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Samba music in brazil12/2/2023 With musical frontiers opened and fashions flashing by, samba fusions are virtually limitless. Other subgenres include samba do morro, played on percussion instruments only samba do breque (break), which pauses abruptly to allow a wry interjection, then starts again and the perennial ballad version, samba-canção, the 'Frank Sinatra of sambas', which is popular in clubs and bars. The best-known samba form is samba enredo (story-samba), sung by an amplified voice accompanied by a guitar and cavaquinho, to a responding chorus of the thousands of voices in the desfile (procession) who 'converse' with the drummers sashaying in their finery. The oldest school, Mangueira, is acknowledged in scores of songs, and the 70-something singer, Elza Soares, whose voice is as huskily sexy as in her 1960s heyday, today mixes sambas and Mangueira tributes with hip-hop fusions. The first samba school, composed of scores of percussionists whose rhythms drive the revelers, was founded in the 1930s, and today every Brazilian town and city has its own. Samba’s official history began in 1916, with Pelo Telefone, the first samba on record and an instant hit at Carnival that year. In today’s gafieiras (dance halls), couples still mix maxixes, habaneras, choros, and sambas with extravagant virtuosity. Fred Astaire’s version in the 1933 Hollywood film Flying Down to Rio coincided with the maxixe’s decline in Rio in the face of samba’s increasing popularity in Carnival parades. But playing for themselves, they injected their own sensuous thrusts and swings, and from those sessions emerged the maxixe, an extravagant, rhythmic form of tango. In the second half of the 19th century, slave bands performing on country plantations and in city ballrooms were obliged to copy fashionable European dance rhythms like the polka and the mazurka. The Afro-Brazilian rhythms made their first, tentative foray into the salons of white urban society in the late 18th century in the form of the lundu, a toned-down couple dance accompanied by viola and sitar. Variations of umbigadas – samba de roda, jongo, tambor-de-crioulo, batuque, and caxambu – survive virtually unchanged today in Afro-Brazilian communities all over Brazil. It was danced originally in a circle, with a soloist in the middle who clapped and danced, then stopped in front of one person, and, with a cheeky umbigada, swapped places. The word samba derives from the Angolan semba, a synonym for umbigada – literally, a navel thrust. The ageless Jorge Ben Jor, Brazil’s James Brown, is seeing his back catalogue of funk-samba cannibalized by a new generation of producers around the world. Leading lights of the 1970s Tropicalia movement continue to draw young audiences: Gilberto Gil and his collaborator Caetano Veloso still woo with sensual, laid-back singing and eclectic music Veloso also joins his son Moreno’s neo-Tropicalia experimentations and Tropicalia divas Gal Costa and Maria Bethania continue to cast their spells. In nightclubs, jazz takes turns with the melancholy of Portuguese fado, Brazilian torch singers, and the legends of MPB (Musica Popular Brasileira) such as Roberto Carlos and Elis Regina, and younger favorites, such as Marisa Monte and Céu, perform poetic anthems. Or you could wait in line to experience ear-bleeding rock bands or hear exhilarating drum-and-bass, hip-hop and electronica DJs perform in small city clubs and bars, or hangar-like favela venues from where baile-funk spins through cyberspace to Europe’s hippest nightspots. Will you tap cutlery to a samba pagode in a tile-floored bar, or dance hip-to-hip to the simple rhythm of the forró? Will you try the tango-like ballroom virtuosity of the gafieira, or converse over the twinkling swirls of choro played on mandolins and violas? Alternatively, you could smooch to sensuous bossa novas in the bars of Ipanema once haunted by 'The Girl'. On a Saturday night in any sizeable Brazilian town a vast musical choice presents itself.
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