COOL HEAT.

In 1983, Bob Hurwitz, who worked for a jazz and classical label called ECM, attended a performance at the Public Theatre, in New York, by the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso--his first show in America. "The audience was probably ninety per cent Brazilian," Hurwitz recalled. "Caetano played with a band, and then, in the middle of his set, did six or seven songs by himself, which was a rare thing for a Brazilian to do here. He sang in English once--a Cole Porter song. Then he brought out his son, Moreno, who was ten or eleven, to sing. It was magical."

The following year, Hurwitz took over the classical label Nonesuch and signed Veloso. In September, 1985, Veloso returned to New York and recorded thirteen songs, using little besides his voice and a nylon-string acoustic guitar. He chose pieces that Brazilians knew by heart: "O Leaozinho" ("Little Lion"), a lilting ode to, as Veloso has described him, "a beautiful young man whose sign was Leo"; also "Terra," a long, melodically complex song inspired by photographs of the earth taken by astronauts. In addition, Veloso included a cover of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," converting Jackson's tense dance music into a quiet, confident bossa nova and making the anxious denial of the original ("the kid is not my son") sound like a carefree dismissal. (Veloso's version also incorporated a snippet from "Eleanor Rigby"; it was as if he wanted Americans to know that he was not cowed by pop music's greats.) The resulting album, the glowing and precise "Caetano Veloso" (1986), was the first record by a pop artist to be released by Nonesuch. Veloso was forty-four years old.

Covering a Michael Jackson song with a classical guitar for a label associated with modern composers and recordings of Javanese gamelan players is the kind of counterintuitive act for which Veloso is famous. This week, at the age of sixty-four, he will release "Ce," a brisk, spare record that sounds more like indie rock than any of the other, highly varied music that he has made in the past forty years. Veloso's stylistic range and influence on his peers have earned him comparisons to Bob Dylan, but the two men could not be more different. As Veloso put it in an interview, Dylan "is an artist who hides his personality behind the art he is creating. He would never ever touch his work with explanation or analysis. And I am the opposite. I am almost not an artist." Veloso is a public figure in Brazil, appearing on Carnival floats and collaborating with local musicians. His lyrics tend to be poetic--on "Ce," he describes himself as a "rattlesnake bristling in the bushes" and his muse as a "coppery panther"--but he can be straightforward when his subject matter demands it. The title track of his 2001 album, "Noites do Norte" ("Northern Nights"), sets a passage from a book by the nineteenth-century Brazilian abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco to elegant music that could have come from a nineteen-sixties Frank Sinatra ballad, except that Nabuco's text begins, "For a long time, slavery will remain the national characteristic of Brazil."

A singer of almost paralyzing grace and sweetness, Veloso is also a high-minded rebel--a fact that is apt to be lost on listeners who don't understand Portuguese and are lulled by the preternatural calmness of his voice. One way around these obstacles is through Veloso's best-selling 1997 memoir, "Tropical Truth," which was recently translated into English and contains knotty ruminations on Brazilian history and the author's sexuality. "As a public figure I came close to what Andrew Sullivan called the 'ubiquitous, vaguely homoerotic' climate of the 'male pop groups of that period,'" he writes. "And today I surmise that those suggestions of androgyny, polymorphism, and indeterminacy that colored the post-Beatles (post-Elvis?) pop-music scene still threaten the conventions that underlie many acts of oppression." Veloso was jailed by Brazil's military dictatorship for fifty-five days in 1968-69--he was never charged with an offense, ...