David Redfern
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Gal Costa, the Brazilian singer who shaped the sound of her nation’s tropicália movement and música popular brasileira at large, has died, the Associated Press reports. Her cause of death has yet to be revealed, but she cancelled her performance at Primavera São Paulo this past weekend after undergoing nasal surgery. She was 77.
Born Maria da Graça Costa Penna Burgos in Salvador, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Bahia, in 1945, Costa met Sandra and Andréia Gadelha — the sisters who’d go on to marry tropicália pioneers Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, respectively — when she was 10 years old. She met both songwriters when she was 18, and made her live debut alongside them the same year. She collaborated with Veloso to release her first studio album, Domingo, in 1967, and their duet “Baby” was first featured on the canonical compilation album Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis in 1968. The version they recorded for Costa’s self-titled sophomore LP, released in 1969, remains her most popular track, and one of the most beloved recordings in Brazilian history.
Costa’s fourth album, 1973’s Índia, is considered a defining document of post-tropicália MPB. (Despite its outsize influence on popular culture worldwide, most agree the antifascist artistic and political movement lasted only five years, fizzling in 1972.) Its cover art, which features a photograph of Costa from the waste down in a bikini bottom and an indigenous Brazilian skirt, was band by the country’s military dictatorship at the time of its release.
She’d go on to release at least 30 more studio albums, as well as eight live LPs, over the course of her long and fruitful career. In 2011, the Latin Grammys honored her with a lifetime achievement award. Her most recent project, 2021’s Nenhuma Dor, comprised duetted versions of 10 Brazilian standards, among them a rendition of “Baby” with Tim Bernardes.
Upon news of Costa’s passing, a legion of former collaborators and fans took to social media to pay tribute.
“Our little sister is gone,” Gilberto Gil wrote in Portuguese. “So many people in Brazil were enchanted by her singing. Now her singing stays with us for the rest of our lives, for the entire time of our history.”
“Gal Costa was among the world’s best singers, among our principal artists to carry the name and sounds of Brazil to the whole planet,” wrote Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president-elect, also in Portuguese. “Her talent, technique, and courage enriched and renewed our culture, cradled and marked the lives of millions of Brazilians.”