For most of us in the USA, Brazil remains a gigantic, well-kept secret to the south. But the fact is we have a twin in the Americas. Stepping off the plane in São Paulo is like entering a Shakespearean comedy: Americans and Brazilians have been raised apart and told they are unrelated, but they resemble one another so closely that confusions are inevitable. By act five, the truth will out: we are all Americans.

For one, the ethnic make-up of Brazilians is so familiar: African, Jewish, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Syrian, Lebanese, Ukrainian, Polish . . . even Confederate soldiers established a community there, after the Civil War. This mix -- with all its positive connotations of cultural vitality, and all its negative ones of racism and prejudice -- is something I never thought I would experience outside the USA, at least not on such a grand scale. Less demonstrable, but no less palpable, is the awareness there that you are not in the Old World. Even though Brazil is clearly not the Puritan New Jerusalem (the anti-papist Puritans would have been quicker to judge it a New Sodom and Gomorrah), there is that familiar sense of promise, or maybe it's promises broken, in the air. And though it might be something of a cliché to regard Brazil as representing an alternate American history, the Catholic road not taken, it seems just as likely that Brazil represents our future. Are we in the USA not heading toward a greater divide between rich and poor, a greater mix of races and cultures, a larger population and yet a more dependent role in world affairs? Perhaps it's only a matter of time before we catch up.

There is one area in which I doubt we will ever catch up, however: music. Something happened in Brazil to shape their popular music differently -- not just rhythmically and harmonically, but culturally. And from our land awash in mass-market junk, we can only marvel at the simultaneous sophistication and popular power of a Brazilian singer-songwriter like Caetano Veloso, who'll be performing at Symphony Hall this Wednesday as part of a US tour celebrating both the release of a new album, Live in Bahia (Nonesuch), and the publication in English of his memoir of the 1960s, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil (Knopf).

Caetano, as everyone in Brazil calls him, recently turned 60 (he's a year younger than Bob Dylan), and he's celebrated in Brazil not only as a musician but as a cultural icon. When he first started making records, in the 1960s, he was a figure of rebellion: long-haired and outrageous, he with Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, Gal Costa, Rogerio Duprat, the band Os Mutantes, and others formed the musical movement known as tropicália, which irreverently drew on rock and roll as well as samba. As he tells me when we talk at his New York apartment, "Everything we did sounded like an aggression."

He continues, "What we were doing was kind of collage, of harmonically very basic pieces of music, with violent words -- working with timbres, and contrast. Making half-ironic appropriation of kitsch -- and rock and roll was included in kitsch. Because until that period, rock and roll was rubbish, was considered rubbish. With the Beatles, it changed. And in Brazil with us, it changed its status."

Tropical Truth eloquently tells the story of this period -- of the sources and development of his and his colleagues' ideas and music, their rise to prominence as both performers and provocateurs, and -- in 1968, during the darkest days of Brazil's military dictatorship -- of his and his friend Gilberto Gil's arrest, imprisonment, psychological torture, and exile. The book leaves the story, more or less, with Caetano's return to Brazil, in 1972, when after making the least popular record of his career, a daring album called Araça Azul ("Blue Guava"; PolyGram), he began to write and record the songs that would make him a bona fide pop star in Brazil. He stops there because the book is ostensibly about the tropicália period, and Araça Azul -- an album he considers a failure -- is, he says, "the last stand."

But even if after 1972 Caetano deliberately turned his back on what he refers to in the book as the "insolent experimentalism of Araça Azul," his subsequent career as a pop star is not the slide into mediocrity you might expect. His hit songs are only vaguely recognizable as such to non-Brazilian ears -- far more often their subtle melodies, complex harmonies, and poetic lyrics represent the kind of sophisticated songwriting we might be more tempted to call . . . art. Consider the lyrics to one of Caetano's best known songs, "Cajuina" ("Cashew Wine"), a version of which is included on the new live album:

Our existence -- what is it for?
For when you gave me the tiny rose
I saw you're a beautiful man and even if by chance the fate
Of the unhappy boy does not enlighten us
Neither does it cloud the northeastern tear
Mere living matter was so fine
We were looking at each other, intact retina
The crystalline cashew wine in Teresina."

You might find it hard to believe -- especially confronting these words on the page, without the melody -- but the evidence is there on Live in Bahia: despite the elusive lyrics and the lack of an obvious hook, when Caetano sings this song in Brazil, everyone sings along. It is a hit. "Our existence -- what is it for?" might well be the question posed by many the US musicians, but not in a hit song.

Outside Brazil, in fact, Caetano is not generally received as a pop musician. It's interesting to contrast the new live album, which was recorded at an outdoor concert in his home state of Bahia, with the live album he released in 1999, Omaggio a Federico e Giulietta (Nonesuch), which was recorded in a theater in Italy. In Bahia, the enormous crowd sings along to almost every song -- you can also hear everybody shouting and, it doesn't take much to imagine, dancing. In Italy, where Caetano had been invited to perform a concert in tribute to Federico Fellini (one of his favorite film directors) and Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina (one of his favorite actresses), the audience is seated and, it doesn't take much to imagine, exquisitely dressed. When he begins to sing "Cajuina," there is a rustle of recognition, but no one sings along.

In Italy, Caetano can not count on the audience to understand all his lyrics, yet the Italian concert is a far more beautiful performance. The elegant arrangements (cello, guitar, bass, and drums) and the subtle vocal delivery highlight the poetry of the songs; and the choice of material -- originals and "covers" inspired by Caetano's admiration not only for Fellini's films but also for the composer of their soundtracks, Nino Rota -- makes for a dense, almost narrative web, a true musical analogue to the lyrical nostalgia of a film like Amarcord.

The Brazilian concert, by contrast, is a party. Not that the material Caetano gathered for this show (the same show he will bring on his US tour) is any less challenging. Live in Bahia offers a fascinating set of songs structured around themes related to the Brazilian experience of slavery, which Caetano explores in his latest studio album, Noites do Norte ("Northern Nights"; Nonesuch). It also includes older material like "Cajuina" and even songs from his most experimental albums of the late '60s and early '70s, "Araça Azul," "Sugar Cane Fields Forever," and the song that gave its name to a movement, "Tropicália." It all takes on new dimensions of meaning in this context. But with everyone singing along, Caetano and his band are directing their energy outward: the rhythms even out to accommodate the crowd, the beats are stronger, and the mixed emotions of the songs begin to separate, allowing the joy that is almost always there to rise to the surface.

When we talk, Caetano acknowledges the difference between the two live recordings, but he stands by a statement he makes in Tropical Truth that might surprise US fans familiar with him only as the wild-haired leader of tropicália, or as the elegant master of song he has become in his maturity: "My place is out there in the middle of mainstream Brazilian culture." "That's where I ended up," he explains. "I want to be in the mainstream, sometimes to help the flow, sometimes to make it difficult, sometimes to oppose it . . . but I have this responsibility for the situation of mainstream creation and consumption of popular music in Brazil. I have this responsibility because I think that in Brazil the mere fact of maintaining the health of the industry is already something liberating. You see, Brazil needs to create for itself areas of stability, and popular music has been one miraculous area of stability in Brazil. So the industry that is connected to it must be confirmed and reaffirmed at every step. But also because for countries like Brazil, being affirmed in the international panorama means something that enriches the word `life.' This is very complicated, because sometimes rebels -- revolutionary, or supposedly revolutionary -- think they must be against and detached from industry and mainstream taste, from everything. But sometimes that only weakens some forces that in Brazil mean revolution."

Is it strange for him, then, to have his music celebrated outside Brazil as either experimental or high art but not as mainstream?

Caetano laughs. "Well, Brazil isn't mainstream."

Caetano Veloso plays Symphony Hall in Boston this Wednesday, November 6, at 8 p.m. Call (617) 931-2000. He also appears next Saturday, November 9, at 8 p.m. at the University of Connecticut's Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts in Storrs. Call (860) 486-4226.

Issue Date: November 1 - 7, 2002