JO?O GILBERTO, DEATH OF AN ARTIST AND THE RESURRECTION OF ART AS TRUTH

Jo?o Gilberto died yesterday, and I clumsily made truly fake news out of his death. I will make up for it with this philosophising: A friend posted the news, but it just did not feel credible to me. Like so many other famous people, he has been lied dead before. Hoaxes of celebrity deaths are common, so I found the most recent debugging news from just the day before, and doubted my friend in another post on her wall. Stupid me! Even a rare legend like Gilberto has a human form which must one day perish. He actually died, is the sad truth. But what can you trust, then?

‘Fake news’ is a reinvention by a recent administration, but the acts of corruption and manipulation of truth for personal gains has ancient roots, and thrives in many places. We must teach the young, and the not so young, to be critical of sources and intentions, I believe, but yesterday my own criticism was misguided. Ooops, foot in mouth, can’t trust a thing, ain’t that the truth! But what DO we hold to be true, then? I have directed and communicated research for decades and I can tell you that truth is a complex matter, up for constant discussion, even –and especially- in Science and Research communities. We can only trust the very process of proper research and peer review, not necessarily the latest results, and particularly not how society interprets and makes use of it. Science and research can be trusted, but only in certain ways. Facts are usually interpreted via some kind of emotion or feeling.

Feelings may appear to be true to you, but feelings can be fake news too. Your gut feeling may well be wrong. Even though you feel that someone dislikes or criticizes you, you cannot know what the other person truly intends, feels, senses, reasons. To trust feelings is a balancing act, just as the use of research results is. In the emotive human, biological signals race around in a body that is conditioned to life in complex cultural and material settings. The embodiment of biologically based emotion-carrying chemistry interactions, interpreted as ‘feelings’ of a certain character is labelled as Joy, Disgust, Fear and so forth. This process is historically and culturally grounded, and as such not only highly personal, but also changing over time. To distrust your immediate gut feeling and balance your emotions with restraint and reason is one meta-competence that we must teach in schools. To trust emotions to inform choices is a skill that needs to be taught even more in schools of education, as many teachers actually score low on their ability to navigate and ride the emotional waves on the Sea of Relationships in School, Kindergarten, Higher Education. Feelings lie. Sometimes.

So what can we hold true, then? Jo?o Gilberto! -Jo?o Gilberto and other performing artists are mediums for the deepest source of human experience that we must –and can- never lose: the mastery of connecting with each other. The composition and the interpretation; the deeply musical inflections, pauses, manipulations of words and even nonsensical Bim-Bom sounds, oohs, aahs and breathing in music is the basis for connecting souls. It surely helped me in my personal life to have Jo?o Gilberto as an emotion-setting backdrop for evenings with my love.

We long for belonging. The loving touching of your skin is as important as air, water, food. The communication between isolated souls that need to connect is just as fundamental to human life as food, at least in the long run. The deepest communication is touch and sound. I am a photographer, filmmaker, composer, musician and researcher of sorts. I cannot live without any of these disciplines in my life. But Sound is the deepest carrier of comfort, together with Touch. So give me Jo?o Gilberto any day. Any night.

So, we must teach Music, Art and Dance in Kindergarten, School, Education and Society. We must reinstate the value of the individuals that sustain our deepest need for connection: The artists. The underpaid, often non-paid artists that give you -all of you -life.

Yes, society must produce and create material value. But just as our industries cannot exist without infrastructure, education and care for those in need, supplied by society, built by our ancestors and maintained by taxes and community efforts; the same way none of us will thrive without musicality in a broader definition of the word.

The Muses are the Keepers of Memories, Creators of Connectivity, Interpreters of our Search for Meaning and Purpose. So teach teachers to teach musicality, musically. Support the artists. Pay for your music, film and images, dammit! Give credit to those that lift your spirit.

Jo?o Gilberto is the only truth, then. Now he is dead. Now he lives on. Jo?o Gilberto and the other artists that make our life worth living, will live as long as humankind exists. Thank you Maestro!

I am an artist, so I pay for art, just like we all must. Here I chose to use images that are common domain in my collage of historical images, inspired by the first album art of Gilberto’s career.

Young Gilberto, Public domain / Arquivo Nacional Collection: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jo%C3%A3o_Gilberto_e_Stan_Getz_em_Nova_York_(1972).tif

Old Gilberto Public domain / Arquivo Nacional Collection:

Starlight 13:01, 29 April 2006 (UTC) [Public domain], https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joao_Gilberto.jpg