years to incubate. One lyric on his new album—and the intellectual spark behind its title track—came from a conversation he had with Gilberto in the seventies. “Terra,” released in 1978, is another example. The opening lyrics, about images of the Earth photographed by astronauts, go like this: “When I found myself / imprisoned / In a cell inside a jail / I saw for the first time / Those famous photographs / Where we see her entirely / But where she isn’t naked / Because she’s wearing her / clouds.” In Veloso’s second month in prison, Dedé had brought him a large-format magazine called Manchete. “I was in this little cell, and there was the Earth photographed for the first time,” he told me. But a decade passed before the memory catalyzed into a clear idea. It took a trip to the movies, to see “Star Wars.” What struck him was the setting: human drama in a galaxy far, far away. It reminded him of the feeling that he’d momentarily disappeared from the planet himself. He told me, “I started to think about human beings who were far from Earth. A human being far from Earth. That situated the whole thing.”
Sometimes the “sung words” are fully formed when Veloso first hears them. One of his most interesting albums is “Noites do Norte,” or “Northern Nights,” which took its name from a text written by the nineteenth-century Brazilian abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco. Veloso set Nabuco’s words to music, then built around them with compositions of his own. Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888; until then, Bahia had been a major hub of the country’s slave trade. Samba started there for a reason—a fact that Veloso has returned to, obsessively, throughout his career. On “Noites do Norte,” perhaps the most insistent voices are the sounds of African percussion from the Brazilian northeast: timbales, rattles, bass drums, atabaques, congas, a knife on a plate.
Veloso never learned to read or write music. He arranges some of his songs himself, but others require help. “Caetano shows me a song on his guitar, and sings three or four phrases—I make notes and go home,” Jaques Morelenbaum, a cellist, composer, and arranger told me. He and Veloso met in the late eighties and have made fourteen albums together. He said, “You cannot believe that someone is capable of having in his brain so many lyrics and so many melodies. I’m just a tool for him.” When Veloso approaches Morelenbaum, he gives him “clues” for the arrangements. One was to use “the language and accent” of Anton Webern, the Austrian composer; another was that he wanted a cast of “cellos singing a low melody.” The album “Livro,” for which Veloso won a Grammy in 1999, was a direct response to “Quiet Nights,” by Miles Davis and Gil Evans. Veloso envisioned street percussion from Bahia that could elaborate on Evans’s big-band sound. “He comes to me like a painter to a blank page,” Morelenbaum said. “He talks about colors, about poetry, about images.”
During the week I spent with him in Rio, Veloso was listening to a Brazilian country singer named Marília Mendonça, a group of Carioca rappers and hip-hop d.j.s, and Silk Sonic, the R. & B. duo of Bruno Mars and Anderson. Paak. Late at night, usually around three or four in the morning, he watched music videos on a channel called “Multi-Show,” modelled on MTV. “He has a ridiculously wide frame of reference,” Arto Lindsay, an American musician who grew up in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco and has known Veloso for almost four decades, told me. Lindsay translates Veloso’s songs into English and has produced two of his albums. One of them, from 1989, is a moody blend of electronic sounds and piercing melodies titled “Estrangeiro”; it features a berimbau player from Recife named Naná Vasconcelos alongside the American guitarist Bill Frisell. Veloso and Lindsay have attended concerts all over New York and Brazil: the Neville Brothers at Webster Hall, in the East Village, Prince at Rio’s Maracanã Stadium.
One night in December, at Veloso’s house, he and Lindsay were reminiscing about their favorite shows. Veloso told us about the time he met Prince, at a party thrown in his honor at a club in Rio, in 1991. Prince arrived with a group of bodyguards, then stood apart, looking scornful. Veloso got up from the table, where we were sitting, to do an impersonation of a young woman in a short dress and heels who crossed the room to ask Prince to dance. “This woman had no fear,” Veloso said, almost gravely. Spinning circles around an imaginary Prince, he brought his fists together in front of his face and thrust out his elbows; he shook his hips and dropped into a low crouch, then sprang back up. “She was doing all the work,” Veloso said. Then he stiffened. He was Prince now: stony, upright, unyielding. Veloso pouted. “It was this face of a bicha má,” he said—roughly translated, a “bitchy queen.”
The stage is where “Caetano becomes Caetano,” the guitarist Pedro Sá told me. The studio, Veloso said, “is a cold, empty place with a microphone. You have to produce all the emotions and the movements of soul from nothing.” In front of an audience, he tends to have a freer conversation with himself. The right conditions turn him into an extrovert. He sambas, in the Santo Amaro style. He is relaxed, but also mannered. His accompanying musicians close in around him, then leave him to long stretches of solos, in the mold of João Gilberto: just the man and his guitar.
Each concert, Sá told me, feels like a movie, with Veloso directing. The concepts behind individual albums often grow sharper and livelier when Veloso performs them. Bob Hurwitz, who for thirty-two years released Veloso’s albums as the president of Nonesuch Records, told me, “There is always a narrative, a story, to each record when it comes out. There’s a record about his relationship to American popular music, or to the identity of the percussion of northeast Brazil, or about the movies of Fellini. His records become concerts. He’ll release the record, then do a concert. Then he’ll release a record of the concert. They’re little movies, in a way.”
In the mid-nineties, Veloso was touring to promote an album of Latin American classics in Spanish when he added a performance of “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” a Mexican folk song from the fifties that imitates the cooing of a dove. The Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar heard a recording from one of the concerts, and became obsessed with the song and with Veloso. He’s since called him “an older brother to me.” After years of trying to use the song in one of his movies, he finally invited Veloso to perform it in “Talk to Her,” in 2002. The melancholic male lead, played by the Argentinean actor Darío Grandinetti, watches in tears while Veloso sings. “That Caetano makes my skin stand on end,” he says to his girlfriend, who comes over to comfort him. The scene is a small concert given at a Spanish villa. A few dozen people crowd around a poolside patio, where Veloso sits on a chair in front of a microphone, staring off like a mystic, or a seer. “To be sure that people understand that this man”—Grandinetti—“is crying, I had to have something that would produce the tears, and that could make the audience cry,” Almodóvar has said. “I remembered how I cried while I was writing ‘Talk to Her’ and listening to ‘Cucurrucucú Paloma.’”
Late on a Friday afternoon, I visited a small limestone apartment building on a tree-lined block in Ipanema. Paula Lavigne had instructed me not to use the buzzer, which was broken. A window was open on the first floor. “Just shout out when you’re here,” she said. Veloso’s son Zeca lived on the third floor. On the first were two units. One belonged to Zeca’s younger brother, Tom, who lived there with his wife and their year-old baby, the other to a portly bald man in his early seventies, with thick glasses and swollen feet, named Cézar Mendes—or, simply, Cezinha.
When I walked in, Cezinha was sitting in shorts, a T-shirt, and black plastic sandals, playing a guitar that rested on his paunch. I was there for more than an hour, as friends came and went. At no point did Cezinha stop fingering the strings, while he told stories about Santo Amaro, where he grew up a few houses down from the Velosos. The apartment was small and crammed with plants and stray sheets of music, some of them taped to the walls. A lamp illuminated his hands from the top of a desk that he had constructed out of the base of an old Singer sewing machine.
Cezinha occupies a privileged position in the Veloso family: he helped teach Caetano’s sons how to play the guitar. Zeca started playing with him around ten, Tom at fifteen. (“A natural, he’s quick and could be even quicker if he weren’t so lazy,” Cezinha said, with a wink.) Cezinha allowed that their half brother, Moreno, who is forty-nine, may have learned more under the tutelage of Gilberto Gil, “but I was really the one who got him going,” he said. Tom walked in wearing a soccer jersey and carrying his guitar. He took a seat, cross-legged, on a chair next to Lavigne, and began to play with Cezinha. He and Zeca are Lavigne’s sons; Moreno, who is Tom’s godfather, is the son of Caetano and Dedé, who separated in 1983.
Veloso started dating Lavigne when she was thirteen and he was thirty-nine. It’s a fact that neither of them has ever tried to hide. Veloso mentions it in his memoir. In 1998, Lavigne gave an unguarded interview to Playboy. She has always maintained that their relationship was consensual, and their subsequent marriage led many Brazilians to accept the matter as private and mostly settled. But the questions never faded; even fans who took a forgiving view of their early courtship—that it had happened in the permissive, boundary-blurring atmosphere of nineteen-eighties Brazil—acknowledge the unsavoriness of it. In the past four years, though, members of the Brazilian right have revisited the issue. A pundit and two lawmakers called Veloso a pedophile. He sued them for defamation and “moral damages,” with mixed success. Now the couple discusses the subject in the context of the new noisiness on the Brazilian right.
“I’m not old, but I started young,” Lavigne, who is in her fifties, told me one night at their house. The two appear to be opposites in every respect. He’s an artist, and she’s a businesswoman. Where he is measured and subdued, she is effusive and forceful. He favors slow, elliptical stories, and she mocks him for his long-windedness. (“You’re going to tell that whole story again, from the beginning?”) He is slight, and she is tall and statuesque, with sharp eyes and long dark hair. “He looks easy, but he isn’t easy,” she said. “I am the one who runs the family, who pays the bills.”
In 2004, Veloso and Lavigne separated, but she continued to serve as his manager. “I felt it was too much to separate the work, too,” he told me. “We learned to go on working together. It was not necessarily easy. She’s very good. She makes things happen.” In addition to representing Veloso, Lavigne, who also had a career as an actor on Brazil’s most famous telenovela, took on other artists, and developed a reputation as a superlative producer.
Their separation sent Veloso into a creative and personal crisis. At the time, he was struggling to finish an album of American songs called “A Foreign Sound.” It took him nine months of plodding studio sessions. His voice kept going out of tune. He was depressed. When the record came out, Veloso went on tour to promote it, but he was also looking for a fresh start.
The moment of inspiration came in Naples. He and his band, which included Pedro Sá, were staying in a hotel that overlooked the twelfth-century ramparts of the Castel dell’Ovo—the Castle of the Egg, named for an old fable involving the Roman poet Virgil. Sá, a childhood friend of Moreno’s, had been sharing new music with Veloso on the tour. It included Wilco, the Pixies, and a funk band from New Orleans called the Meters. “I know when Caetano likes something,” Sá told me. “You can see he’s thinking. When he says, ‘Oh, this is interesting,’ in a whisper, almost muttering, that’s when you know he’s serious.”
Veloso decided to pare his music down radically. He abandoned the sweeping, open arrangements of his earlier work, which called for a large number of accompanists playing in diverse styles. Instead, Sá would play the electric guitar, with Veloso alternating between electric and acoustic. They brought on a drummer and a bassist who also played the keyboard. Called Banda Cê, the group was like a sophisticated garage band: it played tight, angular melodies with distortion, rock vamps, and sped-up rhythms. “A samba parade had turned into a brawl,” a reviewer wrote in the Times, adding that the music “suggested a more cool-headed, grown-up epilogue to the shocks of Tropicália.” Unlike Tropicália, however, Banda Cê was a critical triumph. “The coolest thing in Brazil at the time was Banda Cê,” the music journalist Leonardo Lichote told me. “These guys were like the Untouchables. Caetano wore a jean jacket and purple T-shirt. A younger generation started listening to him, and then got into all of his music.” Veloso was sixty-four years old.
Veloso put out three studio albums with Banda Cê between 2006 and 2015. “He had this broken energy,” Sá said. For the first record in the trilogy, Veloso brought Sá a composition that he described as a love song. It was called “Odeio,” or “I Hate,” and its chorus was: “I hate you / I hate you / I hate you / I hate.” Sá wasn’t sure what to say. But Veloso told him, “When I say ‘I hate you,’ it’s because I really love this person.” Critics pointed out that, if you tuned out the chorus or didn’t understand Portuguese, the song sounded bright and melodic. It was one of three songs on the album about Lavigne. Another is called “Não Me Arrependo,” or “I Don’t Regret.” In it, he sings, “Look at these new people / that we formed in us / and from us / nothing, not even if we were to die / can disprove / what comes to my voice now.”
Zeca and Tom persuaded Caetano to share the songs with Lavigne before they were released. He played them for her while they were both in London for work. As we left Cezinha’s house that evening, and got into Lavigne’s car to go home, she told me, “‘Odeio’ is my favorite of all the songs Caetano has ever written about me.”
Their separation lasted eleven years; just before they got back together there was a final family dilemma. Veloso had long dreamed of performing with Moreno, Zeca, and Tom on a big international tour. The birth of Moreno, Veloso told me, “was the most important event of my adult life.” His oldest son spent his early years in Bahia, surrounded by artists such as Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Milton Nascimento. When he was two, Veloso sat him on his lap and taught him a complex samba choro; at eight, Moreno wrote the words to a song called “Ilê Ayê,” and sang a version that became an international success. He went on to make several albums of his own. Zeca and Tom shared in the family’s talents but took some persuading before they went into music as a career. In 2017, the four of them started crafting a list of songs for a concert, to be called “Ofertório,” which they would take on tour. Veloso saw it as a celebration of family and an homage to the women in his life. But it was also a father’s shameless ploy—“a way to be close to them,” he told me. Lavigne had doubts, however. She worried that, if audiences were hostile, the experience would scar Zeca and Tom. Zeca was twenty-five, Tom twenty. The set list struck Lavigne as being noticeably short on hits. A mother could worry, and so could a producer.
Zeca found a diplomatic solution that satisfied both his parents. The concert would open with the most enduring hit of all, “Alegria, Alegria,” played as a family. The tour was a success in an altogether unexpected way. Zeca performed a composition of his own that was so well regarded that it effectively launched his solo career. Tom’s aloof magnetism onstage turned him into a minor sensation. Last year, he and his father won a Latin Grammy for a song they recorded together, written by Tom and Cezinha.
In 2018, when the Brazilian Presidential
elections were approaching, Veloso saw his police file from the dictatorship
years for the first time. It was three hundred pages, written in a bureaucratic
style. One block of text narrated an interrogation in which
military officers asked Veloso if he had ever mocked the national anthem by
putting it to the melody of his song “Tropicália.” (He said that it would have
been impossible: the national anthem has ten-syllable lines, whereas his song
has eight.) Fifty years after Veloso’s imprisonment, the document might have
seemed anachronistic, even risible. But the conservative candidate for the
Presidency was Jair Bolsonaro, a congressman and a former Army captain, who
faulted the military dictatorship for not going far enough. Its biggest
mistake, he liked to say, “was to torture and not to kill.”
Bolsonaro had spent years on the political fringes, scandalizing Brazilians. But this time he had support from people in high places, including current and former members of the military. Among other things, they were incensed over a 2011 law creating a National Truth Commission that would look into crimes committed during the dictatorship. The President, Dilma Rousseff, had herself been tortured, in the early seventies, for her leftist activism. “The Truth Commission was one of the main reasons why the old military men went back into politics,” the historian Lucas Pedretti, who discovered Veloso’s file, told me. “It was a breaking point for the right.” A few years later, a giant corruption scandal erupted, involving the state-owned oil company, Petrobras. Rousseff had once been the head of the company’s board of directors. Although she was never found guilty of wrongdoing, her opponents pressed their advantage. In 2015, seizing on a budgetary measure she adopted as President, they built a corruption case against her. The next year, with the right wing voting as a bloc, she was impeached. Bolsonaro, who was serving in Congress, dedicated his vote to the military officer in charge of the unit that had arrested and tortured Rousseff when she was in her twenties. In Bolsonaro’s Presidential campaign, he called for the restoration of Institutional Order No. 5, the 1968 edict that had landed Veloso in prison. “You’ll only change things by having a civil war and doing the work the military regime didn’t do,” Bolsonaro said in an interview. “If a few innocent people die, that’s all right.”
When Veloso returned to the country in 1971, the dictatorship was still in power, and government censors kept journalists from describing his and Gil’s ordeal in prison. It remained an open secret until democracy was restored, in 1985. Since then, Veloso had taken political positions as an artist and a public intellectual, but they tended to shift and evolve. He was wary of both the left and the right. The left-wing Workers’ Party, which governed the country from 2003 to 2016, had the support of most artists, including Veloso. But he came to regard it as sclerotic and corrupt. He could be critical of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, the Party’s overwhelmingly popular leader, who served two consecutive terms as President. (Once, after Veloso called Lula “an illiterate” in an interview, his mother, then a hundred and two years old, issued a public apology, clarifying that her son’s views didn’t reflect those of the family.)
The 2018 campaign, however, overshadowed Veloso’s earlier misgivings. In March, a Black city councilwoman in Rio named Marielle Franco, who was widely admired for her outspokenness about extrajudicial killings carried out by the police, was assassinated. Her alleged murderers had ties to Bolsonaro’s family. Bolsonaro survived a stabbing at a campaign event the following September, a month before the vote. As the voting began, a political argument broke out in Bahia, and one of Bolsonaro’s supporters stabbed a friend of Veloso’s to death. By then, Veloso was giving interviews and posting videos expressing his opposition to Bolsonaro. “I am an old man now, but I was young in the 60s and 70s, and I remember. So I have to speak out,” he wrote in an op-ed. “I want my music, my presence, to be a permanent resistance to whatever anti-democratic future may come.”
One night, Veloso and I were walking along Copacabana Beach, discussing his early years in Rio, when the conversation turned to the United States. Crowds had gathered at a respectful distance, and Veloso kept pausing for photographs; some people wanted him to record a greeting for them on their phones. Veloso smiled graciously each time, then turned back to me to resume a knotty disquisition about the state of global democracy. (“It’s hard to be told you’re wonderful all the time, but Caetano takes it pretty well,” Arto Lindsay told me.)
The parallels between the U.S. and Brazil are overwhelming, and, these days, to talk about one country is to prompt a comparison with the other. Donald Trump and Bolsonaro remain allies, and several Trump advisers have been making regular trips to Rio to advise Bolsonaro and build a social-media network designed to link users on the far right. In the elections this October, Bolsonaro will likely run for the Presidency against Lula and his own former justice minister, a jurist named Sergio Moro, who paved the way for Bolsonaro’s election by jailing Lula during the 2018 campaign. (Moro eventually fell out with Bolsonaro, and the two are now bitter rivals.) Steve Bannon has called the Brazilian elections the second most important in the world, after the American ones, and has described Lula as the single greatest threat to the global right.
There was something especially painful about hearing the name Steve Bannon come out of Veloso’s mouth; it felt like a desecration of his voice. “I’m sorry it makes you uncomfortable,” he said, sharply, when I pointed this out. Life under the current government, he said, “feels bad, even as bad as the dictatorship, but it’s a totally different situation. One thing is certain: the people in power are nostalgic for the military dictatorship. But back then we had a coup and the military took power. Now we are under a crazy government during a democratic period.”
Veloso and Lavigne, the filmmaker Petra Costa told me, “have put all their artistic and social resources into a cultural guerrilla war against the rise of authoritarianism.” As President, Bolsonaro has staffed the government with military officers and encouraged attacks against federal judges and political opponents. When Lula was President, Brazil’s minister of culture was Gilberto Gil; Bolsonaro has merged the ministry with the tourism bureau. In the Amazon, where he has gutted environmental protections and granted unfettered powers to agribusinesses, deforestation has advanced at an unprecedented rate. A study this past summer found that, for the first time, large swaths of the rain forest were emitting more carbon dioxide than they could absorb. Scientists have warned that the rain forest will simply not survive a second Bolsonaro term.
Lavigne has responded by becoming a major organizer. At home, she hosts meetings among activists from the environmental, Indigenous-land-rights, and racial-justice movements, using her network of celebrity artists, including her husband, to popularize their message. “I can do all these things because of Caetano,” she told me. “We’re different in some of our political views, but we’re together. Everyone wants to hear what he has to say.”
In New York, where Lavigne and Veloso have an apartment in the East Village, they hosted Indigenous organizers in town to visit the United Nations, in 2018 and 2019. During the first year of the pandemic, while Bolsonaro flouted public-health protocols and sabotaged a deal to secure doses of the Pfizer vaccine for Brazilians, two filmmakers released a documentary that Lavigne had conceived a few years before. In it, Veloso narrates the full story of his imprisonment in 1968, and he reads from his old police file. One of the directors, Renato Terra, told me, “Caetano is part of a generation that thought that Brazil could influence all of the world. He personalizes the idea. Bolsonaro represented all the people who arrested Caetano. Caetano did not speak the name Bolsonaro once in the film, but the message was clear.”
“I’m a producer. My job is to make things happen,” Lavigne told me. We were at their home, in Rio, drinking wine. Her phone rang, and she got up to take the call. “Hello, Senator,” she said, as she walked into another room. It is not an exaggeration to say that Lavigne is an engine of the cultural resistance against Bolsonaro, and that Veloso has become its figurehead. As a musician, he’s been a ceaseless reinventor of himself; now the same is true of his view on politics. He told me, “I feel that I am to the left of myself.”
One morning, I joined Veloso’s sister Maria Bethânia at a studio near a favela called Rocinha. She wore her long gray hair down, with a blue linen shirt and a leopard-print scarf. During a break in her recording, we sat in a garden with vine-covered walls. She’s an icon in Brazil, although less well known internationally than her brother. But neither one could have started a career without the other. Veloso composed songs for Bethânia, and she brought him to Rio. Her voice, he told me, is often in his ear when he writes. “Brazil is the same as it always was,” she said in a recent interview. “But it is sleeping, terrorized, frightened, sick, and sad.” She continues to sing about the country, she told me, but she doesn’t like to talk about it. “I’m an interpreter of Brazil from the inside, but there’s a void, a great silence right now.”
A few months before the release of Veloso’s latest album, he sent it to Bethânia in an early, unmixed form. Her first thought was how young he seemed. All the songs, with one exception, are new compositions, and none of them sound alike. The lyrics are dense with references to Brazilian music, literature, history, and politics; there are songs about homoerotic love, race, and the predations of social media. At points, it’s impossible not to think about Bolsonaro, even though his name is never mentioned. “I won’t allow you to mess with / our story,” Veloso sings. “Despite you having said it’s over / that the dream has lost color / I shout again and again, I won’t let you!”
What struck Bethânia about the new record was that it didn’t just articulate her brother’s opposition to the government; it modelled resistance. His decision to go on making music, at seventy-nine, rather than coasting on old hits, was itself a political act. “Caetano is screaming,” she said, which she meant as high praise. The quality of the music was as much of a message as the album’s most overtly political lyrics.
Brazilians are confronting the fact that their country contains an insoluble contradiction: both Bolsonaro and Veloso represent something essential about the national spirit. Moreno Veloso told me, “My father is a positive thinker. This is a weird and dark political moment. But he thinks this is a wave, a counter-wave, like the confirmation that there was a very huge, good thing going in Brazil.” Veloso himself can sound like a mystic when he makes the point. “I grew up as a Brazilian,” he told me. “That’s why I’ve always noticed the singularity of Brazil. I perceived a mission for us to take to the world. It’s something that should be a real overcoming of the brutality of colonization.”
Veloso almost never listens to his own music. When he does, whether by chance or on purpose, he judges it with a critical ear. More than once, while talking to me, he gave himself the compliment of calling what he heard “audible.” Other times, he feels far enough away from some of his older songs that when someone plays a recording he’s surprised to hear himself say, “Oh, that’s beautiful.” He has written so many songs over the years that he occasionally feels he’s forgotten their essence. “They’re not inside me anymore,” he told me. At his house one night, he was sitting on the couch with friends from Bahia, and one of them, the writer Claudio Leal, gently corrected Veloso’s memory of some of his own lyrics. On Veloso’s face at that moment, I saw something that looked like pride. His work now belongs to everybody.
That night, a group had assembled, in the usual fashion, around the table in his living room, and a guitar was passed around. It wound up in the hands of the singer and actor Seu Jorge, who was wearing white linen pants and a light-green shirt unbuttoned down his chest. He was smoking a cigarette and chatting in a voice so deep that it registered as a seismic tremor. Almost distractedly, he began playing, and the conversations hushed.
It
was a song by Veloso called “Sampa,” about São Paulo. Everyone started to sing
along, including Veloso, who was sitting on a chair in the corner. A rapper
from São Paulo named Emicida came running into the room, mid-song, like he’d
missed something. “You guys started singing about my city without me,” he
shouted, with a grin, before joining in. As the choruses began to subside,
Veloso got up and went into the kitchen. He was alone, almost out of sight. He
took short, quick steps and rocked his hips, dancing to the door.
Words: Jonathan Blitzer
Photography: Rodrigo Oliveira
Assist: Sergio Cezário
Creative direction: André Katz
“I
grew up as a Brazilian,” he told me. “That’s why I’ve always noticed the
singularity of Brazil. I perceived a mission for us to take to the world. It’s
something that should be a real overcoming of the brutality of colonization.”
"Eu cresci
como brasileiro. É por isso que eu sempre notei a singularidade do Brasil.
Percebi uma missão para levarmos ao mundo. É algo que deveria ser uma
verdadeira superação da brutalidade da colonização."
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