April 11, 2004

For Caetano Veloso, First the World, Then Carnegie Hall

hen the Brazilian songwriter and singer Caetano Veloso thinks about American music, he considers a hemisphere, not a nation. And it leads him naturally to look beyond matters of melody, harmony and rhythm, and to reflect on the paradoxes and possibilities of history.

Since he emerged in the 1960's as one of Brazil's, and the world's, most graceful and innovative songwriters, Mr. Veloso has taken up questions at the core of modernity and postmodernity: questions about the crosscurrents of tradition and novelty, juxtaposition and assimilation, power and resistance, memory and fantasy. He is that rarest of combinations, a profoundly self-conscious artist who also follows his most playful instincts. In the truest Brazilian style, his career has blended seduction and provocation.

"You guys stole the name of the continent," Mr. Veloso, 61, genially observed by telephone from Rio de Janeiro. "In Brazil, we sometimes have problems using words because of this. Only the United States and South Africa took the names of the continent, in an unconsciously arrogant way. Given the racially explicit scandal that was lived by both the U.S. and South Africa, I can hear echoes from that decision of taking the name of the continent in what came afterward: a vocation to dominate."

"Of course, like the United States, we in Brazil brought slaves from Africa," he continued. "We were colonized by a European people with a European language. We killed Indians. We share lots of things that Europeans don't know. We share that feeling of America, that feeling of the new world. We have to think of these problems, but most of all we have to open our hearts to the beauty that was created in these new continents, because it's a new experience in Western civilization."

Mr. Veloso returns to New York City this week with his take on Brazilian culture in tow. He is the first nonclassical musician invited by Carnegie Hall to assemble a Perspectives series, and he has chosen performers from Brazil along with one American fan and collaborator, David Byrne. From Bahia in northeastern Brazil, where Mr. Veloso was born, he has invited Banda AfroReggae on Wednesday, a band formed a decade ago as part of a community project for poor slum residents in the city of Salvador. From Rio de Janeiro, where he made his reputation, he has booked Mart'nália, a samba singer who is the daughter of the samba master Martinho da Vila, on Thursday. Mr. Veloso himself performs at Carnegie Hall on Friday and shares a show there with Mr. Byrne on Saturday.

The series concludes on Sunday with Virgínia Rodrigues, a Bahian singer with an ethereal contralto who was discovered by Mr. Veloso.

Meanwhile, Mr. Veloso has released a new album that's a slyly understated collection of songs in English from the United States: "A Foreign Sound" (Nonesuch), named after a phrase from one of its songs, Bob Dylan's "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." Mr. Veloso has spoken English since the late 1960's, when he and Gilberto Gil, his friend and songwriting peer, were exiled from Brazil to England from 1969 to 1972 because their free-wheeling songs displeased Brazil's dictatorship. Their songs were rarely explicit protests, but the government sensed rebellion between the lines, and Mr. Veloso and Mr. Gil were jailed in 1968. In a movement called tropicália, Mr. Veloso, Mr. Gil, Tom Zé and others tossed together Brazilian styles with psychedelic rock, sonic experiments and fractured, allusive poetry, in a pioneering attempt to capture the modern Brazilian and urban spirit.

Most of the songs on "A Foreign Sound" are Tin Pan Alley standards, but the album also includes material from Nirvana, Stevie Wonder and Talking Heads, along with a jolt of dissonance from the late-1970's no wave band DNA (which was led by Arto Lindsay, who would go on to produce albums for Mr. Veloso).

For most musicians from abroad, a covers album would be a straightforward attempt to get noticed here, which is precisely why Mr. Veloso had been considering and than abandoning the project since 1970. "All the times I gave up doing it, it's because I thought, `Whatever I do, it's going to be irrelevant,' " he said. "Because the fact that it seems like you are trying to enter the English-speaking world market of records is always stronger than anything you can do."

But "A Foreign Sound" is considerably more subtle: a homage to Mr. Veloso's formative years hearing imported songs, a comment on border-hopping, a token of kinship and a meditation on exoticism.

"You cannot just be syncretic easily," Mr. Veloso said. "It's dangerous. It's exciting, too, but being both syncretic and eclectic can be very dangerous because creating, performing, composing, these things demand focus and concentration, and also truth in perspective. If one thinks that he can mix anything with anything, he's in danger of getting lost. But nowadays you can't really avoid facing it. Even if you just concentrate yourself in a national, close stylistic world, you're just responding to the necessity of recognizing mixtures and the dialogues of styles and cultures. It is the era of comparison, that you can put things side by side and suggest surprising comparisons that will change your way of thinking and feeling."

On the album, Mr. Veloso sings Cole Porter's "Love for Sale" unaccompanied, hinting at the cries of street vendors. He links "It's Alright, Ma" to brittle northeastern Brazilian guitar music and to hip-hop. He sings Elvis Presley's "Love Me Tender" as a high, sweet lullaby, and he adds burbling electronics behind a string section on Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies." He puts a bossa nova rhythm into Paul Anka's "Diana," a song he had quoted in one of his early tropicalia songs, "Baby." And while his kindly version of "Feelings" can't save the song from its treacly essence, at least Mr. Veloso had good reason to include it: "Feelings" was an international hit in English by a Brazilian songwriter, Morris Albert, who was trying to sound American.

"This is just one more record of mine, and it's just as Brazilian as all the others," he said. "Every little track is filled with layers of histories and emotions."

The album starts with "The Carioca," a song from the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie "Flying Down to Rio." A carioca, in Brazil, is a resident of Rio de Janeiro; the word comes from the native American Tupi language, and means "the house of the white man." From there, the paradoxes continue to pile up. " `The Carioca' is an invented tropical rhythm, entirely false," Mr. Veloso said. "The movie looks as if nobody came to Brazil ever, and the song sounds as if they didn't know anything about Brazilian music. It's a little sweet slight joke, a tender joke. When we finally recorded it, I invited people from Bahia who are used to inventing tropical rhythms."

Another tropical paradise looms in "Jamaica Farewell," a calypso recorded by Harry Belafonte that was a huge hit in Brazil (as well as in the United States) when Mr. Veloso was in high school. "It's a fake Jamaica, and it was an idealized Jamaica, a pop sweet view of Jamaica, and it sounded so dreamy," he said. Later, Mr. Veloso pointed out, Bahians built a new fantasy Jamaica around Bob Marley, merging samba with reggae, so Mr. Veloso's version combines two generations of imagined Jamaicas.

"The song is a free and gentle territory, where you can let your dreams loose, and so you can live," Mr. Veloso said. "It's not just suggesting good things in the lyrics of the song, it's living in the sentiment of the song, having it present new different possibilities of reality."

"Life here in Brazil is horrible in many ways, but it's beautiful also," he went on. "It's strange, but it's different in any case. As a nation we are a child, as big as the continental United States, maybe bigger. We speak Portuguese, we are racially very mixed. We have a historical responsibility of making a new good thing because of that particularity. As far as popular music goes, we have been sketching it. It's a crazy ambition.

"Even if in the future, if we as Brazilians do nothing and we just go on being poor and unorganized and dominated and corrupt, and we slowly disappear in history — even if this dream is only a glimpse in the ocean of history, till now it is alive, and we live the intensity of this ambitious dream."