Brazil: a kaleidoscope of sound

UNESCO Courier, March, 1991 by Mario de Aratanha

Yet the movement was strong enough to survive censorship by seeking refuge in exile--or in metaphor. Poetry slipped in between the lines of the texts the censors scanned. Nevertheless, the general tendency of the 1970s was towards a less political music. The samba returned to popularity with Paulinho da Viola, Beth Carvalho and Martinho da Vila.

Eclectic and electric

The devastating effects of twenty years of military dictatorship hit the intelligentsia of Brazil's cultural capital hard. The great names of the 1960s survived, but successors were hard to find. In the 1980s the greatest opportunities were for the most commercial kind of rock music, whose artistic triumph was assured by media coverage. Rita Lee became a superstar, Alceu Valenca created his own hybrid, forrock,(3) funk invaded the black suburbs of the big cities, and all-Brazilian rock groups made their appearance: Paralamas do Sucesso, Cazuza and the Barao Vermelho, Ultraje a Rigor, Titas and Legiao Urbana.

Yet in reaction to the growing homogenization of the FM radio hits, a new trend in favour of cultural conservation and a return to roots also developed. Over the past few years, black music has found new life in the pagodes, gatherings of samba musicians in suburban Rio backyards that have produced such names as Zeca Pagodinho, Almir Guineto, Fundo de Quintal and jovelina Perola Negra.

The return to sources is most pronounced, though, in Bahia, where so much of Brazilian music has had its origins. Bahia has been the home of black culture ever since the arrival of the first Bantu slaves; and even though its racial background and customs are not dissimilar to Rio's, its atmosphere remains more authentic--as does its music, which retains close ties to the religious cults originating in Angola, Nigeria, Senegal or Guinea-Bissau. Preserved for centuries in the rites of the candomble, it finally freed itself from them at the end of the last century, winning popularity early in the present one.

In the 1930s, the first Bahia carnivals were dominated by the afoxes, groups of musicians with a religious bent that paraded in the streets like the samba schools of Rio, but to a slow, almost funereal beat known as the ijexa. The tradition was broken in the following decade by two revolutionaries, Dodo (who was black) and Osmar (who was white). They joined to form the Trio Eletrico, the group that was to alter completely the nature of the Bahia carnival. They made their debut on an old Ford truck with an amplified guitar and cavaquinho (a small, four-stringed instrument). Six or seven percussionists paraded behind them on foot. The new style soon caught on, and the size of the bands playing it grew, along with the volume of sound they produced and the musical influences they exerted.

In their treatment of radio hits, Rio march tunes and frevos(4) from Recife, the three or four "electric trios" of the early days soon adopted a fast beat. Whenever one of them crossed the path of an afoxe band, it tended to throw the slower ensemble out of time, to such an extent that the afoxe musicians in their turn had, in self defence, to speed up the tempo. This competitive spirit gave a hallucinatory quality to the Bahia carnival that was one of the elements in its success: starting out as a four-day event, it was soon running not far short of three months. And the three or four trios of the 1940s grew to number eighty or more.