Monday, June 8, 2009

My Olodum

Olodum had a Sunday rehearsal last night, & me and my new friend Hans (a Portland capoeira player that I just ran into here) caught the whole show. The Sunday rehearsals are the "real" Olodum rehearsal where the whole bloco is there, and they´re really going through all their different grooves. Sooooo much fun. I took a bazillion notes and re-verified many aspects of Olodum´s style, including:

- they´ve got at least 8 completely different levadas (patterns, pieces, grooves). Several varieties of samba-reggae, reggae and merengue, plus a really cool, sexy afoxe that I am dying to show to Samba Gata.

- samba-reggae does SO have a swing!! This is something I´ve argued about with other Americans, so I spent quite a while listening to the rep´s and caixa´s to re-calibrate my ear for what was happening. It definitely definitely definitely has a swing. In fact it´s a pretty strong swing. One of the merengues seemed to be played pretty straight, but the samba-reggae has a swing. (VINDICATED! YEAH!)

- I. Love. Olodum.
I´ve always dug them but it is starting to turn into that really strong, from-the-heart affection. Like I feel for Banga, and for Imperio. Where it just makes me so happy to see them and it is like seeing old friends again.

Watching them horsing around, teaching each other, dancing, laughing - it´s so clearly a family. You can see all the personalities, all the relationships, the way they´re all greeting each other and teasing each other; you can see all the friendships, and the occasional little feud, but mostly the warm-heartedness. Laughing when somebody drops a mallet, tossing little candies to each other, arguing when somebody messes up a break. It reminded me of the Lions Sunday rehearsal. Everybody just getting together on a Sunday to play through their stuff and have a good time. People who´ve clearly known each other for years and just dig hanging out and playing together.

I´ve seen them enough times now that I´ve started recognizing all their faces. It´s always sort of an interesting moment when you´ve seen a group enough years in a row that what once seemed like a monolithic entity starts to resolve into real people who keep reapparing, year after year. You start to notice, oh, there´s the thin caixa player who can do the backbends - I first saw him in the street 3 years ago, didn´t I? There´s the first-surdo guy who showed me that cool dance move, when was that, two years ago. There´s that wonderful 4th surdo player who never stops laughing, I´ve seen him every single time, he has such great energy. There´s the caixa girl! and, oh my god, they´ve put her in the absolute key position, she´s playing the 3 miked surdos, she must be an assistant leader or something by now!

And that´s when "Olodum" changes in your heart from "that famous band from Brazil" to a bunch of real people who seem like old friends.

To my shock, a couple players even recognized me too.

A lucky night

When I was leaving Portland, many friends asked me "what do you have planned in Salvador?" and I was very pleased to be able to answer "Nothing." I knew that if I went with no plans, interesting things would just happen anyway - they always do.

All I was expecting was just to get some practice time in with my pandeiro. I didn´t think I´d find any choro groups to see - choro´s really from Rio, not Salvador - but I was looking forward to just practicing a bit on my own. The only other goal I had in mind for this trip was to visit the little town of Praia do Forte, to see the sea turtle conservation project up there, since I´ve recently started working on sea turtles, and whales too, in the US.

So anyway - on one of my little forays through the Cana Brava music store, the lovely attendant there told me there was a good choro group in town that would be playing out at Rio Vermelho. That evening I hiked the whole way from Barra to Rio Vermelho - wore a hole in my flipflops, literally - just to see the choro group, Grupo Mandaia.

And they were FANTASTIC. I was stunned. Somehow I had not thought I´d find that quality of choro, or even any choro at all, in Salvador, but it turns out there is a pretty active little scene with 3 or 4 groups.

I was sitting right up front and center the whole time, in a fairly empty restaurant. I must have stuck out a bit, because the guitarist came up afterwards to ask where I was from. We chatted a bit about how choro´s been spreading in the US, and it emerged that I was learning choro-style pandeiro.

All I said was that I was "learning" pandeiro, but the guitarist immediately invited me to sit in for a couple of tunes at their next show on Saturday night.

Saturday night arrived and with some trepidation I carried my little pandeiro all the way back to Rio Vermelho.

I became progressively more nervous as I realized again, watching them play, the very high quality of musicianship in the group. The pandeiro player, a fellow by the name of Raul Pitanga, is one of the best pandeiro players I´ve seen yet. (www.myspace.com/raulpitanga - check out his bio, he´s got a formidable background - and yes, he teaches.) Extraordinarily nimble and agile with his fills, while also very sensitive to the tune - not showing off, just enhancing the tune magnificently; exactly the pandeiro style I am aiming for.

And the cavaquinho player was great. Both guitarists were great. The mandolin player was great. Hands like FIRE, all of them. Brilliant solos and tossing in liquid arpeggios all over the place. What had I gotten myself into?

I was sort of hoping they would forget they´d invited me to sit in, but eventually the guitarist, Lula, came over to ask me what tunes I was most familiar with. I picked two of the absolute most famous tunes, the ones every choro player knows, and that are not too fast: Cochichando and Noites Cariocas.

And up I went to the stage. Fortified by a Lemon Drop (Lemo-Droppee) that was a definitely a little stronger than I´d realized, which made the whole experience rather dreamlike and surreal. Suddenly I was up there on stage in Salvador playing with this absolutely fantastic choro band.

I didn´t dare try any fills - I´m still kind of crap at fills (I´ve had a whole year off of pandeiro recently and have lost what few little licks I´d had). But I knew that one thing I can do well on pandeiro is just to hold a decent choro groove with a pretty nice swing. And I know where the classic stops fall in Noites Cariocas. And so that´s all I did. Held the groove, hit the classic stops.

They looked SO relieved as soon as I started to play - after all, I was a totally unknown quantity and I´d detected a certain apprehension among the band as we were preparing to start. But as soon as we got going, I could almost see them thinking, "Oh! This is going to go fine! Whew!" The mandolin player next to me shot me a huge smile.

Cochichando went fine. I tried to leave then, but there was a chorus of, no, no, stay, play another one, let´s do Noites Cariocas! The magnificent pandeiro player Raul joined me on tamborim-taps for Noites Cariocas. And they played SUCH BEAUTIFUL SOLOS on Noites Cariocas, guitar and cavaquinho and mandolin, and even Raul´s subtle little tap patterns were so cool, and it was just such an honor to just be holding the groove, for them to do those beautiful solos.

Noites Cariocas wrapped up with the ever-so-familiar classic ending, just like on the old Jacob de Bandolim recordings that I practice to. So I successfully nailed the ending and managed to sail off the stage feeling like I´d done a decent job. Nothing flashy, but a decent job.

At the end of the show they all came clustering around saying Parabens, parabens! Come next thursday! We´re here every Thursday and Saturday, come play with us whenever you can! (- and that´s when I knew I´d acquitted myself well). Even when I said that I was about to leave Brazil in a few days, and wouldn´t be back till December, they said: Be sure to bring your pandeiro in December! We´ll be here every Thursday and Saturday in December too!

WOW, what a wonderful opportunity and what a great connection to have made. To be able to sit in with a native Brazilian choro ensemble of this caliber is something I never thought I would be able to do.

That was huge stroke of luck #1. Huge stroke of luck #2 was: When I sat down again at my little table, right after my little triumph of remembering the Noites Cariocas ending, a lovely Brazilian girl at the table next to me complimented me - in English - on my pandeiro playing. Turned out she (1) plays pandeiro, (2) is fluent in English, (3) is a marine biologist (!) who knows all the whale people and turtle biologists at Praia do Forte(!!). I couldn´t believe it. She said, "Let´s go up to Praia do Forte together and I´ll introduce you to everybody!" (!!!)

What are the chances? What a lucky, lucky night.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

beachy day.....

Spent all afternoon on the beach in Barra today. This time I finally went inside to the little maritime museum inside the fort at the base of the lighthouse. It was marvelous! I learned all kinds of things! I was shocked at the antiquity of Salvador - the Portuguese first claimed Brazil way back in 1501 by placing a rock right on the site where the lighthouse now stands. The fort was built soon after, the first fort the Portuguese built in South America; and the lighthouse itself is the oldest lighthouse in America. I was stunned, really, to realize that a lot of the classic colonial architecture I´ve been admiring, throughout Salvador, dates to the mid-1600s. Salvador´s history is a lot deeper than I´d realized.

Spent a long time at the display of the tragic wreckage of a grand Spanish galleon that was wrecked just off the lighthouse in the mid-1600s. It was loaded with priests and Portuguese officials who´d come all the way across the Atlantic, and they almost made it. Imagine coming all the way across the Atlantic successfully in a tiny little galleon, and then drowning within sight of land. They got almost to Barra - I imagine they must have been trying to reach the Bay of All Saints before a storm hit - but they were caught by the storm at nightfall.

The Portuguese version of this story, on a placard in the museum, read somethign like "After hours of desperate struggle, the poor ship, which had been suffering for hours, finally foundered and sank at 11 at night." The English translation condensed this to a dry "The ship sank at 11pm". I think I prefer the Portuguese version....

Anyway, the ship went down just beyond the lighthouse, in the middle of the night, in a raging Atlantic storm. 400 people died. Including the new governor-general of Brazil, who didn´t even get to set foot on his new territory.

For centuries afterward, fishermen retained an oral history of a sunken ship that they swore lay just off the Barra beaches. In the 1970s the Brazilian Navy decided to try to find it, and find it they did. What was left was several dozen cannons and anchors that still preserved the original outline of the ship, and little clumps of crockery, and pots, and forks, and even the simple wedding rings that the priests had brought with them (so that they could perform wedding ceremonies). They even found dishes with the family crest of the governor-general.

That was pretty fascinating stuff. But I think my very favorite part of the museum was its astonishing collection of miniature-ships-in-bottles. Including a miniature Brazilian-Navy-and-helicopter-rescuing-a-sinknig-ship-in-a-bottle. Don´t think I´ve seen a helicopter in a bottle before.

I finally pulled free of the museum and walked on, and reached the tiny Barra beach. What a perfect, perfect beach. The water on this side of the lighthouse is calm as can be - a few hundred meters away, on the other side, there were terrifying breakers rolling in off the Atlantic. But here on the Bay side, it was as calm as glass. You can even swim laps. Which I did. And everybody was having so much fun - men playing handball and kicking soccer balls around, children building beach castles, skinny boys horsing around diving off the pier. Vendors walking by and calling out: water, nice and cold! Baked cheese! Cooked shrimp on skewers! Sandwiches for sale! Beach wraps! Jewelry! Soda pop!

I swam back and forth along the entire beach, and I got a squeaky baked-cheese with sprinkles of oregano, and a little sandwich. I dozed in the sun until the tide came up and started to lap at my toes; and watched the sun set over the Bay. I thought: Oregon has a lot of great things, but Oregon does not have this beach.

I´m told Salvador is the only place in all of Brazil where you can watch the sun set over the sea. (well, over the Bay, anyway.) And it was a beautiful, beautiful sunset.

Two timbal myths

Two American myths about timbal have been bugging me recently - first, that your bloco has to have to have timbals to be able to play samba-reggae, and second, that it is a good idea to wear your timbal on a strap and to try to move while playing it. (parading, stepping with the rest of the band, whatever). I´ve been especially resistant to the Lions´ periodic attempts to get me to do those little band choreographies while I am playing timbal. Normally I dance a ton while playing, and I love doing choreographies on third surdo. But instinctively, on timbal, I don´t want to move at all, because I´m aiming for a very very VERY precise hand position on the timbal, and the second I start to move, I feel my playing go to hell - and also my hands can get unbelievably battered. (Thankfully, Brian has been backing me up on the don´t-force-the-timbals-to-move issue)

I wasn´t sure if this was because I´m a relative beginner, or what. So on my last 2 trips to Bahia I´ve been playing extra close attention to both these issues. Here´s what I´ve seen:

**Samba-reggae usually does NOT have timbal**
The classic samba-reggae bloco has surdos (playing 4 parts, if it´s a classic Olodum-style lineup), caixas, and repiniques (played with plastic rods in Olodum; sometimes with a wood stick in Ile Aiye). That´s it. Surdo, caixa, repinique. That´s what samba-reggae really is, at its core.
OK, so, yeah, occasionally a samba-reggae bloco will add in one or two extra instruments for fun to spice things up. I´ve seen tamborim in Ile Aiye, and shakers or scrapers in both Ile Aiye and Olodum. And yes, occasionally a timbal (especially likely if it is the tiny stage version of the band. Less likely in the full bloco). But it´s an extra. It´s not essential. It was never historically part of the samba-reggae when the genre was invented (by Ile Aiye, in the 70s) and made famous (in the 80s, by Olodum). As I understand it (from talking to players here) the timbal is really the drum of Timbalada, and was basically rescued from near-oblivion in the 1990s by Carlinhos Brown, the founder of Timbalada. And the way Brown really developed the timbal - and the way it is still used today, almost every time I´ve seen it used in Bahia - is on a stage, miked, stationary, in a stand, as part of a SMALL band. Not as part of a gigantic samba-reggae bloco. It simply can´t compete in volume, and it can´t take part in the bloco choreographies (see below).


**Timbals are almost always played with a stand, not with a strap.**
So far, every player I´ve seen here has used a stand for their timbal and has stood completely still when playing, even if the rest of the band was doing all kinds of choreographies. After yesterday´s lesson I cam see why. You really can´t play timbal properly if it´s hanging close to your body, and you definitely can´t play it properly if it´s moving a lot. So it seems to be that you have to choose between flashy choreography and good playing. Take your pick.

My timbal teacher said that in desperate circumstances, timbal players will use straps when forced to. (he demonstrated a parading style that involved holding the timbal off to the left side, almost like a dumbek). And yeah, people will do this in Carnaval. But it´s clearly not ideal - it´s an act of desperation, and it is not standard timbal technique, and nobody can really hear you, and you simply can´t play as well that way.

VINDICATED! Yeah!!

Friday, June 5, 2009

Where to buy cd's in Bahia

A quick note on where to buy Brazilian cd's in Bahia.

My favorite is Bahia Online in Pelourinho. (that's actually the name of their website - the store now goes by the name Cana Brava). It are almost at the end of Pelourinho, just before the very steep triangular plaza. It's owned by an American fellow who loves Brazilian music and who has a great collection of the best stuff of every genre - including old out-of-print LP's.

I had not been in that store five minutes before his charming wife, Ruth, had me seated by the cd player and was pouring piles of cd's into my hands for me to listen to.

Her sales technique was very savvy: She just had me play a bunch of cds on the cd player, and she watched me. She watched me lift an eyebrow at a pandeiro fill, smile at a particular vocal entrance...

After a few minutes of studying me as I listened to various songs, she'd clearly deduced "She likes pandeiro, samba de roda, choro, old-style recordings, recordings with prominent percussion, deep impressive voices, and recordings of ethnomusicological interest". From there on it was like the Netflix on steroids - in a few moments she'd handpicked 15 different cds from around the store and had piled them all in my lap, including: several magnificent choro recordings (including Tira Poeira's first cd, which I've been hunting for for a year!), two cd's of fantastic field recording of old-style samba-de-roda, a remastered recording of a wonderful samba guitarist of the 1970's, two or three small samba-choro bands that turned out to be absolute gems, some brilliant mandolin recordings, a masterful flute-and-guitar duo, and an overwhelmingly beautiful cd of ancient slave songs that had been recorded from the last elderly children-of-Brazilian-slaves in Rio just before they'd died.

I staggered out of the store laden with wonderful cd's. (ironic since I've just been trying to reduce the size of my cd collection. But I guess I was just making room for more good stuff, huh?)

Two days later I stopped by to inquire about a show I'd heard about. The second I poked my head in the door, not only did she recognize me instantly, but she called out, "Look what just arrived! A wonderful documentary dvd movie about samba-de-roda!" Of course I got it, how could I not? (And then she found out about the show for me, which turned out not to be happening after all; and instead she steered me toward a great choro group that was playing in Rio Vermelho that night. All of which culminated in an invitation from the guitar player to come sit in with them on pandeiro on Saturday. Thanks, Cana Brava!!!)

A second excellent music store in Pelourinho is Midia Louca. They are down on a different side street, on a corner just across the street from the Laranjeiras hostel. They've got two locations, one in Pelourinho and one in Rio Vermelho.

Cana Brava is probably better if you want just the very best stuff; I've never bought a bad cd from Cana Brava. But Midia Louca's got a broader cross-section of stuff, if you just want a wider selection, and also has books about music. The Midia Louca in Pelourinho is where I made my best music-book find: I'd been browsing in the store for almost an hour, was about to leave, and happened to turn my head to the side and my eye was caught by this:

"Play Along Choro - Pandeiro - by Celsinho Silva"

Celso Silva! My pandeiro teacher in Rio! The god of choro pandeiro!

It was a brand-new book. It turns out the choro masters at the Escola Portatil in Rio have just made a new series of books for learning choro, and I had stumbled across the pandeiro volume. Here's what it is. What they've done is recorded a set of classic choro tunes, with 1 instrument in one stereo track and all the other instruments in the other track. So you can hear your instrument in isolation, turn it up and play along with a master, and (later when you're up to it) turn it down and play by yourself with the rest of the band. They've also written out all the tunes. The best thing is, they've made different versions of the cd - one with the pandeiro isolated, one with the guitar isolated, etc. Then, each of the master players - the guitar player, the mandolin player, etc., and my teacher Celso for pandeiro - has written a full book to go along with it, with full scores, notes on how to approach each tune, lists of the best players for that instrument, a recommended discography for that instrument. So what I'd found in Midia Louca was the pandeiro volume.

I am so excited to have found this book! It's just what I need.

Also, the second half of the book has a full translation into English, for those who don't speak Portuguese.

GOLD MINE, for those of us who are into choro.

Later I chased down Midia Louca's other location in Rio Vermelho, bought another copy of the pandeiro volume & their sole copy of the guitar volume as well. Plus I found another cd that was on my search-list for choro pandeiro - Choro Rasgado.

PLUS, I found a Brazilian book that I decided would be perfect to be my First Book in Portuguese by a Real Brazilian Author (i.e. not counting the translations of Alice in Wonderland and Harry Potter that I've been working my way through). I know I should be tackling Jorge Amado or somebody classic like that, but what I found just looked much more my style: It's a murder mystery set in Salvador, involving the murder of a Carnaval pop-star singer, who is mysteriously shot dead right on top of a trio electrico, during a lightning storm right in the middle of a Carnaval parade. How perfect is that for my first real Brazilian novel?

GUERRA! GUERRA! GUERRA!

Had the best timbal lesson today that I've ever had in my life. I'd asked Ramiro Musotto for a recommendation (Ramiro is one of the very best musicians in all of Bahia, and he always steers me right when I'm looking for teachers) and he recommended a fellow to me by the name of Kaboduka, who played on Ramiro's recent dvd.

Kaboduka turned out to live in Liberdade. He met me in a tiny little house, led me down a tiny tiled hallway and into an astonishingly modern, soundproofed, air-conditioned recording studio hidden away in deep in the building. The place was packed with the craziest set of drums I've ever seen - even Olodum's psychedelic surdos had nothing on these. Magnificent racks of surdos with clear acrylic shells and strange tubes running through their insides, amazing custom-made djembes spray-painted in neon colors, timbals with huge, industrial-looking metal pipes sticking out of their sides, and the cleverest set of stands and racks that I've ever seen for timbals and surdos. Turns out Kaboduka had made everything, the drums, the drum racks, everything. It was gorgeous, really professionally done. I was thoroughly impressed.

Everything was spraypainted with a name, Kachorro Louco (Crazy Dog), a new band he's putting together that'll start playing this coming Carnaval season. Watch for it!

He asked me to do a few slaps, and I did 1 slap and he said immediately "No, stop". Turns out I had found the Michael Spiro of timbal: Kaboduka is, AT LAST, the first timbal teacher I've ever found who really insists on proper technique for timbal, and he is positively a demon about it. (He's almost the first teacher I've found who even has a clear idea what proper technique IS for timbal. Most teachers in the US who play timbal are really, at heart, conga or djembe players. Most approach timbal as a sort of strange-shaped conga, rather than as a unique drum that has its own technique, and few have really studied the Bahian style of playing.)

After we'd worked on the slap for a few minutes, he stopped me with a very important question:

"Would you rather learn lots of patterns (levadas), or would you rather spend your time today on learning how to play timbal right?"

He was asking seriously; he's had other students that he's asked the same question to, who replied they'd rather learn patterns, even though their technique was all wrong!

Timbal's a street drum that people usually learn on the fly. What does it mean to play a street drum the "right way"? There's several answers to that. One is, from a ethnomusicological point of view, the Bahian way is the right way. Another is, the right way is the way that gives you the best sound with the least pain. (The slappiest possible slap, and the toniest possible tone, and the bassiest possible bass, and always AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE.) The third is, the right way must be the way the masters play, since they are the best players, right? Anyway, Kaboduka's got "the right way" on all three counts (he is a high-end pro, and his main teachers were Carlinhos Brown and Ramiro Musotto, by the way).

So of course I chose to learn "the right way" rather than learn more patterns. I'd always rather fix technique and get the sound right. Patterns are easy to learn, and there are dozens of teachers for that. But it's hard to fix technique, and harder still to find someone who can teach it.

So. Here's some of what I learned:

KABODUKA'S PHILOSOPHY OF PLAYING TIMBAL: I've heard American players say "play more lightly", "don't hit the drum too hard" Kaboduka gave totally the opposite advice: Play harder. He said: "Playing timbal requires an enormous amount of force. AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF FORCE. You must be VERY STRONG. Much more than for conga or djembe. When you play timbal right, you must think that are attacking the timbal. It is a WAR! It is a WAR! You need FORCE! Think of the timbal as, HE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND! YOU ARE ATTACKING HIM! HE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND! IT IS A WAR!"

Throughout the entire lesson he would periodically correct me with "MORE FORCE! STRONGER! WAR! WAR! WAR!" By end of the two hours he would just yell "GUERRA!" (war!) periodically to keep me on my toes.

We spent a solid hour just working on slaps and tones, nonstop, verrry sloooowly, to a metronome. He wouldn't let me stop for a second, and kept zipping around me, peering at my hands from all angles, micro-adjusting the position of each hand, dozens of times, constantly demanding better slaps, better tones, better slaps, better tones, louder, LOUDER, WAR! WAR! WAR! By the end of the hour I was in that hallucinatory daze that comes from concentrating single-mindedly on slow drills, to a very loud, slow metronome, for long periods of time. Kaboduka's younger brother had joined in on the lesson by this time, and I'd barely even noticed that he was next to me. The whole world had become the metronome, and the slap, and the tone.

Finally he judged me ready to begin playing the simplest possible samba-reggae pattern. A bit nervous, I started in on it, and was shocked, I say, shocked, at how much better it sounded than it has ever sounded before. It sounded like a completely different player had taken over my drum. Whose hands were these? It was positively bizarre how different it sounded, and how strong and powerful, and how clear and confident it felt.

We went through 3 classic samba-reggae patterns, and each one was miles better than it has ever been before. It was terrifically gratifying, to feel the new slap and the new tone and the new force settling into my arms.

By the end of the two hours, though, I was completely wiped out. Hours later, now, sitting in a cafe typing this, my arms are still achey and trembling. And I can still hear Kaboduka yelling:

"GUERRA! GUERRA! GUERRA!" (WAR! WAR! WAR!)

***
A few more technique notes for the timbal players out there. Kaboduka's recommendations for good timbals, and where to get them, are at the end.

SLAP: Kaboduka's #1 fix for my slap was something that has baffled me since day 1 on timbal: where exactly should my hand be? His answer, put your hand WAY further into the drum that I had been doing. For the slap, he moved my hand so far in that the rim was hitting the heel of my hand - almost to the wrist! The rim should hit the meaty part at the base of the thumb. This was very comfortable, resulted in a VERY loud slap, and (at last) allowed me to get a good slap without bruising my hand.

TONE: Fix #1: He moved my hand slightly back out for the tone, so that the drum rim hit just wrist-ward of the base of the fingers. (i.e. the entire meaty part at the base of the knuckles is on the head of the drum, along with all of the fingers.) Fix #2: Lift the elbow a little so that the fingers meet the drum completely parallel to the head of the drum - all the parts of the hand that are going to contact the drum should all come to the drum simultaneously. Fix #3: Think of pressing into the drum a tiny bit. (this was a critical fix.) Fix #4, of course, was: MORE FORCE! WAR! WAR! WAR! He added, the tone must be every bit as powerful as the slap. You should be lifting your hand exactly as high, using exactly as much muscle, as your strongest, loudest slap. (the fingers stay slightly spread, btw, for both the slap & the tone.)

*****
What timbals to buy, and where: Kaboduka likes Bauer timbals, shuddered at Contemporanea's, and seemed neutral on Gope. He emphatically prefers the tall timbals and strongly advised me against buying a short one. After the lesson he took me to a great drum shop store that had the best selection of surdos, timbals and pandeiros that I've seen yet in Bahia, and here is the name & address & email of the store:
Silú Instrumentos Musicais
Rua Barão de Cotegipe, 10 Mares
CEP 40.445-000 Salvador, Bahia
Tel: (71) 3313-0076
email: musicom.br@bol.com.br

Anyone who wants a great timbal lesson in Bahia, contact me & I'll give you Kaboduka's #. He's worth it.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

English lessons

Saw the Ballet Folklorico last night (fantastic, more later on that) and went afterwards to go see a capoeira show that was supposed to happen in the street nearby. In typical Brazilian style, the show never seemed to quite happen. I spent an hour waiting on the street near all the capoeira guys for some ill-defined organizational moment that would (in theory) allow the capoeira show to start. The capoeira guy closest to me, a nice guy named Jonatas who I'd just met, was the only fellow wearing a black shirt - everyone else was in white - and his capoeira buddies started ragging on him for not having a white shirt. "Didn't you bring a white shirt?" they asked. "No, nobody told me!" he answered (in Portuguese), continuing half-heartedly, "Eu nao sabia! Se eu soubesse....eu teria..." He trailed off there, but I was fascinated by this sentence construction, which happens to be a set of phrases that I constantly need: "I didn't know! If I had known... I would have..."

I started muttering it under my breath: "Eu nao sabia.. se eu soubesse... eu teria..." Jonatas heard my muttering and laughed, and it turned out he is a keen student of English who recognized exactly the sort of grammatical house-of-mirrors I'd just wandered into. Turns out he's been slogging his way through a huge English textbook ("THIS thick" he said, holding up his fingers an inch apart), entirely on his own, just so he can communicate better with tourists - i.e. potential capoeira students and people in need of tour guides, his main source of income. He'd gotten surprisingly far, considering he's totally self-taught. (Put my self-taught Portuguese to shame, in fact.) And he'd reached the "could/would/should" chapters. And he was very eager to know: How would you translate "Se eu soubesse, eu teria..." into Portuguese?

So I spent a while trying to explain the following English sentence:
If I HAD KNOWN, I WOULD HAVE BROUGHT my white shirt.

Three minutes later, I was realizing this was much more complicated than I'd ever realized. What's the difference between "If I knew" and "If I had known"? What's the difference between "I should have brought", "I could have brought", and "I would have brought"? Why isn't it "bringed" instead of "brought"? Why isn't it "knowed", for that matter? How come English has all the separate little words in front of the verb? (Could, should, would, had...) Why doesn't the verb change?

The moment that "should" entered the picture, he interrupted me with a new question:
" 'You should not', what does that mean exactly? I have seen that. Is that like "'Você não iria', you would not?"

No, I said, it's, it's an instruction. Or it's advice. For example (I said):
You SHOULD NOT go there. It's dangerous. It's not allowed. It's dark.

Ah! he said. Like this in Portuguese?
Você NÃO DEVERIA ir lá. É perigoso. É proibido. É oscuro.

Exactly!

But before we could get any farther on that, he interrupted me again with "You are easy to understand. You are American, right? English people are harder to understand than American people." I didn't understand at first, but then he added "Especially people from Liverpool! And people from Newcastle. People from the north of England, in general. And also people from Scotland. And also people from Ireland," and I realized he definitely had a point. (Turned out he'd lived recently with a roommate from Liverpool, and apparently has been linguistically scarred for life by the experience). He's also been given conflicting pronunciation advice by American tourists vs British tourists. "You Americans, you say the R more, right? Wa-terrrrrr. But the English say: Wa-tuh. And you say your A's differently. Like in banana. Tomato. And your O's are different too. And another thing I have learned is that the English do not say "What's up?" "

I had not quite been aware of that last tidbit, but he explained with a little story:

" I learned "What's up" from an American, who told me it it is a friendly way to say hello, and one day I was in Pelourinho greeting people and I said 'what's up?' to a very tall man, and he looked at me like this [...here he did a very good impression of a snooty upper-class Brit staring down his nose at somebody],... he looked at me like this, and he said "*I* am from ENGLAND. You should say 'HOW DO YOU DO'."

Can't you just picture it! It made me want to go running up to every Brit I see and greet them with a brassy New York "Heeeeeyy man, WHASSUP?!!" and a big ol' high five. The snooty ones who want me to say How-do-you-do, I'll leave them alone. But the ones who laugh, or who high-five me back, they're getting invited out for a cerveza with me and my new Brazilian friend, and we'll all practice saying "You shouldn't say 'what's up' to a Brit, it's dangerous" in Portuguese.

Ele tentou, ele tentou!

If you a woman travelling in Salvador, a large part of the experience is the inevitable flirtatious encounters with the Salvadorean men. The men here are confident to the point of arrogance; they are brassy, bold, and curious; they have an extravagantly generous sense of feminine beauty; and they are immune to rejection. It is an overwhelming tidal wave to any American woman who's grown up with the hesitant, is-he-or-isn't-he, sideways non-approaches of American men.

If you live here for a while you go through phases of being shocked, flattered, amused, annoyed, and burned-out. And then when you return to the US, American men no longer make any sense to you at all. (If they ever did.)

I first experienced this at age 41 or so on my first trip to Brazil. But I'm 44 now. A lot of mental aging seems to happen between 41 and 44, as you shift mentally from "I'm-almost-still-in-my-30s!" to "okay-I'm-definitely-middle-aged". After a couple years teaching bright-eyed college freshmen who are less than half my age, I've been feeling like a creaky old white-haired professor, and I assumed my Salvador flirtations were over. Not so. Apparently there is no age limit here in Salvador.

Salvador flirtation#1: Last night I finally decided to stop at the tiny bar outside my apartment that has been the source of such happy guitar-playing and exuberant, out-of-tune singing. I'd been a bit intimidated from stopping there because it's such a tiny place, and so completely crammed with people who clearly know each other well, that it requires a certain amount of chutzpah just to thread your way through the close-knit crowd to the doorway. But I was very thirsty, needed some drinkable water, and all the other shops were closed.

Sure enough conversation stopped dead as I inched my way through the tiny clump of tables to ask the bartender if he had any water. It felt like one of those Westerns where the piano stops and everybody stares when the new guy walks into the saloon. Everybody was staring at me. (I felt especially ridiculous just asking for water. But I'd already had too many beers that night.) But it was a friendly, welcoming sort of stare, with lots of smiles, and soon they were all saying "Boa noite!" and welcoming me in. I managed to get my precious bottle of water, exchanged hellos with the four or five people nearby - and then a man zoomed over out of nowhere and kissed my hand. He was off and running, zero to sixty, Brazilian style: "Hello! How are you? What is your name? You are very beautiful! Where are you from? Would you like to dance? How long are you here for? Are you here alone? Are you sure you don't want to dance? Do you have a boyfriend?" All this in about 1 minute.

(American men, please take notes. You needn't do it this rapidly, but the clarity and directness certainly do help matters along.)

He definitely got Salvador style points for saving the do-you-have-a-boyfriend for several sentences in, instead of the very first question.

Unfortunately for him I was truly wiped out from all my walking today, and was still feeling a bit wobbly anyway from my horrible plane flight. So I really just needed to drink my water and didn't really want to dance. I tried to decline as nicely as I could, but he was one of those Extremely Persistent Salvadorean Men. "Are you SURE you don't want to dance? Don't you like dancing? Don't you like music? We could dance the forro! Do you know forro? Look, it goes like this! I'll show you!" He started dancing around the tiny room, miming holding a lady in front of him, wiggling his hips from side to side. Luckily the bartender and his wife both recognized the situation and came to my aid, shooing him away and both whispering to me very kindly (in Portuguese) "Just sit if you want to sit! Just relax! Be at home!"

Everyone else returned their attention to the main focus of the evening, which was hollering along out-of-tune to the guitar player's songs. They got into a long joking song that involved suddenly putting a specific person on the spot to contribute two sentences to the lyrics. It all seemed to be be very off-color and double-entendre since there were many howls of laughter. The bartender tried to explain to me: "It's a word of double meaning. See, the chorus there, it can mean [something something] WALL, but it can also mean the [something something] of a WOMAN! HA HA HA HA!" Hmm, I can only guess what I was missing....

Next up, the man who'd been asking me to dance grabbed the guitar and made a huge complicated announcement that I did not really grasp. There was a general "Ooooooo" of anticipation, and the woman next to me said "Did you understand? He is going to sing a song just for you!" He strummed dramatically (he was actually a pretty good player) and launched into a song at the top of his lungs, and at the first word, everybody started screaming and laughing as they recognized what song it was. "Do you understand the lyrics?" asked my friend. I said no, and she said "It's very romantic." I bet it was, because everybody else was whooping and hollering and pounding the tables. I was laughing along with everybody else because the whole situation was just so ridiculous. But my Portuguese is definitely not at its best when everybody is screaming, laughing and talking simultaneously, so I couldn't understand a single word of the lyrics. The only things I could pick out of the general commotion were "Look, look, she's turning red!" and "The funniest thing is, she doesn't understand what he's singing!" and, at the very end, when he dramatically stopped and stared at me and I stared confusedly back, several people shouting delightedly, "Well, he tried! He tried! You can't say he didn't try!" ("Ele tentou! Ele tentou!") Finally a different woman ran up and gave him a kiss, and I finally figured out the whole song had been about asking me for a kiss.

Sorry, bud, I really just didn't understand a word you were saying!

(That about sums up my career with men in a nutshell, by the way.)

Later (after the laughing had died down a bit and the singers were on to another song), the woman next to me said "Everybody here is family, you know. We are all one family. You are welcome any time," and the bartender added "You have friends in Bahia now. It is easy to make friends in Bahia, isn't it?" I'll say.

Monday, June 1, 2009

A copa é nosssssaaaaaa

I went up to the Pelo today for the first time, having spotted on Olodum's website that they were supposedly playing at 1pm. I wasn't too worried about getting there on time, and sure enough when I drifted up at 1:30pm, the sound system was still being assembled. A huge stage had been put up, and there were colored streamers all over the square, and an enormous TV that was almost the size of the entire stage - all of which seemed a bit excessive for what I'd assumed was an ordinary street parade. Two different groups of surdos were stacked in the corners - one with Olodum's colors (green,yellow, red), and another stack with a blocky design in red, yellow and white that I was pretty sure was Ile Aiye! Ile Aiye too? Had I stumbled across them both? Ile Aiye would be an exceptionally lucky strike since they rarely play in the off-season and I'd missed their main party last night.

It turned out, YES, I'd made an incredibly lucky double strike - the full Ile Aiye bloco (complete with dancers) and then the full Olodum bloco as well. It was some sort of World Cup-related party, I gathered, though the World Cup wouldn't actually be here till 2014. (It's going to be in Brazil!) There were banners all over reading "A copa é nosssaaaa!!!!" - The Cup is ours!

Ile Aiye played first - oh, so beautiful! A woman beside me was nearly in ecstasy, waving her arms around and singing along to all those Ile Aiye songs: "ILEE AIYYYYEEEEE..... PASSA POR AQUIIIIIIII!!!" I was so thrilled to be able to see them since they're sometimes a hard bloco to find. They are the oldest afro-bloco, the one that really started samba-reggae, and they still have a unique sort of groove - and their dancers have an exceptionally beautiful, swaying kind of dance, completely different from the punchy Olodum-style samba-reggae dances.

After a long, wonderful spell of Ile Aiye magnificence, Olodum played second. Olodum's bigger, and flashier, and OH boy, Olodum has those ever-so-cool drummer choreographies. They are hot shots and they know it! I was, as ever, fascinated and amused by the two different drummer worlds going on in the Olodum bloco - the fundos in the back (the first and second surdos) who were playing completely their own game of mallet-tossing and drum-throwing, more or less oblivious to what was going on in the rest of the band. In front of them, a buffer line of 3rd surdos and caixas, and then, in front of them, the showmen in the front, the killer line of fourth surdos, doing a completely different set of choreographies. (And in the very front, the repiniques, but it's really the fourth surdos who are the show. Musical notes to follow later - and if you're wondering "Fourth surdo? I thought there were three?" no, there are four, the one you think is the 3rd is the 4th. I'll explain later.)

Then to my huge surprise both blocos merged together and the Ile Aiye and Olodum mestres conferred together up front. What on earth would ever cause Ile Aiye and Olodum to merge into a single bloco?

By this point the crowd had swelled and I'd finally realized that the TV vans I'd passed on the way down were carrying live feeds from fleets of reporters who were scurrying around through the blocos. The crowd was ENORMOUS. I looked behind me and realized that right behind me were about 15 huge puppets dancing around - Carnaval puppets. What could cause the Carnaval puppets to come out, outside of Carnaval? What could make Ile Aiye and Olodum join forces? Bringing the World Cup to SALVADOR, not just to Brazil but to SALVADOR, that's what. I finally clued in: Today was the day that FIFA, the international football (soccer, you clueless americans!) was announcing the host cities for the 2014 World Cup.

The giant TV screen came alive, and it was, sure enough, a live broadcast from FIFA.

So, a little background here. The 2014 World Cup will be in Brazil. (For the soccer clueless among you, of whom I was recently one, the World Cup is only every four years - like the Olympics.) This will be the first World Cup to be held in South America since 1978, and the first in Brazil since 1950. There has been such anticipation about when the World Cup would return to Brazil that once FIFA announced that the 2014 Cup would be in South America, Brazil was such an overwhelming favorite that other South American nations actually withdrew their bids.

In 2007 Brazil was formally selected. Late in 2008, FIFA announced that 12 Brazilian cities, as yet unnamed, would be selected to host the World Cup finals. Today they announced the lucky 12 cities.

So the TV screen was showing the live feed from FIFA in Europe. This was a baffling linguistic experience for me, because the FIFA guy was talking in English but it was overlaid by a translation in Portuguese, and my brain kept flipping confusedly between the two languages. But I did hear enough to catch his opening remarks (paraphrased from memory here):

"It is only right that the World Cup return to the Continent of Football! And when I saw Continent of Football, I refer not just the continent of South America, but to the CONTINENT OF BRAZIL!"

(Huge cheers to this. His geography might be a bit fuzzy but the sentiment was much appreciated.)

Then a long, tedious speech about exactly what criteria were used to select cities: feasibility of plans for building stadiums. Airport quality. Quality of roads and transportation. Quality of telephone coverage. The list of criteria went on and on, and I could hear people around me starting to worry a bit about Salvador's chances: We have good buses, don't we? Our buses are great! The phone coverage is great here, isn't it? But isn't the airport a little small? But we host Carnaval, we've shown we can handle giant crowds! But our biggest stadium is out of commission since that terrible collapse in 2007. True, true, but it's going to be refurbished and strengthened and completely renovated, haven't you seen the plans?

Everybody started to get nervous. What if the copa is not nossa after all?? It would be heartbreaking!

Finally he said he would announce the names of the 12 cities, in alphabetical order. And he started listing Brazilian cities. The closer he got to S, the more everybody held their breath. I saw the Olodum mestre summon all his drummers, Olodum and Ile Aiye both, to get their drums on, to get their sticks ready, to be ready to play. With each city named, there was a little cheer from scattered people in the crowd who were from that city:

"Porto Alegre" - "yayyy!" and a few claps.
"Recife" - "uiuiui!" and a few claps.
"Rio de Janeiro" - no surprise there.
Silence from the crowd, though, because everybody was now very tense, because we were very close to S.
"Salvador"

Nobody heard anything else he said after that. Olodum and Ile Aiye erupted in the loudest, longest drumroll I've ever heard, and the crowd was screaming its collective head off.

Then the joint bloco played and played and played, and it was party time in Pelourinho, as over the top as if it had been Carnaval.

(Funniest part of this: Watching the Ile Aiye drummers trying to follow along with Olodum's choreographies. I especially felt for the tall, very black, formidable fourth-surdo Ile Aiye drummer who was nearly mowed over by a line of laughing, hopping Olodum fourth-surdos that came crashing into him from the right side. But in a minute or two he'd picked up most of their dances.)

June and July, 2014. BE HERE. (Bloco X, are you listening???)

Salvador is Salvador

Back in Salvador! I'll spare you all the story of how I got sick on the plane flight with 3 different illnesses hitting me at once, other than to say, never have the 7 long lines at Sao Paulo been so interminable:
1. Passport control. An extremely tedious 40 min.
2. Bag claim. 20 min
3. Customs. Only 15 min.
4. Pulled off into extra security search in customs. (due to my weird-shaped conga bag, I don't doubt - empty and waiting for a timbal to carry home) (only 2 min, for which I was very grateful)
5. Bag re-check line. Another 40 min!!! oh my god!!! when will these lines ever end!!
6. Security line. 20 min.
7. Line at the gate to get into the little bus that finally carried us to the little flight. 15 min, not too bad.

Lesson 1: Always be sure your Sao Paulo layover is at least THREE hours. Two hours sometimes is really not enough. I deliberately chose a later flight to Salvador to give me extra buffer time, and was very glad I did.
Lesson 2: Make sure you have a seat at the FRONT of the plane on the overnight flight coming into Sao Paulo. It is a horse race to get to the customs line first and those who disembark first have a huge advantage.
Lesson 3. This lesson is for the rich: Arrange a direct flight to Salvador if at all possible.
Lesson 4: Do not be sick!!!

Stumbled off my 3rd and last plane at Salvador, having gone nearly 48 hours without sleep, and been sick most of that time. I I thought "I've never been so exhausted since the trip to Bloco X" (previously my lifetime benchmark for an exhausting journey). Never was I so glad that I'd arranged a taxi driver to pick me up. Honestly the journey had been so miserable I'd been thinking "Do I really even want to go to Brazil? Is this really worth it?" and had started wondering if I was "over" Brazil. But at last I was in Salvador and the sun was shining down, and the air was that indescribably Brazilian air: not just warm, but also soft, velvety, smelling of mango trees and the sea, and all around me were the sounds of Portuguese, and everywhere were acai booths and acaraje stands and coconut vendors. I heard the cries of great kiskadees in the distance - my favorite bird, because when I hear that bird it means I'm back in Brazil. Suddenly all my doubts disappeared. It felt like having gone through hell to reach heaven.

I arrived at my beautiful, peaceful, wonderful apartment. I'd never actually seen it before (I'm just a minor co-owner, not the major owner, and it's primarily for rental) I walked in and was instantly mentally transported to my beloved Flamengo room in Rio - it's in the exact same style, the classic upper-middle-class Brazilian apartment: high ceilings, tile floors in the spacious main room, beautiful wooden parquet floors in the bedrooms, built-in closets with an extra row of storage cupboards that are too high to reach, the usual infinitesimally tiny room for the maid in the back, and in the kitchen the classic Brazilian tiny little stove and slightly tippy pots and slightly sticky cupboard doors. (There is not a single pot in Brazil that is not slightly tippy. Balancing your slightly tippy pot of beans on your eentsy little stove is just part of the Brazilian experience).

I knew it was in a good location, right on Alfonso Celso, but hadn't realized what a cute little neighborhood it is - friendly little shops and neighborhood bars right below. 2 blocks from the beach and the lighthouse, right on the bus routes and right near the shopping. It's on the top (3rd) floor, high enough to look out on a leafy mango treetop and feel as peaceful as can be, but not so high that it would be a terrible walk up the stairs. It feels extremely safe - Alfonso Celso is one of the most peaceful streets, and the regulars who gather round the bar below to sing and watch soccer and play cards just seem to make it even safer. After the 3rd time that you've threaded your way through the card game, they're calling hello and inviting you for a drink.

Here are the rare things about the apartment: the hot water in the showers actually works. The beds are comfortable. The fans actually work. The stove and fridge actually work. There's enough outlets. There's a washing machine that actually works. There's a COFFEEMAKER. (anyone who's travelled much in Brazil will recognize the significance of each of these facts!) But most of all, I have simply never had such a peaceful place to sleep in Salvador. There are birds singing in the tree right outside my window, and I can distantly hear the sounds of singing from the bar below, and the fan is whirring peacefully overhead; I could stay here forever.

It's the rainy season here. I felt a little silly leaving Oregon just as it enters its spectacular summer, and coming to Brazil during the rainy season, but I simply could not resist the unbelieavably low plane fares right now. Even here in Salvador people seem concerned that I might not know what month it is: "You've arrived during the rainy season, did you know that? You know that it is not Carnaval now?" But in fact the weather is perfect - 80F almost constantly - comfortable but not too hot. It is magnicent beach weather for a pale gringa like me. The passing showers, to my Oregon eyes, seem hardly even worth noticing, they pass so quickly, and so far the rain has been so light it is only like being feathered with tiny, welcome little dots of coolness. (the dots seem not to contain any water - just coolness.) And the last three days have had no rain at all. The sea is the absolute perfect temperature - the kind where you can just run into the sea full tilt and it simply welcomes you with open arms. It's not too hot, and I don't have to worry constantly about being fried to a crisp. And the beach is friendly, and peaceful, and uncrowded, and the main danger is not pickpockets but being accidentally mowed down by the capoeira guys who are doing rows and rows of endless backflips along the open beach, something they never have room to do during the high season.

And the bands are playing in Pelourinho, and all my teachers seems to be very available for lessons!

So it turns out, Salvador is Salvador no matter what season it is, and it is FANTASTIC to be here.