Alone onstage at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night, Gilberto Gil had a phantom band in his voice and his fingers. He sang percussion flourishes, cello lines, saxophone solos, bird cries; the chords he plucked on his guitar became chimes, undulations of sound, the other party in a wordless dialogue, a rock band or a samba-school strut. Every so often, he whistled too.
Gilberto Gil as a one-man band at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night.
It’s rare to hear Mr. Gil, one of the world’s great songwriters, all by himself. For him, music is social. His songs are close dances between his individualism — thoughtful, benevolent, playful and musically omnivorous — and many cultures within and outside Brazil.
As one of the songwriters who transformed Brazilian pop through the Tropicália movement in the 1960s, he respected tradition while embracing modernity. Puckishly, he started his Carnegie Hall set with “Máquina de Ritmo,” which celebrated digital rhythm machines although he was plucking an acoustic guitar. Mr. Gil, who became Brazil’s minister of culture in 2003, has supported local arts from traditional forms to hip-hop. He is without doubt the most musically gifted cabinet minister anywhere.
Mr. Gil has just released his first album of solo voice and guitar, “Gil Luminoso” (DRG), in the United States. (It was released in Brazil in 1999, packaged with a friend’s book.) It is a lovely album that concentrates on quiet, philosophical songs about the meaning of time, life, art and faith. But Mr. Gil’s live set moved well beyond it. He sang love songs, visions of Brazil and songs from Bob Marley, Blind Faith, the Brazilian songwriter Dorival Caymmi and the Mexican songwriter Agustín Lara, as well as the Beatles’ “When I’m 64,” which he said he began performing on his 64th birthday last June.
He played delicate bossa novas, strummed rockers and intricate sambas; he crooned, whispered and whooped, equally at home in the fast patter of a samba or the curvaceous contours of a ballad. In “Expresso 2222,” a train song that turns into a prophecy of the 21st century and an epiphany, he juggled pinging single notes and rapidly strummed rhythm. In “Nightingale,” which Mr. Gil has recorded in both Portuguese and English, plain rock chords turned into harmonic twists when Mr. Gil mentioned the bird in the title.
Mr. Gil didn’t trumpet his virtuosity. It was offered genially, like his melodies and his undidactic thoughts on love, poetic license (“Metáfora”) and mortality (“Tempo Rei,” or “King Time”). He was alone onstage but surrounded by ideas and interactions: with lovers, with God, with Brazil and the world. And with the audience, too, which was regularly invited to that most amiable social exchange, a sing-along.
