Meeting Caetano Veloso – A Legend on the Mountain

Frank Fitzpatrick 09/10/2011

I just returned from the Telluride Film Festival, high up in the Colorado Rockies, where I had the immense pleasure of meeting and spending some time with one of my musical and cultural heros – Caetano Veloso. Caetano is a beautiful soul and kind, brilliant man. Although lesser known in the United States, he is a national hero in Brazil and very likely one of the most important conscious musical artists of our time. David Byrne claims that Caetano’s contributions to the world’s music stage rival Lennon/McCartney melodically, Dylan poetically and the inventiveness of Neil Young, Serge Gainsbourg, Stevie Wonder and others. Even with his stature, I found him to be full of light and ease, and very approachable and engaging as a human being.

Caetano is also a hugh fan of film. He was invited by our friend and festival director Tom Luddy, to co-direct this years Telluride, one of the most respected film festivals in the world. What a brilliant combination of inspiring elements the few days held for all of us lucky enough to be there.

There is so much I could share about Caetano, but I’m actually going to defer to another friend, writer and filmmaker – Peter Sellars. Peter wrote a beautiful intro to Caetano in this year’s program that is more eloquent than anything I could attempt:

“What if Bob Dylan was friendly and a great dancer? What if John Lennon was a world-class intellectual with an insatiable curiosity for Third World literature and a deep adoration for Hollywood cinema, as seen from the wrong end of the telescope? What if Stevie Wonder could see and he loved movies? Is it possible to imagine an artist whose coolness is so intoxicating, whose style is so spontaneous and immaculate, with a free imagination so charged with brazenness, heart-stopping defiance and heart-starting tenderness? An artist who, already by 1966, is both teenager and old master? Whose electrified sense of wellbeing and appetite for life itself could survive and defeat junta after junta? And whose joy and unrelenting, honest sadness allowed his generation to survive with him?

Caetano Veloso is a beautiful being so physically perfect and mentally dazzling, of pure feminine allure and masculine courage (or perhaps that’s feminine courage and masculine allure?), an aesthete without a shred of pretention and a rock star with impeccable, ultra-refined taste, a mover and maker in the world, a maker of movements, and a quiet, introspective witness, observer and library of secret testimony.

Caetano writes the best music for a sunny day at the beach, and the music you need to hear on the darkest day of your life, when you break up with someone you love. He writes music for the world we live in, and music that helped make that world happen. He also writes the music for the world that regrettably did not happen, but that, as you listen to him sing, still might.
His utopian melancholy is illuminated by a sensory thrill of sex, ideas, feelings and iridescent, floating-world dreams. Poet, performer, diplomat, essayist, sage and artist in the largest sense of the term, Caetano has given voice to a generation for several generations now.

In the early 1960s, Brazil gave the world the bossa nova, the art of confronting daily violence and brutality with sheer human vulnerability, of going up against steel and cement with the most fragile parts of ourselves. Caetano’s generation followed and created a soundtrack of elation as nonviolence, dance moves as acceptance, inclusivity and open-ended, moment by moment resolution. He made music that is irresistible as a resistance movement. His contributions to the history of music will outlive us all, but thankfully he is very much still present, still creative, still thoughtful, still surprising. He is one of the rare stars who also shines as a person.” – Peter Sellars
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6H_4YAF4zI[/youtube]