It’s easy to see why late-’90s alt-rock fans became enamored with Brazil’s late-’60s Tropicália, the aggressively modernist arts movement that helped spawn the careers of a number of Brazilian musical giants, including singers Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé, and Gal Costa, and the trio Os Mutantes. Any scene as short-lived as Tropicália (roughly five years, from 1967–72, though the musical element of the movement ended in 1969) is easier to romanticize than the sprawl that follows. So is one that begins with revolutionary intent and ends with two of its principals (Gil and Veloso) being arrested and then exiled to London following Brazil’s December 1968 military takeover.

By comparison, the clube da esquina (“corner club”) movement has found relatively little attention in America. Clube de esquina was as syncretic a style as Tropicália, sharing many of the same sources: American and British rock and pop, jazz, bossa nova, Brazilian folk, even classical music. Both styles shared their names with crucial albums: “Tropicália” (1968) featured Messrs. Gil, Veloso, Costa, and Os Mutantes, while “Clube de Esquina” (1972) was a double-LP by Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges.The latter may suffer a bit in the mythological sweepstakes — Mr. Nascimento never served time for the music he made.

Earlier this year, a series of early albums by Messrs. Gil and Nascimento were reissued by the Universal Brazil and Water labels, respectively. Listening again, the sense of ferment in which each artist operated while making these groundbreaking records remains startlingly clear.

Mr. Gil was born in 1942, and was already a pop pro when Tropicália came along, having written the hit “Louvacao” for Elis Regina in 1965. He made his first recordings a year later, and in 1967 released his debut album, also titled “Louvacao.” It’s a polished piece of work, and slots more neatly into the samba and bossa nova that was Brazil’s pop norm than Mr. Gil’s later, rangier albums. But it also sounds like the logical first step of what was to come: His singing is exuberant on the faster stuff (“Ensaio Geral,” “Roda”) and, on ballads, appealingly airy; on the evidence of “Maria (Me Perdoe, Maria),” Mr. Gil could very well have made his living courting the middle of the road.

He had other fish to fry, though, beginning with 1968’s “Gilberto Gil,” one of three consecutive albums featuring that title. This one begins with “Frevo Rasgado,” with its oddly perky orchestration, woodwinds in the left speaker, horns in the right, drums playing military jazz, and Mr. Gil bopping and floating fast syllables deftly over it.What follows sounds similarly in love with the (then) modern world: Garage-rock guitar riffs anchor “Coragem Pra Suportar,” while folky flute lifts it into the Bahia mountains; “Pega a Voga, Cabeludo” borrows its tune from “Hang on Sloopy” and “Coragem Pra Suportar” takes its bass line from the Beatles’ “Taxman.”

The same all-parts-apply sonic sense governs Mr. Gil’s self-titled 1969 album, but for a different reason: Mr. Gil’s revolutionary fusion of styles and sounds had frightened Brazil’s military dictatorship enough to place him under house arrest early that year. He consequently recorded the album alone with an acoustic guitar, which his arranger, Rogerio Duprat, then orchestrated.This “Gilberto Gil” is probably the wiggiest of his albums: “Cérebro Eletrônico” piles on wah-wah guitars, bustling drums, and hammer horror organ, while “Objeto Semi-Identificado” plays with tape-speed the way Mr. Gil plays with his voice.

Mr. Gil was subsequently exiled to London (as was Mr. Veloso), effectively signaling the end of the Tropicália movement in Brazil. The self-titled album he recorded there in 1971 deals explicitly with his sense of betrayal, from passersby “calling me so many names in the street” in the opening “Nega (Photograph Blues)” to the plainly put “Can’t Find My Way Home.” Yet his spirits sound high, such was his love for the “crazy pop rock.” The bonus live covers of Jimi Hendrix’s “Up From the Skies” and the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” are as joyous as anything he ever recorded, down to his mouth-trumpet noises in the latter.

Mr. Gil returned to Brazil in 1972, and a sense of homecoming is writ large on the resulting album, “Expresso 2222,” which spawned the hit “Back in Bahia.” Not surprisingly, “Expresso 2222” was Mr. Gil’s most traditionally “Brazilian” album since his debut, but it sounded little like his earlier work. The arrangements abjure Mr. Duprat’s studio fripperies for a meaty full-band approach (apart from “O Sonho Acabou”and “Oriente,” the solo acoustic tracks that conclude the original album.) With his Brazilian roots and British influences now firmly set, Mr. Gil had made his most accessible album to date, replete with exquisite arrangements and melodies.

While the original Tropicália movement was crushed by authoritarian control, it has survived long enough to influence and inform some of today’s Western recording icons, from David Byrne to Beck.And its try-anything ethos still resonates in Brazilian pop, from the MPB (Brazilian popular music) that immediately followed or more recent styles like the kitchen-sink hip-hop variant known as favela funk.(Mr. Gil has also endured. When President Lula da Silva took office in January 2003, he chose Mr. Gil to serve as Brazil’s Minister of Culture, a post he still holds.) The latter borrows from an American style and makes it unmistakably Brazilian — now, where have we heard that before?