Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Afrobrazil

So, a couple months back I'd stumbled across a friend who does some Brazilian percussion in Boston. I went to a sweet bossa-nova type gig of theirs, sat in a bit (and had a great time), and afterwards, he and the guitarist both told me I needed to check out a group called Afrobrazil.

At this point they both got a sort of religious-convert, wide-eyed look in their eyes. They kept repeating "You HAVE to check out Afrobrazil. It is going to BLOW YOUR MIND. They are AMAZING. You absolutely HAVE to check them out." They both kept saying the leader of this Afrobrazil group was some kind of amazing, incredible, awesome dude, best player ever, best leader ever, coolest repertoire ever, etc. etc.

Privately I was thinking "yeah, yeah, I've seen a lot of groups before" and "Is this going to be one of those Cult-of-Personality things?" The kind of group where everybody worships a Big Dude, and the Big Dude is always front-and-center with the solos, and the group website has just a giant photo of the Big Dude, and Big Dude takes all the gig money and nobody else ever gets paid. Sometimes you have to pay a hefty sum just to be in the glorious presence of the Big Dude for a couple hours per week. I know a few groups like that, and (unless it's somebody truly phenomenal) I'm usually not interested in that kind of thing.

So a few weeks later I finally managed to track down the group. They rehearse on Tuesday nights, someplace in Allston. So Tuesday night rolls around, I motor on over there in my ice-encrusted Forester, blundering my way through Boston's infamous 7-way intersections, and the twisting, turning streets that keep changing their names every three blocks, and the gigantic snowdrifts blocking your view on every corner. Finally managed to find the right street, managed to park my car (by driving it up at an angle onto the 4-foot-tall snowdrift that was covering all the parking spaces), found the street number I was looking for. It was a gorgeous new building with a gigantic "BERKLEE COLLEGE OF MUSIC" sign over the front.

Berklee College of Music? What was I doing at a Berklee building? (note to foreign readers: this is different from Berkeley the research university, which is in California. Berklee is in Boston and does music only; it is one of the top music schools in the USA.)

I walked in to a huge lobby full of drums. Down a hallway to the right were dozens and dozens of tiny, closet-sized, sound-proofed rehearsal rooms, all in a row, many in use by Berklee students practicing diligently. Down the same hallway to the left were a set of four or five larger rooms, each one big enough for a small band, and each equipped with a drumset and sound system. (Several groups were rehearsing - I could just barely hear their beautiful music drifting out through the double-airlock soundproofing doors.) And at the end of the hallway, past another double door for soundproofing: a bright, beautiful big hall for ensemble rehearsals. With stacks of surdos, repiniques, caixas, a box of sticks and straps, and a big box of earplugs. Plus a grand piano and a full set of concert tympani, just in case we needed them.

Afrobrazil turns out to be a "student club" of the Berklee College of Music. And that means Afrobrazil gets (a) free rehearsal space, (b) free drums, (c) maybe 4/5 of the group is Berklee students, and, THAT means, the group has a ridiculously high average level of chops. Pretty much everybody seems to be either a drumset major or a percussion major. Brand-new people drift in at every rehearsal, and the brand-new people can immediately pick up a caixa or a timbal and just start ripping it up. Everybody's got good time. Everybody can pick up any pattern in a few minutes. Everybody can solo. Everybody can read music.

So, the Big Dude turns out to be a Bahian guy named Marcus Santos. During Feb and March he was in and out a lot touring, and then when he was back, I was in Brazil; so one thing and another, we kept missing each other. Then last Wednesday at a little show in the Berklee cafeteria, a big friendly-looking guy I'd never seen before stepped forward and did a phenomenal timbal solo. Like... a TRULY beautiful timbal solo. I've seen a hell of a lot of great timbal playing, and this guy was GOOD. What I really liked about his playing was not the flash or the specific riffs, but that it was so well played. Superb clarity - no muddiness at all, no fuzz, every hit absolutely perfectly placed - and impeccable technique, with the basses, slaps and tones all incredibly bassy, slappy and toney, respectively. None of that blurred, half-djembe/half-conga technique that you see a lot on timbal in the US.

"Who's THAT guy?" I asked somebody, and of course it turned out to be Marcus.

He turned out to be truly friendly - always smiling, and giving big, ebullient bear-hug greetings to everybody. Then last night he led rehearsal, and it turns out he's also got a really cool leading style. He hits that hard-to-attain balance of being very cheerful and encouraging and fun, while also simultaneously pushing the group to play better, better, better. (Kind of reminded me of Brian Davis actually.) He pushed us so hard we stayed 45 minutes late drilling a new maracatu piece over and over and over. So, my two friends were right - this really IS a great group, and the leader is a Big Dude in the very best way. (oh, and, rehearsals are free, and gigs are paid. Yeah!)

The one thing I am going to have to adjust to is that this is emphatically not a traditional group. That is, Afrobrazil's real aim is to do original compositions, NOT to play traditional genres. As Marcus said last night (paraphrasing:) "We don't play samba, we don't play samba-reggae, we don't play baiao, we don't play maracatu. What we play are original compositions that are drawn somewhat from those genres, but we're not trying to play those genres exactly."

That said, though, it seems to me that Afrobrazil's actually got a quite traditional Olodum/Timbalada foundation. Their instrument lineup is pretty much straight Olodum: there's a couple fundos at the back (first and second surdos), then a very strong lineup of thirds who all do very flash choreographies; then a big line of caixas, and another big line of repiques. Then a couple of red-hot players on timbal. (That's Timbalada influence of course. Olodum didn't originally have timbal, but does have a few now.) Surdos are short and are slung low from a double waist strap, caixas are mostly parallel to the ground and are played pretty square, repiques are all 8" and played with plastic rods, the third surdo is mostly called "cortador" (cutter) or "dobrado" (doubler), and is played with two mallets. (Almost all the thirds even played the samba with two mallets, in fact - giving the samba a very samba-reggae feel.) The group doesn't have hand-and-stick repique at all, and in fact when they need to do a repique samba call, rather than do it on repique they do it on timbal - but playing the timbal with hand-and-stick as if it were a repique! Even though they've got repiques right there! (Worked surprisingly well actually.) All that's very Olodum ish, right?

(Also, just to complete the picture, there are a couple other people on stray other stuff like bell for maracatu, triangle for baiao, and ganza. The ganza player, btw, totally kicks ass. I ended up watching him for a large chunk of the Wed show.)

Anyway, all in all it seems very Olodum/Timbalada influenced. Yet they do not play classic Olodum or Timbalada style. They do use a pretty common Olodum-derived break in their samba-reggae... but shifted by one beat. ("AND FOUR" rather than "AND THREE".) They use a really classic Timbalada entrada (the one from Toque de Timbaleiro) ... but changed at the end. They use a really classic Rio repique samba call... but played on timbal, like I said, and with the bateria starting the clave two beats early. (Uh-oh.) (Hands up, all of you who know why I am saying "uh oh" about that...) They don't really do Rio-style samba at all, in fact - they only do 1 samba piece, and it's very Bahian in flavor, very slow and groovy, sort of like Ile Aiye's "antigo" style circa late 70s. (It's so different from the Rio samba that I usually play that I didn't even recognize it as a samba till we got two minutes into it.)

So the whole group's this fascinating mix of top level chops, with elements of traditionality, but all in a nontraditional context that sort of floats around Brazilian genres without really BEING those genres. Overall... SUPER cool repertoire. Their thirds have some especially amazing patterns - long loopy things that cycle through three or four variations, all with groovy, showy choreography. The group's got some rhythms I haven't even seen any other US groups tackle - a galope, for example. AND, they've got a couple pieces where most of band scatters to the sides, and all the surdos come dancing forward and take center stage! Rah surdos! I seriously love a group that features the surdos like that.

It'll be a bit of an adjustment for me to go Bahian style instead of my usual Rio style, but I'm excited about it. (Except for that two-counts-early thing in the samba....) They are really going to push me! And I'm thrilled to have found them.

Now I gotta go plow through my rehearsal recordings and write out that maracatu....

4 Comments:

At April 13, 2011 at 8:14 PM , Blogger Patricia Barnhart said...

I knew you would either find a good band or create one eventually. This one sounds super cool. Miss you, bjs---P

 
At June 25, 2011 at 9:45 AM , Blogger paintbrush said...

So, let us know where we can catch a performance!

 
At December 5, 2011 at 11:15 AM , Blogger Catherine Taft said...

I know Marcus!!! We went to Berklee together. We reconnected after we graduated in 05 but neither of us could remember how we knew each other in school even though I could pick him out of a crowd, haha. His CD BatukAxe is amazing. I am looking forward to jamming with AfroBrazil next month for the first time. He's an insane timbal player, I'm hoping to get a lesson or two in with him.

 
At February 28, 2012 at 11:58 AM , Blogger Greg said...

Hey there Samba Kat! I just found your blog looking for info on AfroBrazil. That's so exciting that you landed a dream job in Boston. Hope you're enjoying it.

In any case, I'm a long time capoeirista and ritmista and I've been looking for a place to play in Mass. I've been here a while, but I'll be moving to Boston soon. I can't seem to find any info about Afro-Brazil. Is there anyway you could give or direct me to some information about practicing with the group?

Thanks so much,
Garça

 

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