Even before she was born, Gal Costa was destined to become a singer. According to Tom Zé ⁽¹⁾, her childhood neighbor, her mother, Dédé, used to stick a small transistor on her belly so that her daughter would be fed music. At the age of 20, she left Salvador de Bahia for Rio to join the club of young Bahian singer-songwriters led by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. There she also met João Gilberto who recognized her talent and became a great source of inspiration.

Since the end of the 60s, she became the muse of the Tropicália movement, the fusion of the great Brazilian musical history in the Anglo-American pop-rock, from the Beatles to Jimmy Hendrix. The rebellious sensuality of Janis Joplin inspired Gal Costa to perform in hippie outfits and afro cuts. After the end of the hardest years of the military dictatorship in Brazil and the return from exile of the musicians banished, the group becomes in 1976 the Doces Bárbaros, with the friends of always Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Maria Bethânia ⁽²⁾. 

In 1980, we saw a sensual Gal Costa, dressed in a voluptuous gold outfit, during the first of her five performances at the Montreux Jazz Festival.

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⁽¹⁾ The multi-instrumentalist songwriter and innovator Tom Zé was deeply influential in the beginnig of theTropicália movement. His album Estudando o Samba released in 1976 was rediscovered in the 1990s by the American musician and composer David Byrne.

⁽²⁾ In 2025, Rolling Stone ranked Gal Costa 90th among the 200 Greatest Singers Singers Of All Time.