Biography

	“O Leãozinho” (0:19) A 19-second pattern of “O Leãozinho”, a tune recorded comparatively early in Veloso’s profession.
Issues taking part in this file? See media assist.

Veloso was born in Santo Amaro da Purificação, Bahia, Brazil, the fifth of seven youngsters of José Teles Veloso (1901–1983) and Claudionor Viana Teles Veloso (1907–2012). His childhood was influenced vastly by inventive endeavors: he was involved in each literature and filmmaking as a toddler, however centered primarily on music. The musical type of bossa nova and João Gilberto, one among its most outstanding exponents, have been main influences on Veloso’s music as he grew up.^[3] Veloso was 17 years outdated when he first heard Gilberto, whom he describes as his “supreme grasp”.^[4] He acknowledges Gilberto’s contribution to Brazilian music as new—”illuminating” the custom of Brazilian music and paving the best way for future innovation.^[4] Veloso moved to the Bahian port metropolis of Salvador as an adolescent, town during which Gilberto lived, and a middle of Afro-Brazilian tradition and music.^[5]

In 1965, Veloso moved once more to Rio de Janeiro, along with his sister Maria Bethânia, additionally a musician. Shortly after the transfer, Veloso gained a lyrics contest for his composition “Um Dia” and was signed to Philips Data.^[6] On October 21, 1967, Veloso gained fourth prize and gained a standing ovation on the third annual Brazil Fashionable Music Competition along with his tune “Alegria, Alegria”. on which he was backed by São Paulo group Beat Boys; together with the efficiency of his good friend Gilberto Gil, who was backed by psychedelic band Os Mutantes, this marked the primary time that rock bands had carried out on the pageant. Throughout this era, Veloso, Bethânia, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, and Os Mutantes developed “Tropicalismo”, which fused Brazilian pop with rock and roll and avant-garde music. Veloso describes the motion as a want to be totally different – not “defensive” just like the right-wing Brazilian navy authorities, which vehemently opposed the motion. Though Gil and Veloso’s performances on the 1967 MBP Competition have been rapturously obtained, inside a yr, Tropicalismo had grow to be a deeply divisive problem amongst Brazil’s youth viewers, with Marxist-influenced school college students of the Brazilian left wing condemning Tropicalismo, as a result of they believed it commercialized Brazilian conventional music by incorporating musical affect from different cultures, particularly the USA.^[4]

The musical manifesto of the Tropicalist motion was the landmark collaborative LP Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis (“Tropicalia: or Bread and Circuses”), issued in mid-1968, which introduced collectively the skills of Veloso, Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé and Gal Costa, with preparations by avant-garde composer-arranger Rogerio Duprat (who had studied with Pierre Boulez) and lyrical contributions from poet Torquato Neto. The album’s group cowl {photograph} depicted the collective holding quite a lot of objects and pictures, in a deliberate reference to the duvet of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Membership Band.

Caetano Veloso on the III Fashionable Music Competition, 1967. Nationwide Archives of Brazil.

The tensions between the Tropicalistas and the scholar left peaked in September 1968 with Veloso’s now-legendary performances on the third annual Worldwide Tune Competition, held on the Catholic College in Rio, the place the viewers included a big contingent of scholars who have been vehemently against the Tropicalistas. When Veloso (backed by Os Mutantes) carried out within the first spherical of the Competition’s tune competitors on September 12, he was initially greeted with enthusiastic applause, however the state of affairs quickly turned ugly. Wearing a shiny inexperienced plastic swimsuit, festooned with electrical wires and necklaces strung with animal tooth, Veloso provoked the scholars along with his lurid costume, his sensual physique actions and his startling new psychedelic music, and the performers have been quickly being bombarded with loud insults, jeers and boos from the scholars, who turned much more incensed when American pop singer John Dandurand made a shock look on stage in the course of the tune.

The ideological battle climaxed three days afterward September 15 when Veloso returned for the second spherical of the competitors, performing a specially-written new tune entitled “É Proibido Proibir” (“It’s Forbidden to Forbid”). The leftist college students started hissing and booing as quickly as Veloso’s title was introduced, and when he started his efficiency, his overtly sexual stage strikes and the experimental music of Os Mutantes once more provoked a wild response – the scholars started booing so loudly that the performers may barely be heard, and a piece of the gang then stood up and turned their backs to the stage, prompting Os Mutantes to show their backs on the viewers. Because the efficiency continued, the scholars pelted the stage with fruit, greens, eggs, paper balls and anything that got here handy. Veloso then stopped singing and launched into an impassioned monologue, during which he excoriated the scholars for his or her conservatism. After being joined by Gilberto Gil, who got here on stage to point out his help, Veloso completed his diatribe by telling the scholars “…in case you are the identical in politics as you’re in aesthetics, we’re carried out for!” and declaring he would not compete in music festivals. He then intentionally completed the tune out of tune, angrily shouted “Sufficient!” and walked off arm-in-arm with Gil and Os Mutantes. A studio model of the tune was later launched as a single, and the closing part of the tumultuous dwell efficiency that includes Veloso’s speech, was issued as the only’s B-side.^[7] [103] Despite the fact that Tropicalismo was controversial amongst conventional critics, it launched to Música standard brasileira new components for making music with an eclectic type.^[8]

Veloso studied philosophy on the Universidade Federal da Bahia,^[3] which influenced each his inventive expression and viewpoint on life. Two of his favourite philosophers have been Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger.^[8] Veloso’s leftist political stance earned him the enmity of Brazil’s navy dictatorship which dominated till 1985; his songs have been steadily censored and a few banned. Veloso and Gil have been each arrested in February 1969 and held in jail for 3 months, adopted by an extra 4 months beneath home arrest; they have been finally launched provided that they go away the nation, and spent the following few years in exile. He stated that “they did not imprison us for any tune or any explicit factor that we stated,” ascribing the federal government’s response to its unfamiliarity with the cultural phenomenon of Tropicália—they appeared to say “We would as nicely put them in jail.”^[9] The federal police detained the 2 and flew them to an unknown vacation spot. Lastly, Veloso and Gil lived out their exile in London, England. When Caetano was requested about his expertise there he says, “London felt darkish, and I felt far-off from myself.” However, the 2 improved their music there and have been requested to make a musical manufacturing with the producer Ralph Mace.^[8]

Profession

Musical profession (1972–current)

Veloso performs in Lisbon, Portugal in 2007.

Veloso’s work upon his return in 1972 was typically characterised by frequent merging not solely of worldwide kinds however of Brazilian folkloric kinds and rhythms as nicely. His reputation grew outdoors Brazil within the Eighties, particularly in Greece, Portugal, France, and Africa. His data launched in the USA, akin to Estrangeiro, helped acquire him a bigger viewers.

To rejoice 25 years of Tropicalismo, Veloso and Gilberto Gil launched a CD known as Tropicalia 2 in 1993.^[10] One tune, “Haiti”, attracted individuals’s consideration in the course of the time, particularly as a result of it included highly effective statements about sociopolitical points current in Haiti and likewise in Brazil. Points addressed within the tune included ethnicity, poverty, homelessness, and capital corruption within the AIDS pandemic.^[10][11] By 2004, he was one of the revered and prolific worldwide pop stars, with greater than 50 recordings out there together with songs in movie soundtracks of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Eros, Pedro Almodóvar’s Hable con ella, and Frida, for which he carried out on the seventy fifth Academy Awards however didn’t win. In 2002 Veloso revealed an account of his early years and the Tropicalismo motion, Tropical Fact: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil.^[12]

His first all-English CD was A Overseas Sound (2004), which covers Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” and compositions from the Nice American Songbook akin to “Carioca” (music by Vincent Youmans and lyrics by Edward Eliscu and Gus Kahn), “All the time” (music and lyrics by Irving Berlin), “Manhattan” (music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart), “Love for Sale” (music and lyrics by Cole Porter), and “One thing Good” (music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers). Six of the seven songs on his third eponymous album, launched in 1971, have been additionally in English.

Veloso has contributed songs to 2 AIDS profit compilation albums produced by the Purple Scorching Group: Purple Scorching + Rio (1996) and Onda Sonora: Purple Scorching + Lisbon (1998).

In 2011, he once more contributed two songs to the Purple Scorching Group’s most up-to-date compilation album, Purple Scorching + Rio 2. The 2 tracks embody a remix of “Terra” by Prefuse 73 (“3 Mellotrons in a Quiet Room Model”) and “Dreamworld: Marco de Canaveses”, in collaboration with David Byrne.

His September 2006 album, Cê, was launched by Nonesuch Data in the USA. It gained two Latin Grammy Awards, one for greatest singer-songwriter^[13] and one for Finest Portuguese Tune, “Não Me Arrependo”.^[14]

With a complete of 9 Latin Grammy Awards and two Grammy Awards, Veloso has obtained greater than every other Brazilian performer. On November 14, 2012, Veloso was additionally honored because the Latin Recording Academy Particular person of the 12 months.^[1]

Veloso has been known as “one of many biggest songwriters of the century”^[15] and “a pop musician/poet/filmmaker/political activist whose stature within the pantheon of worldwide pop musicians is on par with that of Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Lennon/McCartney”.^[6]

In January 2016, Caetano Veloso was a featured artist on the conference of the Fashionable Language Affiliation (MLA), in Austin, Texas. Earlier than a SRO crowd, he was interviewed on stage by two luminaries within the subject of poetry and poetics, Marjorie Perloff (emerita Stanford) and Roland Greene (Stanford, President of MLA on the time). Many of the dialogue involved music, from rock ‘n’ roll and samba to experimental composition. Movies of the occasion ought to be posted at MLA’s web site and the Stanford Arcade web site. He additionally carried out “Isto aqui, o que é?” on the 2016 Summer time Olympics opening ceremony together with singers Anitta and Gilberto Gil after the parade of delegations in August 2016.^[16]

In Might 2018, Veloso carried out on the Grand Closing of the 2018 Eurovision Tune Contest within the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, alongside 2017 winner Salvador Sobral.^[17] His dwell album Ofertório (Ao Vivo) (recorded along with his sons Moreno, Zeca and Tom) was ranked because the twenty fifth greatest Brazilian album of 2018 by the Brazilian version of Rolling Stone journal.^[18]

Private life

Veloso married fellow Baiana and actress Andrea Gadelha (or Dedé) on November 21, 1967, in a ceremony that mirrored the air of the counterculture period. Their son Moreno was born on November 22, 1972. On January 7, 1979, their daughter Júlia was born 3 months untimely; she died 11 days later.^[19] Veloso’s father died on December 13, 1983. Veloso separated from Dedé Veloso in 1983. In 1986 Veloso married Rio native Paula Lavigne, with whom he had two extra sons, Zeca Lavigne Veloso, born March 7, 1992, and Tom Lavigne Veloso, born on January 25, 1997, in Salvador. Paula confirmed to Playboy journal in 1998 that, “[Paula] was 13 years outdated when she misplaced her virginity to the musician, who was 40 years outdated on the time.”^[20] Caetano has since been accused of pedophilia.^[20] This marriage lasted twenty years. Though separated since 2004, the 2 nonetheless work collectively. Veloso’s 1989 CD Estrangeiro contains songs (“Esse Amor, which suggests “This Love”, and “Branquinha”) impressed by and devoted to, respectively, his ex-wife Dedé and his spouse on the time, Paula Lavigne.^{[21][22][23][24]}

Veloso is likely one of the few public atheist celebrities in Brazil. He was introduced up in a non secular Catholic household however left the religion early on. In an interview Veloso said that he didn’t prefer to “deceive his personal intelligence” by believing in God.^[25] In a separate interview Veloso generated controversy when he stated that Brazil can be higher off if most individuals within the nation have been to grow to be irreligious or atheist.^[26] Regardless of this, two of Veloso’s sons have grow to be members of the neo-Pentecostal Common Church of the Kingdom of God, with Veloso attending his youngsters’s baptism, stating that “what is sweet for them is sweet for me.”^[25]

Musical type

Veloso’s residence, Bahia, has had a decisive position in his music. He praises Bahia for its significance in Brazil’s colonial interval—when the Portuguese first got here—in addition to for Bahia’s contribution to Brazilian music. He has cited amongst his musical influences Amália Rodrigues, Cole Porter, The Rolling Stones 1969 tour, and above all, João Gilberto.

Veloso says that he’s unable to make a comparability between his musical type within the Nineteen Sixties, on the peak of Tropicália, and his present work. He does be aware, nonetheless, that he has been in a position to accomplish music of a better high quality later in his profession; that he’s “higher at all the things.”^[4]

Discography

Awards and honors

Bibliography

• Perrone, Charles A. (1989), Masters of Up to date Brazilian Tune: MPB 1965–1985. Austin: College of Texas Press. Chapter 2 “Different Phrases and Different Worlds of Caetano Veloso”.
• Wald, Elijah (2007). International Minstrels: Voices of World Music. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-97930-6.
• Veloso, Caetano (2003). Tropical Fact: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Mei, Giancarlo (2004). Canto Latino: Origine, Evoluzione e Protagonisti della Musica Popolare del Brasile (in Italian). Stampa Alternativa-Nuovi Equilibri.
• Veloso, Caetano (1997). Alegria, Alegria. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Pedra que Ronca.
• Veloso, Caetano (1997). Verdade tropical. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras.
• Veloso, Caetano (2003). Letra só. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras.
• Veloso, Caetano (2005). O mundo não é chato. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras.
• Morais Junior Lui Morais, Luís Carlos de (2004). Crisólogo: O estudante de poesia Caetano Veloso. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: HP Comunicação.
• De Stefano, Gildo, Il popolo del samba, La vicenda e i protagonisti della storia della musica popolare brasiliana, Preface by Chico Buarque de Hollanda, Introduction by Gianni Minà, RAI-ERI, Rome 2005, ISBN 8839713484
• De Stefano, Gildo, Saudade Bossa Nova: musiche, contaminazioni e ritmi del Brasile, Preface by Chico Buarque, Introduction by Gianni Minà, Firenze: Logisma Editore, 2017, ISBN 978-88-97530-88-6