Bahia-Online's Euterpedia Euterpe is the Greek muse of music, hence Euterpedia. The raison d'être of this site is --  beyond offering a full-throated alternative to MySpace Music -- to provide trails of musical recommendations, making possible the unearthing of new (to the discoverer anyway) musical diamonds. And if there are dogs in here too, well, we love dogs. The "trail" function will be inaugurated in July, 2010. This is the English-language version. The Portuguese-language version may be accessed by clicking on "Euterpédia Brasil" in the Euterpedia's upper right-hand corner (entries may be made in any language in either Euterpedia). The sites proper -- not framed within Bahia-Online as below, are at, respectively, http://www.euterpedia.com & http://www.euterpediabrasil.com.

Salvador Brazil From the Ground Up

 

Quincas lives again! Quincas Berro d'Água (based on a story by Jorge Amado) recounts Quincas's last night of partying in Pelourinho, this night being something of an extension of his dissolute life in that Quincas has died and is being carried around by his friends, gentlemen-of-no-standing detested by Quincas's uptight wife and daughter.

Filmed on location in and around Pelourinho.

Update: I saw the movie...I mean Jesus, who financed this crap?

Vânia Strikes a Pose

Vânia Nazaré in Cachoeira for the Festa da Boa Morte. She usually works out of her atelier in the neighborhood of Mouraria, making dresses (including the one she's wearing above), shirts, and batik wall hangings (per above).

Rua do Bângala, 160, (71) 3321-6318, 9609-1932, 8817-4361, vanianazare@gmail.com.

The Bahian Stimulus Plan

It's tough, this fiscal crisis...it's certainly affected me. From what I hear it's cast quite a pall over much of the United States and Europe. But as bad as things can get -- and I don't wish to underestimate, understate or disparage the suffering of those who are out of work, and/or those who've lost goodly portions of retirement money which had been set aside for years -- it's not nearly as bad as losing everything!

And what did (one particular group of) people who'd truly lost everything turn to? Quite naturally, they turned to something they could produce with nothing...and that was music. What an irony that a music which is arguably the world's most joyous and celebratory was produced by people with nothing at all to celebrate beyond the mere fact that they were alive.

This product of the human spirit under pressure (diamonds are created under pressure) has bequeathed a great and variegated florescence to Brazil, and to the world, and with the burgeoning interest in Brazilian music the products of this florescence are being explored and divulged; Brazilian music can be heard live from Tokyo to New York City to Sydney...with the cruel exception of the very foundation of Brazil's national music, its root, its Holy Grail...samba chula.

So in the wake of the rape of the world's financial markets by selfish and unscrupulous men, we offer The Bahian Stimulus Plan, the inheritance of others centuries ago who lost far more than what was lost this time around and who left in the heads, hands, hearts (and hips) of their descendents their own efficacious and true-blue means of lifting the spirit skyward like a Titan rocket...

Samba Chula, the (highly rhythmic) "Delta Blues" of Brazil

The critics* say: "Visceral vitality"..."Up from slavery"..."A moveable feast"..."An artistic triumph of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming adversity"...

* Pardal and his alter-egos.

The Saturno Brothers...the real-deal Blues Brothers of Brazil
 

More here...

Nossa Senhora da Purificação in Santo Amaro, in the Recôncavo, birthplace of Brazil's national music.

 

The Well of Encarnação

It was in this bar in the town of Maragogipe, on the Baía do Iguape in the Bahian Recôncavo, that I met Gabriel dos Santos and first heard of the Well of Encarnação and of the sounds which could occasionally be heard rising from within, echoing up from the profound darkness...drumming, sobs...and of the people from another time who had crawled out of the well and who could -- and can -- still be found wandering the countryside in rags, lost, doing what they can to survive, trying at times to communicate in ancestral tongues.

Encarnação (Incarnation) sits on the coast of the Baía de Todos os Santos (Bay of All Saints), just to the east of the Serra das Covoadas (Hills of the Graves), themselves just north of the village of Misericórdia (Pity).

Suspicion, if that's what it could be called, first fell upon the Terreiro dos Egunguns in Encarnação (a terreiro, in this sense, is a center of the Afro-Brazilian religion of candomblé; an engungun is an ancestral spirit), and maybe there is something to this suspicion...I don't know. Whatever the case, "engungun" is the term which came to be and continues to be used to denote these people.

Gabriel explained that the engungun (in the newer sense, of course) were at first presumed to be itinerant beggars touched by madness...they seemed to avoid the paved, more well-travelled byways, preferring the estradas de barro, unfinished backroads. They were often enough seen traversing open fields, and still can be, preferring to travel by night, always alone. They are difficult to spot by car, shying away, hiding themselves, dropping into underbrush or diving beneath the sugarcane so ubiquitous to the region. Actually speaking to one is even more difficult, although Gabriel assured me that he had finally managed to do so. Drawn in, I asked him how. He said he was there when the man crawled out of the well.

Is Gabriel a trustworthy source of information? A man I met by chance in a small bar in a backwater town, literally, in the most myth-prone region of Brazil? We judge truth by its coherence to two contextual frameworks, self-consistency and consistency to outside, discernable facts. As Gabriel's story developed I would see that it pristinely met the former standard...I would later discover the difficulty of establishing the latter.

The Bahian Recôncavo is in one respect like nowhere else in the world (with one exception, which will be addressed momentarily*): It is a place where the population of African slaves, descendents of slaves, and people of mixed race, came to outnumber by far the Europeans and descendents of Europeans (or those perceived to be "white" in spite an African or Africa-descended ancestor) in the region. It is a land essentially (if unwillingly) refounded (in respect of the original, indigenous population) by slaves.

*The Gullah-Geechee of the Sea Islands and eastern coast of the southern United States also outnumbered and outnumber their European-born/descended counterparts. And as historical fate would have it, the Gullah-Geechee were not taken directly to the United States from Africa, but were drawn rather from slaves first carried to Bahia.

Further it was a land rife with villages apart from the sugarcane plantations and commercial trading centers which had grown up in the region, villages positioned on the far sides of hills thick with brush, across swamps, in places accessible only with difficulty, and this by choice. These were quilombos, villages founded by the region's many runaway slaves, places with names like Mocambo and Burudanga, Calabar and Cafundó, Canabrava and Orobá...

These communities, many of them anyway, are still there, living vestiges of the past little transformed by time...people working the earth, fishing, living a certain timeless existence lifted above the humdrum by that great mover of imagination so far debased and debauched in much of Western society, the drama inherent in stories and histories, told and sung. Nowadays the apellation given to such villages is remanescentes de quilombos -- remains of quilombos -- in that implicit in the Brazilian version of the term (quilombo, that is) is hiding (

Maragojipe is an alternative spelling

Samba at its Source

This is a film still from (my amigo Jorge Pacoa's) documentary Samba de Roda na Palma da Mão (Samba de Roda in the Palm of the Hand). It's a beautiful image, and what it represents to me is true samba at its source...that's a field of sugarcane in the background. I don't know who the sambador is; I just called Jorge and he doesn't know either. But he'll find out and I'll honor the gentlemen in the small way that I can by associating his name with his image.

It's unfortunate that samba in the eyes of so many is hot babes in feathers. Not that we at Bahia-Online are at all averse to hot babes in feathers, but this narrow of view of what samba is is a disservice to a broad, profoundly deep musical art.

The image above links to the agenda for the Casa do Samba, in Santo Amaro. The art, which so ably captures the quintessence of the Recôncavo and sertão, is by Walter Mariano (who also designed our Cana Brava logo).

The Euterpedia
The Neville Brothers

I Love Brazil on Saturday!

I get on the bus to go home after a long day in Cana Brava Records (on Saturday, June 5th, 2010), and what do I hear? Right! Pífanos (fifes)! I'd met Daniel Magalhães, the gentleman pífano player, several days earlier in the shop. Beyond being a player he's also an ethnomusicologist doing postgraduate studies at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. There was also triángulo (not like what you played in kindergarten music class) and chocalho. The pandeiro player preferred to gaze out the window.

The music was wonderful, as were/are the people. Their group is called Cataventoré. Their site doesn't seem to be working (appears that somebody paused while setting it up), so I'll link to more information here.

If I may be facile, bandas de pífanos are truly representative of Brazilian miscegenation. In Brazil's Northeast there was a strong tradition of pífano playing among the native tribes. Adaptations were made for music of European derivation, and African percussion was added. These influences are also reflected in the faces of the people of the great sertão who play this music (per Isabel Marques da Silva, more popularly known as Zabé da Loca), and those who don't as well (my wife for instance, who is from the sertão and is a mixture of African, Indian and European bloodlines).

Zabé da Loca, now 85 years old, lived for 25 of those years in a cave in Paraiba (hence the name "Loca", or grotto). She was discovered and recorded by wind instrumentalist Carlos Malta, who himself played for years with the wizard Hermeto Pascoal.

Listen to Zabé da Loca (the piece opens with rabeca, Brazilian fiddle)

No, her mother is the popular cabocla.

And there's samba here too, Friday nights, in Itapoan.

Dona Cabocla

High-style...or wide-style rather, in the marketplace in Miguel Calmon, Bahia (formerly called Cana Brava, Bahia), on Friday, April 30th, 2010.

Seen this guy wandering around Salvador lately? His name is Simon Brook, scion of British theatrical royalty (son of Peter Brook, who directed both Lawrence Olivier and John Gielgud in Shakespeare, and the film Lord of the Flies, among many, many other illustrious productions). Simon has directed and written numerous films, including two documentaries about and filmed in the Amazon, his latest project to be shown on European television being Generation 68, on that turbulent era and including interviews with Dennis Hopper, Vaclav Havel, Mary Quant, Milos Forman and others.

What could this guy be up to here...hmm...

Dona Nicinha (second from right) and her samba-de-roda group at the Casa do Samba in Santo Amaro, Bahia

Primeiro (a nickname meaning "First"), to the right with the microphone, puxa (pulls, or sings for) the group.

Sister Samba

Headquarters of the Irmandade da Boa Morte (Sisterhood of the Good Death) in Cachoeira, Bahia

Capela d'Ajuda in Cachoeira, Bahia

Os Tincoãs, active in the '60s and '70s, sing Capela d'Ajuda, inspired of course, in the same.

Hot Buttered Soul, Straight Outta Cachoeira!

Tincoã in Flight

Os Tincoãs, with their hauntingly beautiful vocals, were named for a suitably beautiful bird common to their area (the tincoã) reputed to have the power to warn humans of impending danger...the group comprising three vocalists hailing from Cachoeira, Bahia.  1960 was their first year of existence, but they really found their footing three years later when Erivaldo left the ensemble and Mateus Aleliua -- bringing with him an ethos founded principally in Bahia's houses of candomblé -- joined Heraldo and Dadinho.

Os Tincoãs                                          

Heraldo and Dadinho have since passed away, but Mateus (to the right, above) is still active, having co-written another candomblé-based song which was the hit of Carnival several years ago (Maimbê Dandá).  Unfortunately none of Os Tincoãs' records are available anymore.

Mateus Aleluia nowadays...

Mateus performing songs from his new release Cinco Sentidos (Five Senses), on April 15th, 2010

That's the capela at the top of the hill...the Irmandade da Boa Morte is immediately to the left.

A public square in Cachoeira...the monument sits on the site where the town's pelourinho -- pillory -- was once located.

The slaves' cemetery

The bridge over the Paraguaçu river, linking Cachoeira with São Felix

The able hands of Mário Santana, playing the barravento of São Braz, Bahia

 

O grande João do Boi of Samba Chula de São Braz! Here in Cana Brava Records on the night of February 7th, 2010!

Wednesday, February 3rd, we were honored to have Mateus Aleluia, of Os Tincoãs, here in Cana Brava! Os (The) Tincoãs worked with music based in candomblé, in the style of black American spirituals. Absolutely wonderful music!

Bule Bule was here in the shop yesterday (January 18th, 2010) and I got this photo, which I simply had to put up here. Bule Bule is nothing less than The Griot of Bahia, a repository of folk music and poetry, with an almost scary ability to create and sing endless, brilliant, piercingly funny rhyming stanzas on the spot.

Listen to Bule-Bule

More Bule Bule here!

Luiz Gonzaga
December 13th, 1912 - August 2nd, 1989

Rei do Baião		Rei do Ritmo
Luiz Gonzaga and Jackson do Pandeiro, the two Reis -- Kings -- of the Brazilian Northeast

It's interesting that of the two great divisions of the music of Brazil's Northeast -- samba and forró (forró being something of an umbrella term including several different rhythms) -- samba is generally considered as having links to candomblé, while forró seems to be something else entirely...

But here's an epiphany from one of the masters (and hey! If it caught Jackson do Pandeiro by surprise, don't feel bad if it catches you by surprise too!).

"Um dia, em Pernambuco, fui ver um xangô e não é que quando cheguei e fui ouvindo o batuque, eu disse, cá comigo: 'Oxente! Isso é um coco!' E era. Mas um coco com agogô, com atabaques...um coco africano. O coco é mesmo que ser brasileiro: um tem um nariz chato, o outro é preto, outro é branco, mas todos são brasileiros. Assim é o coco."

"One day, in Pernambuco, I went to see a xangô (candomblé) and wouldn't you know it but when I got there and heard the drumming, I said to myself: 'Gee! That's a coco (one of the rhythms utilized in forró)!' And it was. But a coco with agogô (rhythm bell), with atabaques (conga-like drums)...an African coco. Coco is like being Brazilian, one has a wide nose, the other is black, the other white, but they're all Brazilians. That's what coco is like."

Listen to Luiz Gonzaga!

Euterpedia Members Rolph "DJ Raw" Webster The Neville Brothers The Ponderosa Stomp Foundation Jurandir Santana Jay Mazza Gabi Guedes Samba Chula de São Braz

Comedy & the Crib

Comedian Kenny Kramer (left) was Seinfeld producer Larry David's across-the-hall neighbor and inspiration for Cosmo Kramer in the series, while keyboardist Howie (aka "Jaui") Schneider wrote Ray Barretto's hit La Cuna. Great guys and fellow Brazilian music fans!

"La Cuna" is "The Crib", by the way.

The Roots of Samba in Candomblé

This is an interesting clip demonstrating the connection between candomblé and samba. On the left is Luizinho do Gêge, ogã and principal drummer (runtó) in the house of Bogum (of the Gêge nation), and on the right is Gabi Guedes, ogã and principal (alagbê) drummer in the house of Gantois (of the Ketu nation; I love Gabi's little dance at the beginning!). They are playing a rhythm variously called "cabula", "kabila", and "samba de caboclo", while a traditional samba-de-roda is sung (specifically in order to show the connection).

This is from the Perc Pan 2008 Rumpilezz workshop (Rumpilezz is a marvelous percussion/wind-instruments ensemble based in candomblé and jazz; these guys are part of the group), on Friday, September 19th.

Masters of Afro-Bahian Percussion: Ogãs Gabi Guedes & Luizinho do Gêge

Out of the Ashes

 

Nicolas Farruggia ("Nico" to us) was one of the owners of an absolutely wonderful venue here in Salvador, a place which unfortunately closed its doors last year....Casa da Bossa. Nicolas was able to take solace though in the fact that he then found the time to rededicate himself to his own music and compositions (he's a classically trained guitar player), and here he is, wishing us a Feliz Primavera (Happy Spring; it of course being spring here in the southern hemisphere!).

This site -- Bahia-Online -- goes hand-in-hand with a record shop based here Salvador, Bahia, a place by the name of Cana Brava. This real Cana Brava is based on an imaginary record shop in the screenplay below...and that record shop is in turn based on a real record shop on 125th Street in Harlem, New York City...a place by the name of the Record Shack (sometimes the Harlem Record Shack, sometimes Sikhulu's Record Shack; located across the street and down from the Apollo Theater). Owner Sikhulu Shange (below) is a South African emigrant to the United States, and the screenplay's character "Joe" was in part based on him. Sikulu is fighting eviction...trying to survive the gentrification of Harlem.

One seminal Harlem record shop that didn't survive and just recently closed down forever was Bobby's Happy Shop (Bobby Robinson's place, located down the street and around the corner from Sikhulu's). Doesn't sound like a cool place? Well think again! (Hint: Bobby produced Elmore James, King Curtis, the Shirelles, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and Grandmaster Flash, among many others.) Venerable Bobby was a client of mine back when I was in the music business in New York.

And the screenplay?

Capoeiristas? Nah... But the guy on the left knew something about dancing, and according to him the guy on the right was really the... (picking up from page 18)

SONNY An' what about the greatest? RHAKEEM Muhammad Ali? SONNY JOE LOUIS!!! The Brown Bomber! Louis was his middle name. His real name was Joe Louis Barrow. Now what was the problem with "Barrow"? And come to think of it...what was the problem with "Black"? The Black Bomber! RHAKEEM Yeah! That's some pretty heavy sounding shit! SONNY Too heavy for them times. But look...the way I see it...there's a difference here. It's one thing if you don't like the way a name sounds, or what it stands for. But it's somethin' else if you don't like a name because what it stands for...is you. THIS DANCE CAN KILL (complete script as pdf file)

pardal@bahia-online.net