Did you know that Brazil has gods (football aside)? In the sense that the Greeks and the Romans did? The Greek and Roman gods were done in by Constantine (first blow) and Theodosius (final blow).
The gods of Brazil were born in Africa and arrived in Brazil within the negreiros making the Middle Passage, a voyage which transported not only people, but a culture. There was a great attempt by the Brazilian poobahs to exterminate the gods of Africa in Brazil, but it didn’t work.
As the Roman emperors moved to extinguish the very real belief in Jupiter, Apollo, Venus, Minerva and the rest, banning the ceremonies to these deities, the Brazilian “authorities” banned the ceremonies devoted to Oxalá, Oxossi, Iansã, Yemanjá and the rest.
But like the ultimate futility of the communist stomping-on of Christianity in Russia, Poland, et al, the piety of the Brazilian ruling class was to no avail (can’t you people ever mind your own business!???).
Now, the Greeks and Romans had statues; magnificent, wondrously conceived, wrought and elaborated statues. The Africans had rhythms, and melodies…magnificent, wondrously conceived, wrought and elaborated rhythms, over which are floated (they aren’t attached, per Western music) melodies ranging from inspired to sublime.
Some of these rhythms (one in particular) are the basis of Brazilian popular music. So as marble adorns Rome, rhythm adorns Brazil…but to carry the analogy further, as the statues have with the passage of time become fewer and farther between, the modernization of Brazilian popular music has left the rhythms fewer and farther between (excepting those in Bahia’s houses of candomblé, these houses multiplying greatly in number over the past few decades)…
But this is Brazil, isn’t it? With music everywhere?
Yes, and yes, but. Samba and its vertentes are based in polyrhythms. And while one may say that Brazilian music was enriched by the confluence of African rhythm-and-melodies and European melodies-and-harmonies, the rhythmic component was, with the Americanization of the 1950s, and then under the effects of the British invasion of the ’60s and the astounding market success of first-world music, impoverished.
Speaking frankly, it was dumbed down. Detexturized. Anesthetized. Edge and angle taken out. Soothed and smoothed…
Witness the birth of bossa nova and MPB (música popular brasileira)! Yes, there was genius there, but not in the strictly African-derived part of the music…that was old-fashioned, not hip.
Thank god for unhip people like Paulinho da Viola! Paulinho came of age in the 60s, when Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil went hippie, they celebrating the we-can-do-anything culture with their invention of tropicália, one ear to the sidewalks of San Francisco and the intersection of Haight-Ashbury…
Paulinho played samba then. He plays samba now. Music. Where somebody sings. And people play instruments. No BS. Paulinho’s music was never modern, but it is timeless.
The great Bobby Sanabria quoted the great Art Blakey as saying that a place where jazz is played is a holy place, Bobby following this up with (addressing his audience from the stage) “So thanks for coming to church!”
In the spirit of Art Blakey, a place where samba is played is a holy place…and we ain’t talkin’ ’bout The Girl from Ipanema. Samba, with all the assaults upon its integrity, never left Brazil.
To quote again, now the words of the great Nelson Sargento, it agonizes, but it doesn’t die. It’s even cool now. Samba is the local equivalent of those Roman statues.