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| Brazil |
| Music |
| Brazil’s talent for music is so great it amounts to a national genius. Out of a rich stew of African, European and Indian influences it has produced one of the strongest and most diverse musical cultures in the world. | |
| Most people have heard of
samba and bossa nova, or of Heitor Villa-Lobos, who introduced the rhythms
of Brazilian popular music to a classical audience, but they are only the
tip of a very large iceberg of genres, styles and individual talents.
Music – heard in bars, on the streets, car radios, concert halls and
clubs – is a constant backdrop to social life in Brazil, and Brazilians
are a very musical people. Instruments help but they aren’t essential:
matchboxes shaken to a syncopated beat, forks tapped on glasses and hands
slapped on tabletops are all that is required. And to go with the music is
some of the most stunning dancing you are ever likely to see. In Brazil,
no one looks twice at a couple who would clear any European and most
American dance floors. You don’t need to be an expert, or even
understand the words, to enjoy Brazilian popular music, but you may
appreciate it better – and find it easier to ask for the type of record
you want – if you know a little about its history.
The roots: Regional Brazilian music |
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| The bedrock of Brazilian
music is the apparently inexhaustible fund of “traditional” popular
music. There are dozens of genres, most of them associated with a
specific region of the country, which you can find in raw uncut form
played on local radio stations, at popular festivals – Carnaval
is merely the best known – impromptu recitals in squares and on street
corners, and in bars and dancetarias, the dance halls that
Brazilians flock to at the weekend. The two main centres are Rio and
Salvador. There’s little argument that the best Brazilian music comes
from Rio, the Northeast and parts of Amazônia, with São Paulo and
southern Brazil lagging a little behind. Samba, and later bossa nova,
became internationally famous, but only because they both happened to get
off the ground in Rio, with its high international profile and exotic
image. There are, though, less famous but equally vital musical styles
elsewhere in Brazil, and it’s difficult to see why they remain largely
unknown to audiences outside the country – especially given Western
music’s current obsession with the Third World.
Each local musical genre is part of a regional identity, of which people are very proud, and there’s a distinct link between geographical rivalry and the development of Brazilian music. Nordestinos, in particular, all seem to know their way around the scores of Northeastern musical genres and vigorously defend their musical integrity against the influences of Rio and São Paulo, which dominate TV and national radio. A lot of people regret carioca and Paulista domination of the airwaves, fearing that it’s making Brazilian music homogeneous, but if anything it has the opposite effect. People react against the Southeast music by turning to their local brands – which often develop some new enriching influences, picked up along the way. Choro |
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| Much less known, choro
(literally “crying”) appeared in Rio around the time of World War I,
and by the 1930s had evolved into one of the most intricate and enjoyable
of all Brazilian forms of music. Unlike samba, which developed variations,
choro has remained remarkably constant over the decades. It’s one
of the few Brazilian genres which owes anything to Spanish-speaking
America, as it is clearly related to the Argentinian tango (the real River
Plate versions, that is, rather than the sequined ballroom distortions
that get passed off as tango outside South America). Choro is
mainly instrumental, played by a small group: the backbone of the combo is
a guitar, picked quickly and jazzily, with notes sliding all over the
place, which is played off against a flute, or occasionally a clarinet or
recorder, with drums and/or maracas as an optional extra. It is as quiet
and intimate as samba is loud and public, and of all Brazilian popular
music is probably the most delicate. You often find it being played as
background music in bars and cafés; local papers advertise such places.
The loveliest choros on record are by Paulinho da Viola,
especially a self-explanatory record called Chorando. After years
of neglect during the postwar decades choro is now undergoing
something of a revival, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to catch a choro
conjunto in Rio or São Paulo.
Samba |
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| The best-known genre,
samba, began in the early years of the twentieth century, in the poorer
quarters of Rio, as Carnaval music, and over the decades it has
developed several variations. The deafening samba de enredo is the
set piece of Carnaval, with one or two singers declaiming a verse
joined by hundreds, even thousands, of voices and drums for the chorus, as
the bloco, the full samba school, backs up the lead singers. A bloco
in action during Carnaval is the loudest music you’re ever likely
to come across, and it’s all done without the aid of amplifiers: if you
stand up close, the massed noise of the drums vibrates every part of your
body. No recording technology yet devised comes close to conveying the
sound, and on record the songs and music often seem repetitive. Still,
every year the main Rio samba schools make a compilation record of the
music selected for the parade, and any record with the words Samba de
Enredo or Escola de Samba will contain this mass Carnaval
music.
On a more intimate scale, and musically more inventive, is samba-canção, which is produced by one singer and a small back-up band, who play around with basic samba rhythms to produce anything from a (relatively) quiet love song to frenetic dance numbers. This makes the transition to record much more effectively than samba de enredo, and in Brazil it’s especially popular with the middle-aged, who are not able to gyrate quite as energetically as they did in their youth. Reliable, high-quality records of samba-canção are anything by Beth Carvalho, acknowledged queen of the genre, Alcione, Clara Nunes, and the great Paulinho da Viola, who always puts at least a couple of excellent sambas on every record he makes. You can get a taste of the older samba styles that dominated Rio in the 1940s and 1950s in the records of acknowledged old-school greats like Cartola, Bezerra da Silva and Velha Guarda de Manueira. Since the early 1990s, a refreshing trend in samba has been the revival of samba-pagode, a back-to-the-roots reaction against the increasing commercialization of samba in the 1980s. Pagode means a simple dance hall, and samba de pagode is not a different style of samba so much as a good-time samba, played by a small group, for dancing and general enjoyment in a bar or dancetaria. This has always flourished year-round in Rio, but since the 1970s, Carnaval and glitzy versions of samba-canção had increasingly become the public face of samba, dominating recording output and being heavily marketed to outsiders. Many of the musicians on whom samba depended for its continuing vitality were sidelined, reduced to making a precarious living doing live shows in the lower-income parts of Rio. Fortunately, people are now returning to samba-pagode in a big way, with established sambistas like Agepê and Martinho da Vila following their audience and switching to pagode on their records. A number of pagode groups have become major national stars, including Zeca Pagodinho, Raça Negra, Ginga Pura and Banda Brasil. The Bahian sound |
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| Although Rio is the
traditional capital of Brazilian music, for some years now it has been
overtaken, in vitality and originality, by Salvador, the capital of
Bahia. Bahia in general, and Salvador in particular, have always produced
a disproportionate number of Brazil’s leading musicians including
Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, the Caymmi family and João
Gilberto, but in recent years their status has progressed from important
to dominant. The main reason is the extraordinary musical stew provided by
deep African roots, Caribbean and Hispanic influences coming in through
the city’s port, and a local record industry that quickly realized the
money-making potential of Bahian music. They didn’t invent lambada,
for example, but it was Salvador record producers who transformed it into
a global hit. Tellingly, all over Brazil (except in Rio, naturally), it is
now more common to hear the Salvador Carnaval hits than samba
during Carnaval.
The new Bahian sound, an exhilarating blend of Brazilian and Caribbean rhythms, is exemplified by groups like Reflexus, and singers like Luis Caldas, Margareth Menezes and Daniela Mercury. Its guiding light is the percussionist and producer Carlinhos Brown; a great performer and songwriter in his own right, he is also the éminence grise behind the rise of other prominent Bahians like Marisa Monte. Other genres |
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| A full list of other
“traditional” musical genres would have hundreds of entries and could
be elaborated on indefinitely. Some of the best-known are forró, maracatú,
repentismo and frevo, described at greater length in the
“Northeast” chapter: you’ll find them all over the Northeast but
especially around Recife. Baião is a Bahian style that bears a
striking resemblance to the hard acoustic blues of the American Deep
South, with hoarse vocals over a guitar singing of things like drought and
migration; carimbó is an enjoyable, lilting rhythm and dance found
all over northern Brazil but especially around Belém (a souped-up and
heavily commercialized version of carimbó enjoyed a brief
international vogue as lambada in the 1990s); and bumba-meu-boi
is one of the strangest and most powerful of all styles, the haunting
music of Maranhão state.
A good start, if you’re interested, is one of the dozens of records by the late Luiz Gonzaga, also known as Gonzagão, which have extremely tacky covers but are musically very good. They have authentic renderings of at least two or three Northeastern genres per record. His version of a beautiful song called Asa Branca is one of the best-loved of all Brazilian tunes, a national standard, and was played at his funeral in 1989. The golden age: 1930–60 and the radio stars |
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| It was the growth of radio
during the 1930s that created the popular music industry in Brazil, with
home-grown stars idolized by millions. The best-known was Carmen
Miranda, spotted by a Hollywood producer singing in the famous Urca
casino in Rio and whisked off to film stardom in the 1940s. Although her
hats made her immortal, she deserves to be remembered more as the fine
singer she was. She was one of a number of singers and groups loved by
older Brazilians, like Francisco Alves, Ismael Silva, Mário
Reis, Ataulfo Alves, Trio de Ouro and Joel e Gaúcho.
Two great songwriters, Ary Barroso and Pixinguinha, provided
the raw material.
Brazilians call these early decades a época de ouro, and that it really was a golden age is proved by the surviving music on record. It is slower and jazzier than modern Brazilian music, but with the same rhythms and beautiful, crooning vocals. Even in Brazil it used to be difficult to get hold of records of this era but after years of neglect there is now a widely available series of reissues called Revivendo. They send catalogues abroad, if you can’t make it to Brazil to buy the records: write to Revivendo Músicas Comércio de Discos Ltda, Rua Barão do Rio Branco 28/36 – 1. andar, Caixa Postal 122, Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil. Contemporary singers and musicians |
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| The number of high-quality
singers and musicians in Brazilian music besides these leading figures is
enormous. Milton Nascimento has a talent that can only be compared
with the founders of tropicalismo, a remarkable soaring voice, a
genius for composing stirring anthems and a passion for charting and
celebrating the experience of blacks in Brazil. Since his emergence from
Minas Gerais in the 1960s, he has become a prominent spokesperson of black
Brazilians. Fagner and Alceu Valença are modern
interpreters of Northeastern music, and strikingly original singers. The
latter is the creator of what has been termed “forró rock”. Elba
Ramalho is a Northeastern woman with an excellent voice, which she too
often wastes on banal rock rather than the more traditional material she
excels at. Renato Borghetti, from Rio Grande do Sul, has done much
to popularize gaúcho-influenced music through his skill on the
accordion and his adaptations of traditional tunes. Ney Matogrosso
has a striking falsetto voice which sounds female, but he is a man –
although sometimes self-indulgent, he can be very good. Jorge Ben
is a fine Rio singer who wrote the definitive Rio verse in his classic País
Tropical:
I live in a tropical country Vinícius de Morães and Toquinho are (or were in the case of Vinícius) a good singer and guitarist team, and Dorival Caymmi at over seventy is the doyen of Bahian musicians. Whilst all these figures have been going strongly for decades now, an artist to look out for is Zeca Baleiro from Maranhão who, with his bumba-meu-boi- and reggae-influenced style, has been described as one of the most innovative performers to have emerged in Brazil in the 1990s. Too many musicians these days, though, waste their time attempting to fuse Brazilian genres with rock-based formats. It’s not that it can’t be done – tropicalismo pulled it off several times in the 1960s – but the type of rock music currently most popular in Brazil, appalling heavy metal and stadium rock, is completely incompatible with the subtle, versatile musical imagination of Brazilians. National radio and the dominant São Paulo radio stations pump out the worst kind of British and US FM blandness, and this has spawned a host of Brazilian imitations, almost all of them embarrassingly bad. The other possible criticism of Brazilian music is that, while its popular roots are healthier than ever, nobody of similar stature has come up to succeed the towering figures of the 1960s and 1970s. Elis is dead, Gil, Caetano, Chico and Milton are still producing but are no longer young, and, while younger talent abounds, there’s nothing at the moment which could be called genius – a lot to demand of anyone, but it’s a tribute to Brazilian music that its pedigree allows us to judge it by the highest standards. International success – the bossa nova |
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| With this wealth of music
to work with, it was only a matter of time before Brazilian music burst
its national boundaries, something that duly happened in the late 1950s
with the phenomenon of bossa nova. Several factors led to its
development. The classically trained Tom Jobim, equally in love
with Brazilian popular music and American jazz, met up with fine Bahian
guitarist João Gilberto and his wife Astrud Gilberto. The
growth in the Brazilian record and communications industries allowed bossa
nova to sweep Brazil and come to the attention of people like Stan Getz in
the United States; and, above all, there developed a massive market for a
sophisticated urban sound among the newly burgeoning middle class in Rio,
who found Jobim and Gilberto’s slowing down and breaking up of what was
still basically a samba rhythm an exciting departure. It rapidly became an
international craze, and Astrud Gilberto’s quavering version of one of
the earliest Jobim numbers, A Garota de Ipanema, became the most
famous of all Brazilian songs, The Girl from Ipanema – although
the English lyric is considerably less suggestive than the Brazilian
original.
Over the next few years the craze eventually peaked and fell away, though not before leaving most people with the entirely wrong impression that bossa nova is a mediocre brand of muzak well suited to lifts and airports. In North America it eventually sank under the massed strings of studio producers, but in Brazil it never lost its much more delicate touch, usually with a single guitar and a crooner holding sway. Early bossa nova still stands as one of the crowning glories of Brazilian music, and all the classics – you may not know the names of tunes like Corcovado, Isaura, Chega de Saudade and Desafinado but you’ll recognize the melodies – are on the easily available double-album compilations called A Arte de Tom Jobim and A Arte de João Gilberto; Jobim’s is the better of the two. The great Brazilian guitarist Luiz Bonfá also made some fine bossa nova records: the ones where he accompanies Stan Getz are superb. The bossa nova records of Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd are one of the happiest examples of inter-American co-operation, and as they’re easy to find in European and American shops they make a fine introduction to Brazilian music. They had the sense to surround themselves with Brazilian musicians, notably Jobim, the Gilbertos and Bonfá, and the interplay between their jazz and the equally skilful Brazilian response is often brilliant. Live bossa nova is rare these days, restricted to the odd bar or hotel lobby, unless you’re lucky enough to catch one of the great names in concert – although Tom Jobim, sadly, died in 1995. But then bossa nova always lent itself more to records than live performance. Women singers |
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| Brazilian music has a
strong tradition of producing excellent women singers. The best of all
time was undoubtedly the great Elis Regina, from Rio Grande do Sul,
whose magnificent voice was tragically stilled in 1984, when she was at
the peak of her career, by a drugs overdose. She interpreted everything,
and whatever Brazilian genre she touched she invariably cut the definitive
version. Two of her songs in particular became classics, Aguas de Março
and Carinhoso, the latter being arguably the most beautiful
Brazilian song of all. Again, the A Arte de Elis Regina double
album is the best bet, although there is also a superb record of Elis with
Tom Jobim, called Elis e Tom. After her death the mantle fell on Gal
Costa, a very fine singer although without the extraordinary depth of
emotion Elis could project, whose version of Aquarela do Brasil
inspired Terry Gilliam to the idea for the film “Brazil”, and whose
LP, named after the song, is highly recommended, along with the A Arte
de Gal Costa compilation.
More recently, a new generation of women singers has carried the tradition forward. The most prominent amongst those who have come into their own in the 1990s has been Marisa Monte; the classic Cor de Rosa e Carvão is the best introduction to her enormous talent. Other up-and-coming women singers include Silvia Torres, Belô Veloso (a niece of Caetano), and the latest sensation, Virginia Rodrigues; it took a couple of albums for her remarkable voice to find the right producer, but her most recent album, Nós, suggests that Marisa Monte may have to look to her laurels in the years to come. Live music and recordings |
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| If you want to see or hear
live music, look for suggestions in this guide, buy local papers
with weekend listings headed Lazer, which should have a list of
bars with music, concerts and dancetarias, or ask a tourist office
for advice.
Local radio is often worth listening to – you won’t regret taking a transistor along and whirling the dial – and there are also local TV stations that often have MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) programmes; the TVE, Televisão Educativa network, funded by the Catholic Church and the Ministry of Culture, is worth checking – if you see the initials FUNARTE, it might well be a music programme. Finally, a word about buying recordings. The price varies according to how well known the recording artist is. Recordings even by leading artists are less expensive than in the USA or Europe, and those by more obscure artists and regional music are cheaper still. At the upper end of the scale, but dependably high quality, are the A Arte de…, O Talento de… or A Personalidade de… series, often double albums, which are basically “Greatest Hits” compilations of the best-known singers and musicians. The best place to buy any music, no matter how regional, is São Paulo, then Rio, with cities like Recife, Salvador, Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre a long way behind. Outside Rio and São Paulo there are good music shops, but they’re few and far between: look in local papers to see if there are adverts for Loja de Disco (record shop), with MPB or discos nacionais mentioned in the advert. A selected discography |
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Apart from the A Arte
de…, O Talento de…, A Personalidade de… and Revivendo
series, recommended recordings easily available in Brazil include the
following (artists in bold):
As for Brazilian records available abroad, only the jazz/bossa nova records of Getz and his Brazilian collaborators are easily available. However, recent interest in Brazilian music has spawned a few compilation albums: notably Brazil Classics: Volume 1 (a sort of Brazilian greatest hits) and Volume 2 (a samba collection), both on EMI and collected and presented by David Byrne; and Forró: Music for Maids and Taxi Drivers (Globestyle Records), a self-explanatory and excellent introduction to the effervescent Northeastern music. One of the best international mail-order suppliers is Globestyle Records (48–50 Steele Rd, London NW10 7AS) – send an SAE for their catalogue. |
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