Interpreter of albums with a pop, jazzy or bossa-nova tendency, she was part of the tropicalist movement which, under the military dictatorship of AI-5, revolutionized Brazilian music. It died on November 9 at the age of 77.
by Véronique Mortaigne
“Meal nome é gal” (“My name is Gal”), she sang. Gal, three letters, to pronounce with sweetness, by delighting it, because Gal Costa, it was the beauty of a Métis country, and the affirmation of the right of women to exist as they wish, wise or delusional , rebellious of course. Tropical beauty, bare belly, long Afro hair, lips painted red “stick”: Gal Costa was the feminine element of the tropicalist revolution – the Brazilian musical revolution of the 1960s -, which she led as a hippie warrior and rock’n ‘Roll alongside his comrades Bahianais Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé. Her weapons: a guitar, which she played very well, a sensual voice, of a crystalline character, which she could push very high, and a total absence of prejudices or moralizing frameworks.
Honey interpreter of the Brazilians, she was the son -daughter who inevitably separates from her mother in Mamae, Coragem – “I want, I can, I wanted, I did it”. She was the wounded woman of Sua Estidéz, a rageous love song written by the Yé-Yu-Yeu Roberto Carlos and Erasmo Carlos in 1971. She was this tigresa, beauty with black nails, which, “touching my body of her golden skin Brown, tells me that the evil is good and the good cruel “, song composed by Caetano Veloso in 1977.
In fifty-seven years of career, Gal Costa has operated her art and her charm on many “small music” which she transformed into gold. Born in Barra, a district of Salvador da Bahia, on September 26, 1945, Maria Da Graça Costa Penna Burgos died in Sao Paulo on November 9, of a pulmonary embolism. She was 77 years old.
Daughter of a widowed mother passionate about classical music, she wants to sing from childhood. To refine her voice, she had, she said, her methods. Iconoclasts. For example: Take a pot that was used for cooking the Feijoada, putting your head on the inside, controlling breathing and seizing the shades of the stamp. According to his destiny, “Gracinha”, not yet GAL, works with a record store, Roni Discos. Then befriends his neighbors, the Sisters Sandra and Andréa Gadelha, future wives of Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso.
Tropicalist family
At the time, the girl has short hair and she was under control – that of the voice of Joao Gilberto, guitarist, singer who has just invented the Bossa -Nova with the album Chega de Saudade (1958 ). Presented in 1963 in Caetano Veloso by her friends, she took her first steps on stage in August 1964, at the Vila Velha theater, symbol of the cultural bubbling of Salvador de Bahia on the eve of the 1964 military coup. unfolds what will soon become the band of tropicalists – Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and his sister Maria Bethânia, Tom Zé. Here is her recomposed family, whom she soon follows in Rio de Janeiro.
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