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by Chris McGowan &
Ricardo Pessanha Brazil, music is everywhere. You can find it in a complex rhythmic pattern beaten out by an old man with his fingers on a cafe table; in the thundering samba that echoes down from the hills around Rio in the months prior to Carnaval; and in the bars where a guitar passes from hand to hand and everyone knows all the lyrics to all the classic Brazilian songs played late into the night. Music is part of the Brazilian soul, and rhythm is in the way people speak, in the way they walk, and in the way they play soccer. In Rio de Janeiro, after the national team has won an important soccer game, fireworks explode in the sky and samba detonates in the streets. On sidewalks and in city squares, the celebration begins. Impromptu percussion sections appear, made up of all types of Brazilians, rich and poor, black and brown and white. As participants pick up instruments—a drum, a scraper, a shaker—an intricate, ebullient samba batucada (percussion jam) builds. Each amateur music-maker kicks in an interlocking rhythmic part to create a groove that would be the envy of most professional bands in other parts of the world. The singing and dancing inevitably go on for hours. Samba has become a fundamental part of the world's musical vocabulary. It would get another boost when one of its variations, a sort of ultra-cool modern samba called bossa nova, entered the world spotlight through the 1959 movie Black Orpheus, which won the Cannes Film Festival grand prize and the Academy Award for best foreign film. In North America, a bossa craze was ignited by the 1962 smash hit album Jazz Samba, recorded by guitarist Charlie Byrd and saxophonist Stan Getz. At the same time that Brazilian music was influencing jazz in the Northern Hemisphere, a remarkable new generation of singers and songwriters was coming to the forefront in Brazil in the late 1960s and 1970s. Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Ivan Lins, João Bosco, Djavan, Gal Costa, Maria Bethânia, Elba Ramalho, Alceu Valença, Chico Buarque and others fashioned original sounds from an eclectic variety of sources in and outside of Brazil. Their superb integration of rhythm, melody, harmony, and lyrics resulted in one of the richest bodies of popular music ever to come from one country. Today, as in past decades, Brazil's popular music can lay claim to a dazzling variety of song forms and musical traditions. There are the troubadours who strum guitars and trade improvised stanzas back and forth, each trying to top the other, in traditional desafio song duels. There are accordion virtuosos who lead their bands in rollicking syncopated forró music. There are ritualistic afoxés, festive marchas, frenetic frevos, and the leaping instrumental improvisations of choro. And there are the walls of sound and waves of color that are the escola de samba (samba school) parades during Rio's Carnaval. Whether manifested in these or other forms, Brazilian music above all has a profound ability to move the soul. In its sounds and lyrics, it reflects the Brazilian people—their uninhibited joy or despair, their remarkable capacity to celebrate, and the all-important concept of saudade (a deep longing or yearning)... Continued in: The Brazilian Sound Excerpted from The Brazilian Sound: Samba, Bossa Nova
and the Popular Music Of Brazil (Temple University Press, 2008).
© Chris McGowan & Ricardo Pessanha, 1991 / 1998
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