A propósito do próximo concerto de Caetano Veloso e Gilberto Gil no festival EDP Cool Jazz (31 de Julho), em Oeiras, na comemoração dos seus 50 anos de carreira, aproveito para vos recordar o que Caetano escreveu na edição do álbum Tropicália 2 (a pretexto da celebração dos 25 anos do movimento). Trata-se de uma bela síntese do espírito do tropicalismo e do seu magnífico canibalismo sonoro, que ambos, com o contributo e o testemunho de outros intervenientes, idealizaram e concretizaram. Uma música sem idade nem fronteiras, que devorou géneros, gerações e territórios, cujos alicerces estéticos assentaram na aplicação prática da velha máxima: act local, think global. Praticamente tudo o que vinha de fora era aceite e digerido. Dessa recolha renascia um soberbo e revitalizado corpo musical após uma cuidadosa e devidamente dissecada matéria musical, filtrada por uma singular perspectiva regional.
«Milton Nascimento’s falsetto is one of the most beautiful sounds produced by the human species today on this earth. In Carlinhos Brown the dry wilderness goes seaside and the sea laps at the wilderness. Assis Valente didn’t deserve that spiritualist couple of biographers who insisted on treating his sexual life in the same obscurantist climate of dissimulation and subterfuge the was the rule in the time in which he lived and probably contributed to his being driven to suicide. 1955, avantgardes: in the National Park, the Villas Boas brothers; in the National Library, the Campos brothers; in National Radio, Angela Maria and Cauby Peixoto. Roberto Silva was the shadow of the bridge that leads from Orlando Silva and Ciro Monteiro to João Gilberto – an evolutionary line not present in the mind of the other great ones of the period, who only saw the American side of modernization: the Alfs and Alves and Farneys, the Cariocas… The Tao is an invention of man from the Orient. The baião is an invention of men from the dry wilderness. The Tao of the baião will always be a musical path trough universal history. (…) Caruso, Celestino, Lanza, Pavarotti, Domingo – they sound like rooster to me, fine for crowing but though to cook. You need a little Sumac or Callas to soften then up. When I saw Prince for the first time on American TV I thought: Miles Davis like this. (…) Amália Rodrigues, Ray Charles, Cameron de la Isla: lessons of inevitable singing. Everything in Michael Jackson is made of pop material: his great music, his great dancing, his minimal life. In our times only he carries the same weight of popism as Marylin or Elvis or Elizabeth Taylor. (…) Everything that wasn’t American in Raul Seixas was too baiano, too much from Bahia.»
