David Remnick: Staff writer, Jonathan Blitzer recently profiled Caetano Veloso, the great Brazilian musician. Although as Jon writes, the phrase "great musician", doesn't really cut it. Veloso is a Brazilian national treasure. He's one of its finest songwriters. He was also a political prisoner and then in exile. He's a voice of the '60s who at the age of 79 is as active in making new music as he ever was. Here's Jonathan Blitzer.

Jonathan Blitzer: The first time I became aware of Caetano Veloso, I was in my early 20s. I was living in New York and I wandered into a movie theater somewhere uptown for an evening showing of a film by the great Spanish director, Pedro Almodóvar. The movie was called Talk to Her, Hable con ella. I went into the movie, not knowing specifically what to expect beyond the fact that this is a director I loved, and I just wanted to bliss out and watch this movie. There is a scene right next pool in this villa, somewhere in Spain and there's a group of people who have assembled to listen to a musician sing.

[music]

Dicen que por las noches

Nomás se le iba en puro llorar

Dicen que no dormía

Nomás se le iba en puro tomar

Juran que el mismo cielo

Se estremecía al oír su llanto

Cómo sufría por ella

Que hasta en su muerte la fue llamando

Jonathan Blitzer: That's Caetano Veloso. He appears in the scene. He's sitting on a chair in front of a microphone, gazing out into the distance, and is singing this song. It's called Cucurrucucú Paloma. This is a Mexican folk song from the 1950s. He has this liquid melodic tenor that also just drifts so effortlessly into falsetto.

[music]

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay cantaba

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay gemía

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay cantaba

De pasión mortal moría

Jonathan Blitzer: I can't remember how I began to piece together who this man was, why I needed to hear more of him, but it became an obsession.

[music]

David Remnick: Jonathan, the honor of attending your wedding to our colleague, Alexandra Schwartz, in fact, and you guys walked down the aisle to one of Caetano Veloso's songs.

Jonathan Blitzer: We chose Oração Ao Tempo, Prayer to Time. It's an older song, but there's a more recent version we especially liked.

[music]

És um senhor tão bonito quanto a cara do meu filho

Tempo tempo tempo tempo, vou te fazer um pedido

Tempo tempo tempo tempo

Compositor de destinos, tambor de todos os ritmos

Tempo tempo tempo tempo, entro num acordo contigo

Tempo tempo tempo tempo

Jonathan Blitzer: A lot of people at that wedding came up to us afterwards and said, "Who is that?"

David Remnick: Yes, pop music stars usually, don't sustain a career for forever and ever. They have a moment in time and if they're lucky and if they strike some chord, they're there and then things fade. Caetano Veloso is hardly a new artist. He's released about 50 albums. He's composed music for several singers and musicians over the years, including his sister. What was it like being with him and why has he been able to sustain that popularity and creative for so long?

Jonathan Blitzer: He is constantly reinventing himself and his music to a degree that is honestly voracious. A friend of his, David Burn, was telling me that that's the thing he actually admires most about Caetano and is intimidated by even the fact that every album is new. Every composition goes in a new direction. He is just constantly hungering after new musical sounds and experiences. To hang out with him, you even get a little glimmer of a sense of it because you're just seeing what he's reading, what he's listening to.

It's in every direction, it's classical music, it's pop music, it's hip hop, everything. Nothing is too low or too high for him. He just consumes it all and then somehow weaves together this concoction that is just hits.

David Remnick: Now, you've been tasked with choosing just four songs from Caetano's enormous body of work. What do you have for us?

Jonathan Blitzer: Transa. It's pure adventure.

David Remnick: I bet it was, what do you have for us first here?

Jonathan Blitzer: Well, I was moving chronologically and I thought I would start with a song called Coracao Vagabundo or Wondering Heart. It's one of the first songs he ever wrote. He wrote it when he was 21 years old.

[music]

Meu coração não se cansa

De ter esperança

De um dia ser tudo o que quer

Meu coração de criança

Não é só a lembrança

De um vulto feliz de mulher

Que passou por meus sonhos

Jonathan Blitzer: It's written in this kind of bossa nova style. He released it and immediately said that, "Okay, this is an end of a chapter for me. I'm already going to be moving in a different direction after the song. This is a song he's always loved. His collaborators have always loved. It's just a song that persists through time as a classic.

[music continues]

Sem dizer adeus

E fez dos olhos meus

Um chorar mais sem fim

Meu coração vagabundo

Quer guardar o mundo

Em mim

Meu coração vagabundo

Quer guardar o mundo

Em mim

David Remnick: Eventually, Caetano develops what's known as tropicalia music, a kind of movement. What is that?

Jonathan Blitzer: That movement is about bringing in international rock forms and fusing them with traditional Brazilian music, Sambas and old classics. At that time there were street protests in Brazil in the middle of a military dictatorship in which leftists protested the rise of the electric guitar in Brazilian music. This was hard-fought territory and Caetano blew right through it and started incorporating rock sounds from English neo-rock, as he called it and American Hendrick stuff and The Beatles and fusing it all together.

It was a total sensation and it lasted a few years and it basically landed Caetano in prison.

David Remnick: Now, I think I can pronounce your next selection. It's called Nine Out of Ten. Tell us about that song.

Jonathan Blitzer: This is a song that Caetano wrote while he was living in exile in London. He spent two years in political exile from the dictatorship. I've always loved this song because there is a moment in his time in London when he's really struggling with depression. Here, he is in exile. His life has been upended. This song in particular, to me, it captures this battle that he's fighting, where he chooses life. There's a line where he says, "I'm walking down the road, I'm hearing reggae music. I'm alive, alive, alive." He keeps repeating it.

Then he drifts into Portuguese and says in Portuguese, he says, "There's the sound of music rumbling in my belly."

[music]

Walk down Portobello road to the sound of reggae

I am alive

The age of gold, yes the age of

The age of old

The age of gold

The age of music is past

I hear them talk as I walk, yes I hear them talk

I hear they say

Expect the final blast

Walk down Portobello road to the sound of reggae

I am alive

I'm alive and vivo, muito vivo, vivo, vivo

Feel the sound of music banging in my belly

Know that one day I must die

I am alive

I'm alive and vivo muito vivo, vivo, vivo

In the Eletric Cinema or on the telly, telly, telly

Nine out of ten movie stars make me cry

I am alive

And nine out of ten film stars make me cry

I am alive

Jonathan Blitzer: I just feel like it's a very personal song and I know that he's always been particularly proud of this album. It's from an album called Transa, which he started in England and then ended finishing in Brazil after returning a few years later.

David Remnick: Now, he returned, as I understand it, at the suggestion of his hero and sometime collaborator, Joao Gilberto, the great pioneer of bassa nova.

Jonathan Blitzer: Caetano once said to me, "I didn't believe in God, but I believe in Joao Gilberto." He received a call one day in the early 1970s while he is living in London from Joao Gilberto and Gilberto says to him, "Caetano, you have to come home. Now is the time." Of course, this is not a man who's particularly well known for his practical acumen or his political understanding of what's going on in Brazil at the time, Gilberto and so Caetano understandably says, "How do you know it's safe?"

He and his wife at the time then set out to try to figure out whether or not they can return and will they immediately be imprisoned again? What will happen? They can't get any firm answers. They decide to roll the dice. Then when they touch down, it all happens exactly as Gilberto says it would. He's welcomed. No problems at the airport. He's able to ease back into his old life.

David Remnick: Now, what is the next song, your third song?

Jonathan Blitzer: The third song is a beautiful one called Terra. This is a song that Caetano wrote 10 years after his time in prison. It came out in the late 1970s. The lyrics referred to a specific moment when he was in prison. When his then-wife comes to him with a magazine that had photographs taken by astronauts of the earth from outer space. It was this incredibly poignant experience for him because here he was wasting away in this tiny jail cell and he's seeing some of the first photographs of the earth from space.

[music]

Quando eu me encontrava preso

Na cela de uma cadeia

Foi que eu vi pela primeira vez

As tais fotografias

Em que apareces inteira

Porém lá não estavas nua

E sim, coberta de nuvens

David Remnick: Jon, help us out with the lyrics here.

Jonathan Blitzer: He's describing, sitting in a jail cell when he sees these photographs of earth taken from out her space, and he points out that earth isn't naked because she's wearing the clouds around her.

[music continues]

Quem jamais te esqueceria?

Ninguém supõe a morena

Dentro da estrela azulada

Na vertigem do cinema

Mando um abraço pra ti

Pequenina

Como se eu fosse o saudoso poeta

David Remnick: Your fourth song, your final and favorite track, maybe what is it, and is it in the same mode as Terra?

Jonathan Blitzer: Well, I picked it in part because it sounds completely different. It sounds like it's from an entirely different artist, which is the sensation you get listening to Caetano. This song is called The 13th of May, which is the day that slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888. Caetano was from Bahia, which was a major hub of the Brazilian slave trade. It's also not unrelatedly the home of Samba, which is an Afro-Brazilian musical form, which is at the core of a lot of Brazilian popular music and definitely the core of Caetano's music.

This is the song about the day that slavery was abolished, and it is set specifically in the town where Caetano grew up Santo Amaro.

David Remnick: This is on an album from 2000.

Jonathan Blitzer: This is on an album from 2000 called Knights of the North and the entire album is dedicated to Afro-Brazillian percussion from Brazil's Northeast.

[music]

Dia 13 de maio em Santo Amaro

Na Praça do Mercado

Os pretos celebravam

(Talvez hoje inda o façam)

O fim da escravidão

Da escravidão

O fim da escravidão

O fim da escravidão

Da escravidão

David Remnick: Jon, you write that Caetano originally wanted to make movies, but he ended up making music because of the political persecution he experienced long ago, he is now 79. Has he expressed any regrets about the creative life he could have had? Is he a happy guy?

Jonathan Blitzer: I have to say, he said to me many times how he fell into music. He was interested in other art forms. I believe him. I take him at his word, but I'm somewhat skeptical because it's hard for me to imagine him doing anything else. One thing that his friend Gilberto Gil told me is the reason Caetano says things like that is because he can do all of it and he just chose music. He could have been a painter. He could have been a writer. He could have been a filmmaker. I can't imagine Caetano doing anything but making music like this.

[music]

Lembro da maniçoba

Foguetes no ar

Tanta pindoba!

Lembro do aluá

Lembro da maniçoba

Foguetes no ar

Tanta pindoba!

Lembro do aluá

Lembro da maniçoba

Foguetes no ar

Pra saudar Isabel

Ô Isabé

Pra saudar Isabé

David Remnick: You can read Jonathan Blitzer's profile of Caetano Veloso at newyorker.com. Veloso's most recent album is Meu Coco.

[music]

 

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