GP: reheaters: battles: Gal Costa moment of bossa nova revolution.

As 1968 waned, Brazil's military dictatorship snatched up Bahian Gal Costa's longhaired mentors, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Acolytes of the nontraditional who were galvanized by the short-lived Tropicalia arts movement, Veloso and Gil were encouraged by the ruling regime to cross the Atlantic for a spell. Costa, then twenty-four and moved by her friends' forced exile, followed up her eponymous debut with a sharp bossa nova and psychedelic rock response, simply titled Gal.

In and out of print, primarily as an import, for the past four decades, specialty record store and new label, Dusty Groove, pounced on the opportunity to again make the distinctive recording available. "She was really at that point one the strongest forces of the Tropicalia movement," label co-owner Rick Wojcik says, "and this record was really one of the boldest statements that movement ever made."

"Meu Nome E Gal" bisected the album, and began with the bossa nova languor initiated by Joao Gilberto and others in Costa's adolescence. Luxe and swinging with gauzy strings and triumphant horns, her cool coo remained unfettered--the better to course through the intricate guitar strumming and bottom swishing bass--until it morphed into a screechy caw. Enter a wanton electric guitar and breakspeed percussion and the seams of samba (and its scion bossa) were burst and the hems left hanging. This was Tropicalia concentrate.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

But Gal's tattered fray was front and center, a quality that young jazz vocalist Gretchen Parlato lauds. "She allowed her emotions to come right to the surface of her voice," notes the Brazilophile, who joined Costa in a 2005 Hollywood Bowl tribute to Antonio Carlos Jobim. "She immediately got to the heart of the song, the heart of the note, the heart of the lyric." Gil, whose three contributions slashed and warbled with electric guitar and vocal effects, challenged Costa to pierce through the fuzz. She inhabited them well: rambling as if intoxicated on "Cultura e Civilizacao," siren-esque on "Com Medo, com Pedro," smooth and stir-crazy on "Objeto Sim, Objeto Nao."

But for the sixty-two-year-old Costa, who ascended to star status in Brazil and has an enduring global allure, smoothness is now the most prominent element of her music. Neither Costa nor her musical kin have attempted such a sound in any of their recordings since. Gal is then "a dream gone wrong," to borrow from Veloso's bluesy "The Empty Boat," the album's only English language song. The reverie of bossa nova is a salve to an inhibited populace, but Gal's fierce, fused sonics were a nightmarish battle cry.