David Dalle
Thursday June 12th, 2014 with David Dalle
Brazil: Samba and Football

The compiler of the recent, excellent compilation "Daora: Underground Sounds of Urban Brasil, Hip-Hop, Beats, Afro & Dub" with recordings from Sao Paulo, wanted to show Brazil is "not just Samba and Football", but though it is the Brazilian cliché, Samba and Soccer ARE important and cherished icons in Brazil. With the opening of the 2014 World Cup today in Brazil, we will focus on Samba. It is interesting that all of Brazil's incredibly diverse music, it is Samba which became the national music of Brazil, and many other traditions with just as old a pedigree and as wide in popularity like Forro and Choro are considered "regional music". Samba becoming the national music and an icon of Brazil arose from a complicated, tangled set of circumstances. To summarize briefly, Samba, though with roots from Bahia, developed in Rio da Janeiro in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the predominately black Favelas. Like most Brazilian urban music, Samba was a mix of African and European influences. Rio being the capital then was the intellectual, political, and cultural centre of Brazil, and early Samba made inroads into all levels of Rio society. Starting in the 1930's after the revolution by Vargas, the idea of race mixing was encouraged and promoted as the *essence* of Brazilian identity by Brazilian writers, poets, and intellectuals and was supported politically by the Vargas establishment. The local Samba (for them) was promoted as exemplifying this essence of Brazil and it became massively promoted by the government, by the cultural elite as the "National music", its popularity and promotion was greatly aided by radio which was just then becoming part of mainstream society. In the words of Brazilian scholar Hermano Vianna: "First, contrary to the way that it is generally imagined, the invention of samba as a national music involved many different social groups. The favela dwellers and sambistas of Rio played a leading, but not an exclusive, role. Among those involved were blacks and whites (and, of course, mesticos), as well as a few gypsies--also a Frenchman here or there. Cariocas and Bahianos, intellectuals and politicians, erudite poets, classical composers, folklorists, millionaires, even a US Ambassador--all had something to do with the crystallization of the genre and its elevation to the rank of national symbol. Second, the crystallization of the genre and its symbolic elevation were concurrent, not consecutive, processes. There never existed a well-defined, "authentic" samba genre prior to its elaboration as a national music." Just a note that I don't want people to think that Brazil is or has been a racism-free utopia. Racism was and continues to be a pervasive issue in Brazil, as in the rest of the world, and Brazil had and still has serious issues with its indigenous populations. But it is striking that in the 1930's Brazil was promoting the mixing of races as a positive and essential part of Brazilian identity, when in the rest of the world we had Hitler with his fictional Aryan fantasies and severe racism and segregation in the United States. Nowadays, regardless of skin colour, Brazilians in their DNA predominantly have mixed-race ancestry. Today we will focus primarily on the Samba of Carnival and Brazilian football matches, with its emphasis on bateria, the powerful percussion ensemble of Samba.