Brazilian Tropicália

The seeds weren't planted in São Paulo's concrete, but in Bahia's sertão—the dry backcountry where accordion music crackled through radios and street performers worked Salvador's Afro-Brazilian neighborhoods. Gilberto Gil grew up in Ituaçu in the 1940s and 50s listening to Luiz Gonzaga's forró, music that came, as he'd later describe it, “beneath the mud of the earth.” Caetano Veloso, born in Santo Amaro da Purificação in 1942, was seventeen when João Gilberto's bossa nova records arrived—“my supreme master,” he'd call him, an illumination of what Brazilian tradition could become. Tom Zé came from Irará, smaller still, a town he called “pre-Gutenbergian” where information moved by mouth. These were the proto-tropicalistas: Northeast children carrying the friction between rural tradition and urban modernity into their art like contraband.

The movement coalesced when Veloso and Gil met at Salvador's Federal University of Bahia in 1963. They started performing at Vila Velha Theatre—the opening night concert series “Nós, por Exemplo” (“Us, for Example”) in July 1964, months after the military coup. Maria Bethânia, Gal Costa, Tom Zé joined them. Gil became musical director. This collective began experimenting, taking bossa nova's sophisticated progressions and making them stranger, rawer. The connection to São Paulo's concrete poets—especially Augusto and Haroldo de Campos—brought literary experimentalism into the songs.