Like most artists and musicians, I considered myself detached from the political life. But I had an insight that maybe we would have a political contribution to make in the future.

Sometimes, from outside, and from America especially, where the racial tension is so intense, you tend to understand Brazil as a kind of ideal situation, but it's not. There are a lot of problems. Historically, we have been in struggle, in real struggle to protect and defend the natural leaning towards absorbing the African and the Indian heritage that our society has.

We are sufficiently conscious of this dimension or quality of Brazil as a melting pot, as a culture and a nation that is being subjected to an amalgamating process. More than just a mixing process, it is an amalgamation where the fragments, the parts in collision, really interact profoundly. They become another thing after the contact.

Like most artists and musicians, I considered myself detached from the political life. But I had an insight that maybe we would have a political contribution to make in the future.

Brazil was, is, and will be in fashion.

[ on the "tropicalization" of intellectual property laws ] To make the digital world join in the samba.

Beginning in the sixties, but getting strong during the seventies and eighties, everybody was sort of Miles Davis and Chick Corea and the jazz guys on the west coast and east coast in America, and then in Switzerland and lots of groups in England and elsewhere, like here in Brazil. We were all under a heavy influence of technological gadgets and changes that we used as elements to produce and create music.