The title
track is a most worthy addition to Gil's body of work; one not only of
substance but also of obvious symbolic power, celebrating the
communities of runaway slaves in Brazil. However, the rest of this
soundtrack for a film on a most significant one - the Quilombo dos Palmares - incurs in the usual peccadilloes of the format, biding a portion of its
time on perfunctory variations on the main theme, while also falling
prey to some 1980's production choices (much like the rest of
Gil's work from that period), which means that little effort was made to
deliver something more tailor-made and unique, going deeper into the
African roots of Brazilian music, which a few other numbers (like the instrumental "Alujá Do Rei Xangô") and some
meatier percussion work signal was a real possibility, but became instead a sadly missed opportunity (kind of how, in what was otherwise one of his
finest albums from the last decades, Chico Buarque's Sinhá (with music
by João Bosco) made me fervently wish he would put out an entire album delving
into that social soundworld - while realizing that he probably couldn't do so without raising a whole lot of very different highbrows these days).
As a
result, the record as a whole feels not only a bit run of the mill ("Dandara, A Flor Do Gravatá" might be the only other song I'd keep) but
strangely anachronistic, and not, I suspect, in any meaningful way, as in linking past struggles and present strife, should that require underlining (it might). Of course, I'd have to track down the film to check that hypothesis, which is something that, despite director Carlos Diegues' not unpromising beginnings and good taste in musical collaborators (not only Gil but, again, Buarque, on Quando o Carnaval Chegar, for instance), is not high on my priority list given what little I've seen from his 1970's-80's output (admittedly, the bare minimum to start getting superficially opinionated about it); but then again, if it were the sort of film that could, in some measure, succeed in counteracting our (dia)chronic slippage into that sort of (in)voluntary social amnesia liable to romanticize even the worst of times (at least for a whole lot of people, mostly unrelated to those doing the romanticizing), maybe I could also, in some measure, refrain from being such a judgmental stick in the mud, until such a time when art and its appreciators can safely divert their full attention back to their self-absorbed mirrors. The best of times? Maybe just as good as it gets.
