Brazil: a kaleidoscope of sound

UNESCO Courier, March, 1991 by Mario de Aratanha

A country the size of a continent, where racial and cultural intermixture given birth to rich and original forms of music

THE mixing of races and cultures in Brazilian music reflects the history of this continent-sized nation, where the Portuguese arrived in 1500 and the Africans half a century later; where white people married Indians, Indians married Africans, and Africans married whites. This racial mixing has produced one of the richest and most original of the planet's musical heritages.

Exporting its styles and stars worldwide, Brazilian music reflects a multi-faceted cultural framework that currently includes at least half a dozen fundamentally different traditions. Brazil itself provides a huge market for recorded music. About 80 million discs are sold there each year, almost 70 per cent of which are of the country's own music-this in spite of the almost total control of distribution by big, foreign-owned multinationals.

Combing the country from north to south, musicologists have already identified 365 different basic rhythms in Brazilian music. The jesuits started putting together this musical kaleidoscope when they incorporated Indian dances into their ceremonies. The mix was later enriched by the African cultures that came over on the slave ships. It was then refined with the arrival of the Portuguese court in Brazil in 1808-1 spread by the coffee boom of the mid-nineteenth century; professionalized by the coming of the radio; and carried across the seas by the cinema, record and video industries.

The process is still continuing, and in so doing is becoming more technologically and culturally aware. On the one hand, computers have invaded the recording studios, the electric trios" of Salvador de Bahia use special effects worthy of a Spielberg movie, and the urban young dance to the sounds of Brazilian rock. But on the other, Rio's pagodes and the afoxes of Bahia are consciously returning to their African roots.

At the same time, a cultural interchange is under way. While the lambada is fashionable with European dancers, the young blacks of Bahia do the samba-reggae. Tom Jobim has moved to New York, and Gilberto Gil and Milton Nascimento continue to conquer foreign markets. Media superstars like David Byrne and Paul Simon record with Brazilian musicians, following in a tradition of cross-fertilization that earlier included Hollywood's discovery of Carmen Miranda, Walt Disney's Pepe Carioca cartoons, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers flying down to Rio to dance the maxixe.

Indians and whites

Brazil's first cultural marriage was that of the white settlers with the indigenous population. The jesuits introduced into their ceremonies the catarete, a dance of the Tupi Indians, who were the first to compose Brazilian songs in Portuguese. The limited penetration of black music into the Northeast hinterland has helped the ancient blending of local wind instruments with Arab strings, as imported by the Portuguese, to survive there. In this arid region, you can still see characters recalling the troubadours and minstrels of medieval Europe, guitarists and poets of the people who travel from fair to fair singing songs drawn from history, present-day reality, or the dream world. In their improvised solos and duets, Indian and Iberian sounds blend.

Closer to the coast, the music becomes more rhythmic, percussive and African. In the urban zone around Recife and in the neighbouring Pernambuco sugar-cane district, the massive black presence makes itself felt musically in the maracatu, the dance of the carnival parades. This music of the Northeast coast, stretching from Bahia to Recife and on up to Maranhao, is of all Brazil's styles the one that best balances Indian, white and black elements in its traditions. A similar sort of popular aesthetic also makes its presence felt further north, as far as the Amazon estuary, where Caribbean echoes can be heard.

The rural areas of the states of Sao Paulo and Parana are now among the wealthiest parts of Latin America. Helped by this prosperity, the dupla caipira-a popular, country-style music reflecting the songs of Paraguay's Guarani Indians-has become one of the most saleable musical commodities in the country, particularly since its influence reached the city of Sao Paulo, an industrial megalopolis with 10 million inhabitants.

Farther south, on the vast pampas grazinglands, new musical horizons come into view: those of the Rio de la Plata, whose native music shows the influence of the milongas, rancheras and chamames of Argentina and of Uruguay.

Rio, cultural capital

The two richest musical regions of Brazil are those surrounding Bahia, in which the black influence predominates, and around Rio de janeiro, Brazil's cultural capital, where most of the nation's styles meet. All the different regional currents, whether from Africa, Bahia, the Northeast or anywhere else, come together in Rio. Brazilian radio got under way there; and it is in Rio that television is at its most creative, that most of the recording studios and music businesses are based, and that the labour market is most welcoming. As a result, Rio draws musicians from all corners of the nation.