Thirty-one years after his first show in the US, the venerable Caetano Veloso played the Hollywood Bowl for the first time on Sunday as the last of KCRW’s World Festival series, along with Devendra Banhart and Andrew Bird. DJ Frosty opened the show mixing a short selection of cool tropical rhythms, throwing in a Caetano tune, to which the steadily filling Bowl responded with enthusiasm in anticipation of the legendary headliner.
Devendra Banhart immediately followed. Gently finger-picking his Fender Jaguar, the sonorous notes projected an impressively wide range of tones throughout the amphitheater for several minutes before his voice followed suit. Banhart’s voice has noticeably evolved over the past decade. The high-rapid warble on early albums like Niño Rojo has relaxed to a slower, drowsier vibrato, though certain notes still sometimes reach that frantic excitement, demonstrating a great degree of control over his voice while never seeming to take himself too seriously. Joined by the other three members of his band after four songs, Banhart often seemed to be parodying himself while still competently delivering unexpectedly sublime moments, devoid of pretense, as if inventing as he went along. He grabbed onto the sublime as it came, riding that wave until it toppled over, and then falling back on the cheekiness until the next wave came.
Bowl shows are refreshingly hasty, and Andrew Bird took to the stage less than ten minutes after Banhart left it. Like Banhart, Bird opened his set alone, whistling and playing his violin through an array of effects pedals and loop stations. A plucky pizzicato rhythm on “Cintro” was combined with layers of singing strings, swelling and visiting a range of emotions–a jaunty arpeggio soon gets overtaken by mournful wistfulness, which then gets eaten by something else. Adeptly layering mournful notes and happy accidents over the looping rhythms, while showcasing a facility with dizzying effects and his signature spinning horn speakers in the background, Bird’s set then made an abrupt transition when joined by his band, the Hands of Glory, which sounded like something straight from The Prairie Home Companion. Twang harmonies and warmly overdriven pedal steel colored the rest of the set, with an occasional swell of effects grabbing onto Bird’s ever-expressive violin. Several of the songs even had the band gathered in a tight circle around a single condenser mic on one side of the stage. The duplicity of his set was an interesting combination of sounds, albeit confusing in retrospect.
A slightly longer changeover, and Caetano appeared with a smile to the scores of cheering fans. As he has done for decades, for the next hour Caetano Veloso funneled influences far and wide into a coherent structure, in contrast to Bird’s set, though in a way it vindicated it in the spirit of things. A cofounder of the Tropicália movement in Brazil in the 1960’s, Caetano is no stranger to drawing from multiple styles to create a bold new product. At 72, it is inspiring to hear him carry in this tradition while still being uniquely Caetano. Opening with the vaguely foreboding bounce of “A Bossa Nova Foda” from 2012’s Abra, which explodes into quasi-punk choruses of swirling fuzz guitar before relaxing into loungey moments of reflection, Caetano prepared initiates for the sort of unpredictable, anything-goes attitude that has fueled him for a half century, and 49 studio albums.
The genre-crossing Dadaist attitude even showed visibly in his choice of props, which were four large wooden easels, each with a square painting of a shape on a white background: a black cross, a black square, a black circle (off-center), and a red square–the sort of stuff you would find in an Ellsworth Kelly retrospective. Seeing as the first song began with a spotlight on the black square, it was tempting to try and decipher some sort of relationship between the paintings and the songs. But really there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it except that it added one more layer of mystery to the musical alchemy coming from Caetano and his band. His language easily transitioned from Portuguese to Spanish to English, his musical style employing samba and bossa nova rhythms, while his guitarist channeled Joey Santiago and Kurt Cobain. Caetano Veloso is a musician’s musician with no interest in borders, or even aware that they exist, and his energy is infectious. Without a hint of narcissism, his stage persona is benevolent and ageless. Throughout his eclectic sixteen-song set, Caetano showed no signs of slowing to the 12,000 gathered at the Bowl, in a country where most have never heard of him. It’s rare to see such an energetic performance by a tireless veteran who never fell to the monotony of cynicism or abandoned his passion for experiment. It seems unlikely that he ever will.
Set List:
1. A Bossa Nova é Foda
2. Baby
3. Abraçaço
4. Parabéns
5. Homem
6. Luna Llena
7. Estou Triste
8. Odeio
9. Escapulário
10. Funk Melodico
11. Eclipse Oculto
12. Leaozinho
13. Nine out of ten
14. Reconvexo
15. Você não entende nada
16. Luz de Tieta
17. Foda
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