World Music : Gil Spices Mix With Ideas From Science, Culture

When Gilberto Gil brings his kinetic band on stage at the Hollywood Bowl on Sept. 12, world music fans will have the opportunity to experience one of Brazil’s most charismatic performers in action. A visual and aural whirlwind, he will be singing, dancing and playing the guitar in front of a high-voltage ensemble, very similar to the one that brought him a world music Grammy for “Quanta Live” earlier this year.

But Gil, like such Brazilian contemporaries as Caetano Veloso and Tom Ze, among others, has interests that reach far beyond the entertainment world. He is as conversant with John Cage and quantum physics as he is with reggae, yoga and Taoism. (It’s worth checking out his Web site, https://www.gilbertogil.com.br., for a deeper look at his remarkable range of interests.)

And his fascination with science, philosophy and cultural ideas from around the globe courses through his music. Topics in the appealing melodies and rhythms of “Quanta,” for example, range from mathematics and images of the candomble religion to a whimsical look at gigabytes and Web sites.

This sort of omnivorous intellectual curiosity is not surprising. Gil was one of the principal architects of Brazil’s Tropicalia movement of the late ‘60s, a creative effort encompassing filmmakers, poets, dramatists and writers as well as musicians that was aimed at opening the arts to the changing winds of new ideas.

That effort did not sit well with the military dictatorship then in power in Brazil, and Gil and others were first jailed, then exiled. After several years in England, Gil returned to resume his musical career and soon was more popular than ever, his integrative ideas unabated.

“Lately, I’ve been looking into the need and the possibilities of having radio stations in Rio and Bahia devote more time to African music,” he said. “It’s still hard to find, and I think it’s time we consistently supplied Brazilian audiences with access to this important source of their culture.”

And he continues to find common cause with Brazil’s other creative artists.

“In Brazil, the filmmakers and the poets and the theater people belong to the same culture that we musicians and composers come from,” he said. “So we are kind of neighbors. We’ve been formed in the same school, the same universe; we’ve been through the same problems; we’ve been chosen by the society to represent them, in a sense. Although we may come from different states, from Bahia or Minas Gerais or Rio Grande Do Sul, we’ve had the common ground of having Rio de Janeiro as a main area where we have been installed and where we have been operating.”

Gil has been planning for some time to explore the blending of African and Western music via an album devoted to the songs of Bob Marley. The project still hasn’t materialized, although two Marley tunes were included on “Quanta Live.” Gil said he will include one or two Marley numbers in his Bowl performance.

“We’ll have a program that will stretch into other areas, into blues, improvisation. I want it to have the same kind of freshness and aliveness that was in the live album. Because I want people to understand that it was my band that won the Grammy. Me, I’m just the bandleader.”

* “Tropical Heat,” with Gilberto Gil, Waldemar Bastos and Fantcha, Sept. 12 at the Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., 7:30 p.m. $3 to $75. (323) 850-2000.

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Raga Roundup: Indian classical music can be enjoyed without a whisper of technical knowledge about what the players are actually doing. But it can be enjoyed a lot more with even a rudimentary awareness of the ragas (the scale/melodies) and talas (the rhythmic time units) that provide the foundation for the players’ improvisations.

And now there’s a quick way to gain that awareness: “The Raga Guide: A Survey of 74 Hindustani Ragas” on Nimbus Records. This superb package--a 184-page book with four CDs--is good enough to serve as both a neophyte’s introduction and an expert’s basic source. It includes fundamental definitions of each of the elements in Indian classical music, with written explanations and notated versions (in Western and Indian notation) of each of 74 basic ragas.

The CDs offer parallel audio versions of the ragas in relatively brief but musically complete renderings. And the book concludes with a set of 34 paintings from a 17th century ragamala illustrating many of the ragas. It’s an absolutely invaluable companion, one with the capacity to open the door on one of the world’s most compelling musical cultures.