Candomblé

Vestments of Obaluaé

Acessórios de candomblé are easy to find in Salvador.  There are two shops (each with an annex) dealing in such located on the ground floor of Edifício Themis (the Themis Building), on the southern side of Praça da Sé in Salvador's Centro Histórico.  These shops are an interesting walk-through even if you're not planning to buy, something in the vein of mercantile museums.

Colares in A Conta

When the season rolls around, you can get your Carnival colares (necklaces) there too, at good prices.

Fiction

The interior of Bahia is home to the great sertão, a dry, hard-scrabble area where people work laboriously to eke out a living from an uncompromising and unyielding land.  But as hard-scrabble as the sertão is, and as far away as it may seem, it isn't nearly so far away as the real-estate pictured in the photograph above (Mars).

Author, Scientist

What does Mars have to do with Bahia?  Thomas E. Thorpe is what.  Mr. Thorpe, in addition to being an astronomer, is the Project Manager for the Mars Surveyor Project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and is therefore responsible for flight operations for the Mars Surveyor series of missions).  And as it this weren't enough, Tom Thorpe is also a writer of fiction.  The latest addition to his work is a tautly plotted and well-researched historical mystery entitled Night Wind to Bahia, set around the time of the Malê Revolt of 1835.

Mr. Thorpe has a website where this book and others in his Darmon series may be purchased.

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!