Looking for Portuguese lessons here in Brazil? A Portuguese course?

Professora Inaê Sodré

INAÊ SODRÉ (that's pronounced "ee-nai-EY saw-DREH") gives private classes in Portuguese, and she will come to you, showing you the city and its cultural spots depending on the personal taste of the student.

Inaê's telephone number is 55 (Brazil) (71) Salvador 9192-6188, and her e-mail address is inaesodre@hotmail.com.

Inaê Sodré is a graduate of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) with a degree in Portuguese Literature and Linguistics. She is trained in the teaching of Portuguese as a second language and currently teaches Portuguese for Foreigners at Salvador's Alliance Francaise.

Depending on her students' needs, she works with grammar, conversation, and pronunciation by way of writing dealing with Bahian and Brazilian culture, literature, and poetry, along with the lyrics of great Brazilian musicians (Inaê is also sings and can be heard on a recording of fundamental importance in Bahia, DENGO, the work of her father, samba-de-roda master Raimundo Sodré).

SHEILA WAKSMAN, a carioca (native of Rio) living in Salvador and a fluent English-speaker, has a range of courses which are delineated on her website at www.basicalingua.com. Sheila teaches in Barra.

SONIA-PORTUGUESE is a website (run by Sonia, of course) for English-speakers, dedicated to teaching the Portuguese language.  Lots of good information and excellent tips for free, and Sonia's book and course on CD ROM are also available. The website is at www.sonia-portuguese.com.

* A few notes for those intending to learn Portuguese (I will, as a matter of necessity, approach this from an English-speaker's point-of-view):

I'll start with the English language r. It doesn't exist in Portuguese. And when it creeps (or blares) its way in it sounds terrible. It's what Brazilians imitate when they make fun of English-speakers (particularly Americans, who pronounce it in a more, well, a more pronounced manner).

In Brazilian Portuguese an r at the beginning of a word is pronounced like an English-language h. When talking about a cidade maravilhosa they say "Hio". Conversely, a Brazilian with a little knowledge of English tends to pronounce red as "head": "This pencil is head!" Pretty ridiculous, but that's how a lot of us sound to them too. And it gets worse...

The English-language r does happen to be approached in one region of the country -- the interior of São Paulo -- where the accent is perceived by the rest of the country the way a Manhattanite might perceive, say, Billy Bob Thornton's accent: It makes us sound like hicks who can't talk right.

Cana Brava Records in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

Brazilian music is deep, there's no question about that! And while musical depth is not unique to Brazil, Brazil's harnessing of depth and warmth to complex and sophisticated rhythms makes it a source of enormous richness to a people -- including many musicians -- who don't have such richness in a more material sense.

Pixinguinha

Cana Brava Records was founded as an outlet for the music of Bahia and Brazil's Nordeste (Northeast, an ethnographic entity unto its own, defined by hardship and spirited resilience), and as an outlet for hard-to-find music in Salvador (while making room for Brazil's consecrated artists, Cartola, Jobim, et al, and styles ranging from the sambas of Rio's morros - hills - to choro - "cry", a style which gave birth some of Brazil's most beautiful compositions and most extraordinary instrumentalists, per which, below, is the trailer to Finnish-born Salvador resident Mika Kaurismäki's 2005 choro documentary, Brasileirinho).

Hamlet said: "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." The dreams of the composers, singers, and instrumentalists beneath our arches pulse and soar through space and time, extending our shop beyond its walls to the plantations beyond the bay, to the backlands, to the terreiros de candomblé, to the hills ringing Guanabara, to the gafieiras (dancehalls) of 1930s Lapa, the Ipanema of the 1950s and 60s...

Our shop is small, but it encompasses a universe!

Where we're located in Pelourinho...

Our Own Short History of Brazilian Music

Notes on current Bahian music and how it got to be this way...

A new way to find and/or propagate great music. If you're a musician or music lover, join up! Join these guys! Fast, free, fabulous!