There aren't many pop musicians you can fairly compare with Brazil's Gilberto Gil. Thirty-two years after he began his recording career and became a founder of the so-called tropicalia cultural movement, he remains one of most popular, inventive, and relevant musicians in his country, no small achievement in the world's sixth largest record market. Gil has just released his 32nd album, Quanta (Mesa), and it fairly overflows with samba, reggae, rock, bossa nova, country music and artful balladry. It meditates on the big subjects: science and art, religious truth, and how technology is changing the world for both better and worse. Heady fare for a pop record, but Quanta hit the charts alongside work by Brazil's trendiest youth bands. At 55, Gil survives like Dylan, only his career has known no troughs. Instead, it has traced a steady trajectory toward pop perfection, and on Quanta, he's damn close to the mark.

"Quantum is a minimum of action" writes a Brazilian physicist in a letter to Gil, printed in the liner notes, and that theme of minimalism weaves through this album on many levels. None of these twenty jewel-like songs runs over four-and-a-half minutes, but together they amount to a sprawling, hungry embrace of everything from Gil's African roots, to God and the cosmos, to personal reflections, to the wowing possibilities of the Internet, and of course, all those musical styles. Gil's bossa novas are as smoothly romantic and pensive as any. His accordion-driven forro number--a celebration of the garlic pill--pumps out the hook-laden, foot-stomping exuberance of the Brazilian northeast. "Ciencia e arte" ("Science and Art") is a rollicking country samba, while "Danca de Shiva" ("Shiva's Dance") caresses with a cool, urban take on that signature Brazilian pop rhythm. When Gil veers into reggae and rock territory, he sings with cutting urgency of Bob Marley and so recalls Gil's early days as a rabble-rouser during Brazil's 1960's military dictatorship. His arrangements and melodies unfold like Chinese boxes, forever springing surprises.

Gil has to be seen not only as a musician, but as a literary figure. Quanta is his first collection of new songs since his 1991 release Parabolica. (A collaboration with fellow tropicalist Caetano Veloso and a live acoustic album have intervened.) You can pour over the lyrics of Quanta's interconnected songs as you might a new novel or volume of poems by a favorite writer. The title track declares Gil's cosmic subject matter for the entire song cycle: "I know that art is the sister of science, both daughters of a fleeting God who makes and in the same moment unmakes. This vague God behind the world, from behind the behind." "Opachoro" takes its images from the Afro-Brazilian candomble religion, which offers, "All the enchantments/so many rare things/to dry up the weeping." Gil probes social injustice in "Chiquinho Azevedo," a true-life parable about rescuing a drowning "boy from Ipanima" on the beach and being refused treatment by a doctor more concerned with being paid than saving lives. Gil savors paradoxical transformations, as in the song where a lovers' fight begins as a "bomb that exploded in the lobby of our love," but then turns out to be "but a firecracker."

"Pela Internet" ("By the Internet") is a rocking celebration of the computer network, complete with downbeat slam, bluesy harmonica, DJ scratching, and playful vocal adlibs echoing Mick Jagger's endless quest for satisfaction with the line, sneered in English during the fade, "Got no connection!" Gil's image in this song isn't a superhighway, but an "infosea," where the port of call receives not slave ships and merchandise, but diskettes and far flung missives. "I want to enter the net," sings Gil, "to contact the homes in Nepal, the bars in Gabon, that the carioca chief of police warns on his mobile."

The whole idea of instant connection has special resonance in a place like Brazil, which has some of the world's most bustling modern cities, and also some of its remotest hinterlands. One of Brazil's best new bands in recent years, Chico Science and Nacao Zumbi, used as its logo a parabolic dish rising out of crab-filled mangrove swamp. Chico Science looked like Brazil's most likely torch bearer for Gil's ravenously inclusive artistic spirit, but tragically, he was killed in a freak car accident this past February. Gil, who once collaborated enthusiastically with Chico Science, dedicates Quanta to his memory, and though the album was probably already in production when the young singer died, Gil's song "Atimo de po" ("An instant of dust") also makes a fitting memoriam with its poignant reflection on the vastness and brevity of life. Another cosmic paradox from one of the world's most intelligent and soulful pop musicians.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre
Originally published in: Boston Phoenix