The Olympics opened last Friday with fanfare and lots of fireworks in Rio de Janeiro. The opening ceremony featured a vague environmental message, a nod to Brazil’s biodiversity, lots of dancing and a rendition of perhaps the most famous Brazilian popular song of all time, The Girl From Ipanema, performed by the grandson of its composer, Antonio Carlos Jobim.
The various sports that make up a modern Olympics, now over 40, mean that the event will be with us for the next few weeks. So, with the spotlight on Brazil, it’s time to consider the diversity of Brazilian music and maybe one or two highlights that you can listen to while you watch Usain Bolt and his fellow athletes burn up the track.
There are very few countries that can match Brazil for the sheer volume and diversity of music it produces, from tribal music to turbocharged funk, from choral music to electronica and much more; those are just some broad trends, consider, for instance the varied kinds of carnival music, from the old samba de roda in Bahia to the sophisticated floats and dancing of the Sambadrome in Rio. This is the country that gave the world the samba, bossa nova, tropicalia/MPB, carioca funk, samba-reggae, Afro-bloco, trio eletrico, forro, axe, choro, frevo, lambada (remember that?), brega and all kinds of versions of Western music, such as Brazilian rock, jazz, rap, hip hop, choral and classical. Just put some of these names into your video search engine and you’ll be immediately immersed into 500 years of musical development.
Samba and its later descendant pagoda, originated in West Africa, and is associated with carnival in Rio where it is known as carioca samba. It has one of the most complex rhythms of any popular dance (always tricky to play a fast samba as a DJ here in Bangkok — the rhythms seem to flummox many folks). But once you start dancing to it, you can’t stop. Listen to one of the great sambistas, the late Clara Nunes, and you’ll understand why it is such a potent and popular music.
Of all the different states, one of the oldest, Bahia, whose state capital Salvador was once the capital of Brazil, is the one with some of the funkiest Brazilian sounds. Many of Brazil’s musical stars hail from Bahia, people like the Dorival Caymmi and the Jobims, as well as big stars from the 60s and 70s like Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethania and Gilberto Gil — all worth checking out on YouTube and the like. Veloso and Gil were part of the tropicalia trend in the 60s, and Gil later went on to become minister of culture.
Carnival in Bahia is a little different to Rio’s more well-known and glitzier affair. A unique musical creation in Bahia is the trio eletrico, often a trio of musicians (bass, cavaquinho and guitar) but also with a singer that travels around on a flatbed trucked and is powered by huge speakers. Dodo and Osmar are the most famous for this genre but also worth checking out is Moraes Moreira. The genre was made famous in a song by Caetano Veloso, which includes the immortal line: “Only the dead do not go after the trio eletrico.”
Bahia is the place where reggae took off first in Brazil. Bob Marley was a potent icon for many young people during the 70s and 80s. Gilberto Gil started his experiments with blending reggae with local sounds at this time — his Portuguese-language cover of Marley’s No Woman No Cry is a beautiful version. The end result was that Bahian musicians created samba-reggae, a popular genre to this day.
One of the sounds from Bahia I like to play is a drum-based genre called Afro bloco, which can often feature as many as 100 drummers performing together. Some of the rhythms are drawn from percussion used in Umbanda ceremonies (Umbanda is a syncretic religion similar to Santeria in Cuba and voodoo in Haiti and New Orleans) and they create a wall of sound on top of which call and response vocals soar — often with lyrics of protest. Olodum is the band to check out for Afro bloco and also the work of Carlinhos Brown, a virtuoso percussionist, and his band Timbalada.
And while you’re in the northeast, another popular genre worth considering is the music known as “music for maids and taxi drivers”. It’s based around wild accordion, metal triangle and a drum called the zabumba. There are some similarities with Columbian vallenato (a kind of “cowboy” music played on accordion) and other kinds of accordion-driven music like Balkan and polka. Great music for parties.
And I never got the chance to write about Brazilian bands like my favourite Os Paralamos do Successo (The Mudguards of Success), who I think started the ska craze in South America and are a precursor of funky political bands like Mexico’s Los de Abajo.
No time, too, in this brief survey to consider some of the greats of Brazilian music like Milton Nascimento and Gal Costa but they are also worth checking out. In the meantime, there are lots of great compilations around such as the Luaka Bop compilations by David Byrne of Talking Heads fame, and the globe style compilation on Forro. When it comes to music, Brazil offers so much more than just bossa nova.
Along with other tropical music, I’ll be spinning some Brazilian tunes with a distinct Bahian twist at my next DJ night at Studio Lam on Aug 27. World Beat starts at 9pm until late. (www.facebook.com/groups/1893339064225936/)
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.