Brazilian legend Gilberto Gil’s debut 1962 recordings ‘Decisão / Vem Colombina’ restored and reissued on 7” vinyl for the first time by Day Dreamer Records.

Beginnings are always fragile. For even the most talented musicians, the release of a debut record is fraught with uncertainty. Not bolstered by reputation or burdened by expectation, the music is let out into the world to find its own way. It may fly or it may fall. There is a lightness - a weightlessness almost - to this moment.

Not that a young Gilberto Gil will have felt it. Aged just two-and-a-half, he is said to have told his mother that he would become either a musician or the President. With the release ‘Decisão / Vem Colombina’ eighteen years later, he achieved the first goal. It would still be decades before he became Brazil’s Minister of Culture. He wasn’t far off the second – and there is still time.

Living in Salvador de Bahia, Gil had spent his teenage years playing the accordion, emulating the baião songs of Luiz Gonzaga do Nascimento. Antonio Carlos Jobim called Gonzaga a revolutionary. By the end of the decade – having manifested the Tropicália movement and spent time in prison for defying the military dictatorship – it was a word used to describe Gilberto Gil too.

His debut feels like it belongs to a different era. Released by JS Discos and pressed on 10” shellac at 78RPM,‘Decisão’, the rhythm loosens into a carnivalesque samba. Between the orchestration and group harmonies, Gil’s voice rises with the maturity and assurance of someone twice his age, riding high on the Afro-Brazilian rhythms that echo down the beaches of Salvador de Bahia.

On the B-side ‘Vem, Colombina’ begins with a brass fanfare, a marching band snare and a touch of the Bahian saudade Gil so admired in the work of composer Dorival Cayymi.

Released in 1962, these two songs are the foreword, the preface and the introduction all rolled into one. They are short, but they contain a huge amount of compressed energy, the seed of something more to come. The following year, Gil met Caetano Veloso and the rest we now know.

To hear the name ‘Gilberto Gil’ in 1962, simple and unadorned, is to hear it without the glittering coat of MPB, Tropicália, social activism, political struggle and cultural leadership that it came to wear. To listen to ‘Vem Colombina’ in 2023, is to hear no more or less than the first steps of a young man from Bahia, who might go on to become one of the greatest musicians Brazil, and the world, has ever known.
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Reissued for the first time, and released on 7” vinyl, ‘Decisão / Vem Colombina’ has been painstakingly restored and cut on a mono Scully 601 lathe to get as close as possible to the sound of the original recordings.