IMN - International Music Network

Gilberto Gil has developed one of the most relevant and renown careers as a singer, composer and guitar-player in both world and pop music. In a career that has spanned four decades, with over 30 albums released, Gil has six gold records, four platinum singles and five million records sold. The Tropicalist genre he introduced, alongside Caetano Veloso, has secured his fame internationally as well as at home in Brazil. His extensive and prolific catalogue of work has been covered and recorded by João Gilberto, Elis Regina, Gal Costa, Sérgio Mendes, Ernie Watts, and Toots Thielmans. Over the years, his political and environmental activism gained prominence alongside his musical career and reached a new height in 2002 when he was appointed minister of culture for Brazil. As a musician and as a diplomat, Gil possesses a key role in the constant modernization of Brazilian popular music and culture throughout the world.

North American concert dates have been announced for Grammy Award-winning artist Gilberto Gil for June and July 2008. Following his unprecedented solo tour here in 2007, Gil returns with a full band line-up for 11 concerts in major markets, his first such tour since 1999. Performing the repertoire from his latest CD Banda Larga Cordel (June 2008 /Warner Music Latina), Gilberto Gil continues to raise the banner he’s been carrying in his most recent works – the Broad Band (Banda Larga).

Gil has delved deeply into the vertiginous waters of the digital revolution and its accelerated information highway. He wants his music to use all of these means of communication including mobile phones, the internet, cable, digital TV, ringtones, truetones, downloads, etc.

Since the days of Tropicália, Gil has long demonstrated his interest and fascination with this subject. Just listen to Cérebro Electrônica or Futurivel (1969), for instance, or even Cibernética (1974) or Parabolicamará (1991). But the most obvious example is the Grammy Award-winning double album Quanta (1997) in which he assembled a large part of his reflections on art/science and new technologies. The album was previewed by the pioneering launch of Gil’s website in April of 1996, and through the on-line broadcast, that same year, of “Pela Internet”, the first Brazilian song to be officially released through the internet in real time.

With the passing of time, Gil’s interest on these subjects has not only increased but the number of willing interlocutors has multiplied and he has seen various ideas materialize: Digital inclusion, Creative Commons, Free Software, for example. These are just some of the concepts he already had in mind and that were evident in his activities and in the public discourse of Gilberto Gil.

BANDA LARGA (Broad Band), the album and the tour, reaffirm Gil’s irreversible engagement with the new rules and compasses of the universe of bits and bytes, embracing all of the risks and challenges. This theme that has fascinated him for more than 30 years characterized a previous tour outside of North America, also called Banda Larga, in which Gil made available as much of his work as possible for webcasts, podcasts, cellcasts, etc.

The audience for his shows was and continues to be another form for multi-casting, energized to make their own recordings and videos of the performance with digital cameras and cell phones. The traditional “It is forbidden to photograph or film this show without previous authorization” has been replaced by a warm invitation: “Record and film whatever you want however you want.” The shows themselves including backstage footage of life on the road will be released on the internet as widely as possible, on diverse platforms ranging from a specially-created tour blog to the parallel universe of Second Life.

The great novelty of the Banda Larga Summer Tour 2008 is really the set list. Whereas the previous tour was created around the greatest hits, this time Gilberto Gil will play a new collection of songs such as “Banda Larga Cordel”, “Não grude não” and other more recent compositions, many of them inspired by this theme and by his new experiences around this theme that fascinates him so much. The only major artist of his generation to retain complete control over his intellectual works, Gilberto Gil intends to interact with his audience and provoke interaction.