Music - The Rough Guide to Brazil - page 657

Music
Brazil's talent for music is so great it amounts to a national genius. Out of a
rich mix 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 but they are only the tip of a very
large iceberg of genres, styles and individual talents. Accompanying 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 dancefloors. 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 music you
want - if you know a little about its history.
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, impromptu recitals in squares and on street corners,
and in bars and dancetarias (the dance halls Brazilians flock to at the weekend).
There's little argument that the best Brazilian music comes from Rio, Salvador, the
Northeast and parts of Amazônia, with São Paulo and southern Brazil lagging a
little behind.
Samba
Brazil's best-known musical genre, samba , began in the early years of the twentieth
century, in the poorer parts of Rio as Carnaval music. Over the decades it has
developed several variations. The deafening samba de enredo is the setpiece of
Carnaval, with one or two singers declaiming a verse joined by hundreds or 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'll ever
hear, and it's all done without the aid of amplifiers - the massed noise of the drums
vibrates every part of your body. No recording technology yet devised comes close to
conveying the sound, and recorded 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 CD or DVD 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 style transfers more effectively to recordings than samba de enredo , and
in Brazil its more laidback pace makes it especially popular with the middle-aged.
Reliably high-quality samba-canção is anything by Beth Carvalho , acknowledged queen
of the genre, Alcione , the late, great Clara Nunes , and the even greater 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 1960s and
1970s in the recordings of old-school greats like Cartola , Bezerra da Silva and Velha
Guarda de Mangueira .