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....

Some updates

Oops, I totally forgot I left my blog on such a dismal sad note. Leaving Portland, right. Well, it's three months on now and I've gotten so much cheerier, and with so much stuff going on, that I just forgot to update the blog! So here's some updates:

- MAJOR changes going on back in Portland. Maybe I left at the right time! The Lions have been scaled back and don't rehease weekly any more; they still exist, and drum and dance classes are still running, but the drumming side of it is only being called together now and then, for focused rehearsals for certain big gigs. So of course all the Lions players (plus ex-Lions and other assorted drummers) are missing the weekly rehearsals, so they are putting together a new group, and that means going through all the inevitable turmoil - meetings, committees, surveys, endless rounds of emails and soul-searching and arguing and apologizing, and more meetings and surveys and emails, and STILL MORE SURVEYS, AND ENDLESS EMAILS ABOUT THE SURVEYS, jesus effin c, and YET MORE EMAILS, and discussions about names and rehearsal space and goals and whatnot. All of this is normal, of course, and it's all part of the process. I'm simultaneously glad I'm gone, and wishing I could be there to contribute to what comes next. Anyway, the new group (still unnamed I think) seems to be coming together ... at least, the endless flow of emails has stopped, which probabaly means things are settling down to some kind of normal weekly flow. Certainly there's a tremendous amount of samba skill in Portland, and a couple of excellent leader types, and the new group's got the potential to be great.

Still miss the Lions though. My time as a Lion was really the defining element of the last five years of my life. (I was just recently going through my housing history of the last five years, and discovered I started playing with the Lions way back in 2006. Hey! I've been a Lion for five years, who knew!)

- And then I managed to get to Rio for three weeks for Carnaval. (See the riostories blog.) This was a tiny trip for me; I buzzed in only two days before Carnaval started, so was not able to play with escolas. But that wasn't my goal this time. I really just wanted to play with Banga, see the parades, and most of all see all my friends! Anyway, Rio was fantastic as always, with the real highpoint being playing with Bangalafumenga in both their Carnaval parade and their last big Lapa show of the ressaca-do-Carnaval (the "hangover-of-Carnaval", the weekend after Ash Wednesday). I was on repique again this year, actually remembered pretty much all of the repique patterns, knew many more of the songs and felt MUCH more confident and relaxed. I could see Pedro, the repique leader, gearing up several times to remind me of pattern changes in certain songs, then looking very relieved when it turned out I already knew them. He actually blew me kisses a couple times when I nailed some of the trickier transitions. The Lapa show was particularly awesome... god, we played the roof off that building, and the crowd was just euphoric. (And just fyi, the new Magalenha arrangement kicks ass.)

Also managed to snatch some time with my Cubango crowd - Daniel, Dora, Mestre Jonas, Humberto and some of my other buds - out in Niteroi at a crazy little bloco. Daniel drove me all the way out there, and then Humberto took the trouble to escort me clear back across the bridge all the way to the Sambodromo later that night, bless the both of them. Saw Monobloco and Rio Maracatu too, and went to just about all the escola parades of Grupo de Acesso and Grupo Especial, made some great new friends, went about 100 hours with about 6 hrs sleep, then got sick, then went and lay on the beach for a week, all the usual.

- Just fyi, Dudu Fuentes is returning to California Brazil Camp for WEEK 2 ONLY. I think (but am not sure) that he'll be doing a full class of his own to teach Banga repertoire (i.e. not samba). So sign up now and get your tickets! Me, I'm desperately hoping that my August whale fieldwork in the Bay of Fundy goes so amazingly smoothly that I can bolt away for a week to California. But I won't know till the last second (depends on the weather in the Bay of Fundy and on how many boat days we get). Fingers crossed!

- And I've got my ticket to go to Bloco X! It's coming up in just a few weeks! In Germany, at Bad Orb, on the first weekend of May. CAN'T WAIT. God, it's so nice to be closer to Europe. I'm going to London first to see some samba friends there, then to the Max Planck Institute for some biology stuff, then to Bloco X. I'm working really hard on tamborim for this, practicing every day. I hope I will be up to Bloco X standards on tamborim by the time I go - though, given their level of skill, maybe not. If not, I'll have to haul a caixa all over Europe again, and I really am sick of traveling with a caixa. It is way past time to switch to a smaller drum. So, me and the tamborim, we are becoming best buds at last.

- But the big news is that I found a REALLY cool afrobrazilian group here in Boston. They're called Afrobrazil. See next post.