Tropical triumph

Caetano Veloso, Brazilian music's most influential performer, is in the spotlight again. Michael Church joins the celebrations

Flavour of this month is indubitably Brazilian music, with a clutch of CDs including the Nu Brazil showcase on Manteca, and Ryuichi Sakamoto's nostalgic return to Brazilian Sixties classics with the oddly titled A Day in New York (Sony). But the main focus is on Brazil's musical éminence grise, Caetano Veloso. This month we have his autobiography (Tropical Truth, Bloomsbury), a CD (Caetano Veloso: The Definitive Collection, on Wrasse Records) and, on Sunday, a South Bank Show devoted to him. All are designed to reflect the first six decades of this singer-poet's tumultuous life. By taking him back to his roots in Bahia - together with his lifelong collaborator Gilberto Gil, now Brazil's minister of culture - they may help to explain what makes this multi-talented and mysterious man tick.

Veloso's aim in his book is to pin down the nature of Tropicalismo, the musical movement that flowered at the end of the Sixties before right-wing repression drove it underground. It was all about young Brazilians' love-hate for the US: at once embracing American mass culture, and defiantly asserting that their country, with its rich indigenous culture, had no need to buy into the new globalisation. Taking their cue from Joao Gilberto and the music of the bossa nova (new wave), Veloso, Gil and their co-revolutionaries created a musical explosion in their home-town of Salvador: the Beatles (in Sergeant Pepper mode) may have been their role-models, but their deeper allegiance was to Fellini and the Parisian avant-garde. Veloso chose not to settle for the down-home sweetness of saudade (nostalgia) and developed a light, ironical tone instead; his sister Maria Bethania turned out to be Brazil's more than adequate answer to Piaf.

The secret behind Bethania's art is her faith in candomble, Salvador's spirit-religion, which draws on Yoruba roots; Veloso's art is a more worldly matter. He's always had a knack for hitting a nerve with the public: "Alegria, Alegria" - a catchy song with a dour Sartrean subtext - became the theme tune of demonstrations all over the country, with its closing words "Porque nao?" ("Why not?") chanted by thousands as they called on their rulers to resign.

Veloso has always denied being a political songwriter, but that did not stop him being arrested and put into solitary for two terrifying months, before he escaped to exile in London. As a "political", he was spared torture: the only thing his captors did physically was to shave off his long hair in what he called "a symbolic assassination", but there were many nights when, listening to torture sessions in an adjoining cell, he wondered if it might be his turn next. His book offers a typically probing study in prison psychology, most notably in how the sex drive is altered.

Sunday's programme will rightly centre on Salvador, that pulsating slave-city that is still the powerhouse for Brazilian music. This is where Paul Simon's album The Rhythm of the Saints is grounded, and where you still hear those other quintessentially Brazilian musics: choro, whose name is derived from chorar, to weep, and whose saxes and cavaquinhos seem to do just that; and forro, the music for a migrant workers' dance, whose name comes from the English "for all". All Brazil's musical roads lead back to the city whose candomble "churches" have earned it the title of Black Rome.

Caetano Veloso is on 'The South Bank Show', at 7.45pm on ITV on Sunday