Session Transcript:
Mauricio Bussab
Red Bull Music Academy, Sao Paulo 2002
The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.
One hundred years ago you had choro, where the European sounds of polka and waltz rubbed up hard against the Portugese and African sounds of Rio. Then came samba]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba[/], where Brazilian music went back to Africa. And that's not to mention the globally popular [lnk:bossa nova, or tropicalia - the brazen, political Brazilian rock 'n' roll. Confused? Let Bojo's Mauricio Bussab show you the way through Brazil's labyrinthine history of roots and culture, and all will become crystal.
Mauricio Bussab: »Brazil is just vast. Brazil is one of the biggest, one of the largest countries in the world. It's comparable in size to Australia or the US - it's that big. So, of course within Brazil you have several states and regions. Each state and each region has its own music, its own tradition, its own heritage, its own culture. Each state has many different rhythms and many different styles. This is one of the most important things to talk about. Brazil has a fairly decentralised production. There are many, many independent labels all over the country producing music, which often only stays in one city or region, not really going away from there. So nationally, it's a huge production - lots of styles and ideas. Only one style really went past the border,
bossa nova. However, there is a lot more to Brazilian music than bossa nova. I'm going to talk about a few of the things that happened and still happen in this country. I'm going to be talking about styles that came before bossa nova right through to the local electronica producers today that do highly local, highly Brazilian work.
Choro is the first recognisable Brazilian style. It's still available out there. It's still very much alive and still very much played. If you go to a restaurant, you will be exposed to choro. This music is more than 100-years old. It started in the late 19th Century, when Rio was the capital of the country. Today the capital of the country is Brasilia but back then it was Rio. A group of musicians started playing stuff that was coming from Europe: minuet, polka and waltz and then slowly started to merge into a local blend of European, Portuguese and African styles that became choro. Usually, along with the flute you will hear the tambourine and plenty of mini guitar [ukulele]. This you will hear in all Brazilian styles, in all Brazilian types of music you hear on the streets on Friday nights. The sound is much higher, like a treble, really beautiful in a basic rhythm. The bassline is played on a special kind of guitar with 7 strings [7th string is a cello string]. Choro is very much alive. If you walk around you'll hear the musicians playing it. It's a virtuoso style, meaning you have to study a lot to play choro. You don't just go around playing it. You have to study choro - the time and the number of notes that you can play on the solo. There is a lot of improvisation. It's the Brazilian version of jazz. You need a lot of education initially to be a good choro player. The next recognisable Brazilian style is
samba. The Samba is much more African. The word samba comes from 'semba', which is a Kimbundu word from Angola in Africa, meaning to hit somebody with your belly. The samba style of dance and the African influence is very strong and was invented in the early 20th century in Rio. Picture yourself in Rio in the beginning of the century. African slaves, recently freed in 1888 and now free to express their once forbidden music, are gathering around the town squares. They play rudimentary percussion instruments and clap their hands and that's how the samba was born. It was very much a collective composition in the beginning. Percussion instruments for Samba are very loud, they have to be. One of the versions of samba is called samba enrido, which is the yamba played in the
Carnival. In the Carnival in Rio, you have hundreds, literally hundreds of percussionists walking down the street together in blocks, playing many loud percussion instruments - no melody, just percussion. The samba schools compete against each other, like soccer teams, in a Carnival. When they go outside to play, they are rehearsed, like an opera. So you have 24 schools competing any given weekend. Thousands of people from the street, very well-rehearsed. To compare it to opera directing is considered a good starting point. A samba school director will have to deal with the costumes and the elaborated floats. There is a conductor for the rhythm section, known as the Buccaneer. Hundreds of people belong to the rhythm section. People try to recreate the samba school sound in the studio. You can't really record the samba schools very well because there are too many people playing at the same time. So the only way to really listen to what a samba school sounds like, is to visit one. A friend of mine says that if you go to a samba school, even if you hate it, you'll dance. There is no way you can't dance. It's just physically impossible. The ground vibrates and throws you up in the air. I have never known anybody that has been to a samba school that hasn't danced. Just the sheer force of the instruments will make you. You've probably heard of a lot of the instrument names from the percussion tools found on your average midi keyboard. But if you've never seen or heard of a
cuica, it looks like a regular drum but inside there's a little stick glued to the skin. You kind of wrap a cloth around the drum and stroke it, which gives quite a unique sound. It's very difficult to play. I could never play it. The cuica is used in all varieties of samba. You cannot stay away from samba in Brazil. Turn on the radio and it's there. Go to any regular nightclub and you'll hear it. Those type of clubs always end with Carnival samba, so you'll eventually come across it somehow. At the beginning of this century, samba was very popular with all kinds of variations, but always with a very basic harmony, always with very traditional singers. Microphones back then were not sensitive enough to capture a small voice. Then in 1958, somebody mixed samba with jazz harmonies. And to top it off, invited someone to sing who had absolutely no power in his voice. By then microphones were better and could capture small voices. The result was bossa nova. Chega De Saudade or No More Blues - written by
Antonio Carlos Jobim and
Vinicius de Moraes, but sang by
Joao Gilberto - represented a musical revolution in many ways. The simple harmonies of samba were gone. Now what you had were very complicated jazz chords and progressions with a man that sings very, very quietly. People almost threw their radios against the wall when they heard the new style. They hated it. It went against everything that samba was. This came about as a result of studio technology allowing music to progress. Joao Gilberto had this perfect sense of rhythm, singing and playing his guitar. This is a sense of rhythm that you can compare to hip hop now and to all kinds of electronic music. Nothing was so perfect, rhythmically in Brazil, before Gilberto.«
RBMA: »Can you tell us a bit about what was else happening in Brazil at this time?«
Mauricio Bussab: »It was at this time that the new capital was being developed. You've heard of
Brasilia. Brasilia is this architectural masterpiece. It's a city built out of nowhere, out of nothing. So in 1958 the new capital had been built. The capital moved there from Rio. There was a strong sense of nationalism. There was a climate of optimism in the peoples' relationship with the government and their country. Rock 'n' roll came along and passed them by. Unlike choro and samba, bossa nova evolved from the top down. It's a genre that came from the middle and upper classes in Rio. The people who created it were highly musically educated. Vinicius de Moraes was an Oxford educated poet, journalist and diplomat. Antonio Carlos Jobin had classical training and was a conductor and arranger. There are no amplified sounds in bossa nova and the lyrics are very apolitical. Bossa Nova songs are always about flowers and ducks and the sea. It's true, there really are such songs about about the ducks and the sea and beach and how beautiful Rio is.«
RBMA: »You describe bossa nova as an apolitical music that provided a top-down revolution in Brazilian culture. Then you've got Brasilia, a city designed for architecture books but probably not for really living in. What's the connection between having the sweetness of bossa nova on one hand and the really clear structure of Brasillia on the other? How do these things fit together, how did all that happen at the same time?«
Mauricio Bussab: »At the time, Brazil had a populist democratic government led by President Kubichek. This guy was the first to see that Brazil could be a developed country. So he wanted to start a development revolution. There were also groups that wanted Brazil to go communist. Cuba just had their revolution. The left-wing parties had some power in the media. It was a very political time and then bossa nova broke all that. Before everything had to be political, then these guys came along - they just lived in Rio and started to surf. They just watched the sea and made music. So it was a kind of fight between people who were just interested in music and people who were interested in politics. Just five years after that, the military government took over everything. So everything was rosy and dandy until 1964, when the military took over the country. People who protested against the coup began to disappear and were killed. The people making bossa nova weren't happy about the dictatorship. The tropicalia movement started in 1968, in response to the lack of political content in bossa nova. They wanted to use music to protest about what was going on in the country. Tropicalia incorporated music that was happening elsewhere in the world that had, until then, been ignored by Brazil: rock, soul, pop, everything that was being invented elsewhere. When the first Tropicalia songs started being played on stages with electric guitars, several prominent musicians signed an open letter trying to make electric guitars forbidden in Brazil. Electric guitars and rock 'n' roll were seen as tools of North American imperialism. These musicians even took to the streets to protest about tropicalia. What's interesting about tropicalia is that it takes away the sweetness of the bossa nova. It goes against all that. It's an expressionist movement. Tropicalia is loud, it's noisy, it's confusing, it's extremely creative and still it's very musical.
Caetano Veloso was one of the greatest arrangers, the brains behind tropicalia.
Os Mutantes was one of tropicalia's biggest bands. They used quite complicated rhythms and sounded quite like the Beatles sometimes. They had a psychedelic sound - very much tropicalia, which was really the birth of Brazilian rock 'n' roll. I still listen to Os Mutantes today. There is this album called
Technicolor, made in 1970 but not released until 2000. Many of the tracks are in English, which is great if you are more familiar with English than Portuguese. It's an album that's really worth listening to. It's got all these people and more and is a good introduction to all these key figures in Tropicalia. People like
Sergio and
Arnaldo Baptista. If you buy one Brazilian CD, that's a good start. So the '70s was a time when the dictatorship was in place. People were disappearing and being kidnapped all the time. Musicians began to speak out against what was going on through the tropicalia movement. Another new style from that time was samba-rock. Technically, it's samba played in a 4/4 beat. Samba is a 2/4 rhythm. If you play some samba, and strum a guitar in a 4/4 rock 'n' roll beat, then you get the samba-rock groove. This style was invented by
Jorge Ben.«
RBMA: »Why did he re-name himself?«
Mauricio Bussab: »The best explanation I found was that he was constantly mistook for George Benson. Now he is known as Jorge Ben Jor. He doesn't like the name samba-rock. He calls the kind of music he does swing or samba. He doesn't consider his music to be rock, but it is. Another musician worth checking out is
Tim Maia, he did a lot of Brazilian soul. All of the music styles that I've talked about so far can be catergorised as
MPB. That means 'musica popular brasileira', which is basically every song that's done in Brazil that is not rock or reggae or rap. Walk into any record store in Braizl and you'll find a MPB section. After Tropicalia, the next thing to put life into MPB was
Club da Esquina. This was a collective led by
Milton Nascimento during the '70s in Minas Gerias, a state in Central Brazil. The name is exactly what it means - Milton Nascimento and his friends jamming together in a house on a corner. They produced some of the most beautiful songs in the genre of MPB. One thing by Milton Nascimento that I think is worthy to point out, is a track called Peixinhos Do Mar, from his album Sentinela. It was made with a band called
Uakti. Uakti is something you could look for. They're a band from Minas, where they built their own instruments. Their instruments sound synthesized, but they're not. Some have huge tubes that they hit to produce sound, others use wheels with strings. They turn the wheels and use a bow on the strings. They use anything that can make a sound. Uakti CDs are great for sampling. Peixinhos Do Mar was recorded in 1980. I went to a Uakti concert once where and all the instruments were powered by water. Forró is not one genre or style. Forró means party and has a lot of different rhythms. Around town you will see this word, forró. If somebody wants to take you to a forró, you will know it's going to be a lot of fun. The connection between the rhythms is that they all come from the North-East, and that the accordion is the lead instrument. The instruments traditionally used in forró are the accordion, triangle and the zabumba, a big bass drum. It's all fun to dance to. You dance in couples and with other people. If you go to a forró night, somebody there will teach you how to dance to it. A famous figure of this style is
Luiz Gonzaga, known as the king of forró. He was making music around 1941 and is often seen wearing the traditional hat on his record covers, which looks very funny. One of the rhythms he uses is
maracatu, from the North-East. The lyrics in forró are sometimes very harsh. They talk about famine and droughts because it seems like desert up there. The region has produced seven musical styles including the latest, greatest musical style or revolutionally movement, which is the
mangue beat. The mangue beat is the latest movement in Brazil, from Recife - the capital of the North-Eastern state of Pernambuco. The area has lots of mangrove swamps and marshes. Mangue beat was started by
Chico Science. Unfortunately, he died in a car crash in 1994 and you will see how unfortunate that is by listening to his music. His band,
Nacao Zumbi continues on. They just released a great, great album. This movement started in 1992 and is still going strong.
Mundo Livre is the group that is most respected and receptive to electronica crossovers with mangue beat. They have a great album. It's a mix between the sounds of regional North-East and electronica. Fred Zero Quatro was the producer. He's a great composer and he's also great on stage. Otto was the percussionist of Mundo Livre and he also crossed over from the movement by incorporating samples. In his solo albums, Samba Pra Burro and Condom Black, Otto adapts a rhythm called maracatu and fuses it with rock, rap and drum 'n' bass. I think that Otto once said that he wrote sambas and then people did them wrong. I think he is very much a samba person. So now we have all kinds of traditional rhythms crossed with electronica, even drum 'n' bass incorporated into bossa nova.
Suba is a name worth noting in Brazil electronica. He's from Yugoslavia but died in a fire in 2000. He was a very respected and had made two albums. Sao Paulo Confessions is a beautiful album. Finally, one more Eeectronica guy I should mention is
Lenine. He's not technically electronica but he's very open to new things. For example, he doesn't use a drummer. There is no drummer in his first three albums. Instead he a heavily processed tambourine and it sounds like it's a lot of fun.«