Music: Brazil’s Musical Mutants Resume Their Strange Trip

SÃO PAULO, Brazil

In 1968, from left, Mr. Leme, Rita Lee, Mr. Baptista and Mr. Dias.

OS MUTANTES are to this metropolis, South Americas largest, what the Grateful Dead were to San Francisco, the Velvet Underground to New York or Nirvana to Seattle. Simply put, they are an emblematic band indelibly associated with a particular place, time and pop style.

Unlike their American counterparts, though, Os Mutantes, or the Mutants, are still playing, improbable as that may seem given their star-crossed personal, political and commercial history. After three decades apart, the band members reunited last year for a concert in London, liked the results and are now touring and writing again, 40 years after they first began rehearsing in the basement of the home of the brothers Sérgio and Arnaldo Dias Baptista.

Here at home, where in their first incarnation they were constantly harassed by a military dictatorship that found their hippie lifestyle and psychedelic lyrics threatening, their return has been celebrated. They recently won Brazils equivalent of a Grammy as best band, and have been on the road most of the year, playing to audiences in which fans not even born when they broke up are the largest segment.

Perhaps even more surprising, over the past decade or so Os Mutantes, who will be performing in New York at the Lincoln Center Festival on July 17, have emerged as cult favorites of a younger generation of musicians in the English-speaking world who praise the band as unsung pioneers. Beck called one of his records Mutations in their honor, and other admirers range from Nelly Furtado and David Byrne to Sean Lennon and Devendra Banhart.

In 1999 Mr. Byrnes Luaka Bop label issued a best-of compilation of the bands music, called Everything Is Possible!, that stimulated new curiosity. Since then interest among the pop cognoscenti has broadened to the point that the Mutantes entire catalog is now available in the United States, including Technicolor, a disc in English that had been languishing in a record companys vaults since 1970.

Normally you get only one chance in a lifetime to do something really special and meaningful, and thats if youre lucky, said Sérgio Dias, the bands 56-year-old guitarist. But weve been given a special gift in that its come around twice, and while we were just riding the wave the first time, now we are more mature and can really enjoy all that is happening.

Along with the singer-songwriters Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Tom Zé, Os Mutantes were founders of Tropicalismo, the controversial counterculture movement that emerged here in the late 1960s. They helped introduce electric instruments and rock rhythms to Brazilian popular music, and by using cut-and-paste collage techniques and indulging a penchant for irony, they defined an aesthetic that dominates much of todays pop music.

They didnt sound like the Beatles, but they were innovative, masterful musicians the way the Beatles were, traversing styles from song to song or even from verse to verse, mixing psychedelia, African tribal modes, tango, ragas, Motown, even polka, Mr. Banhart said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. At the same time they were making fun of everything and everybody, like mischievous, deviant teenagers at the back of the class.

One sign of how much Brazil has changed since the Tropicalista era is that Mr. Gil, who in those days sometimes performed with Os Mutantes backing him, is now the countrys minister of culture. He helped organize the 2006 cultural exposition in London, devoted to Tropicalismo, that led to the rebirth of Os Mutantes, and said there was poetic justice in the bands return to activity.

Os Mutantes were an extremely important phenomenon not just musically but also politically, because they inseminated a new spirit, that of the politics of ecstasy, into the Brazilian body politic, Mr. Gil said in an interview. They were part of a revolutionary moment in Brazilian music and mores, so their reuniting has an element of restoration, of putting back together something that was broken asunder in the violent processes going on at that time.

Since the generals who ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 regarded Os Mutantes as dangerous apostles of sex, drugs and rock n roll, the groups shows were sometimes raided or interrupted. Not that Os Mutantes didnt relish their roles as provocateurs: Mr. Dias would mock the military by performing in a Napoleonic uniform, while his brother Arnaldo Baptista, the bands bass and keyboard player, would wear a priests cassock, and the singer Rita Lee would appear in a brides gown.

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