Samba: Brazil’s Heartbeat Is Alive and Well

Intricate rhythms crackle and boom from big speakers, infecting the auditorium with a syncopated itch that causes toes to tap, fingers to drum and heads to nod. Grupo Fundo de Quintal, a popular samba ensemble, is playing an evening concert in Rio the week after carnival, Brazil’s Mardi Gras.

As one song follows another, more and more of the audience yields to the music’s insistent tug. Many listeners cannot resist singing along. Finally, most end up dancing in the aisles when the band comes back for an encore.

Carnival is over, but the samba beat goes on.

Samba is the musical fuel for Rio’s famous pre-Lent extravaganza. Colorfully costumed “samba schools” parade to the music of sambas de enredo , custom-composed for carnival. The rapid beat and grandiloquent lyrics pulse through the city during four days of revelry.

When carnival ends, the echo of the samba de enredo fades. But other kinds of samba endure: the samba cancao , slow and romantic, for listening; the samba pagode , robust and earthy, for dancing and partying.

Like ferns on the floor of a tropical forest, the samba flourishes in the shadows. Most Brazilian radio stations virtually ignore it, favoring rock ‘n’ roll, romantic ballads, disco, funk and other popular music, both Brazilian and foreign.

On television, the samba rarely gets prime time. Most of Brazil’s most popular singers--Roberto Carlos, Simone, Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento--stick mainly with the pop tunes of what is called MPB, musica popular brasileira .

Nevertheless, the samba’s popular roots and its enticing rhythms keep it alive and well. More than any other music, the samba is the heartbeat of Brazil. The rhythm emerged from the drums of black slaves and mingled with strains of popular urban music in the early 20th Century. From the 1920s through the 1950s, the samba enjoyed a Golden Age, gaining enormous popularity on Brazilian radio and stage and in the streets.

It is Brazil’s party music, the sound of dancing till dawn and singing along. And it is Brazil’s soul music, a reflection of the common people who have cherished and cultivated it through the years. No other music is so widely enmeshed in popular Brazilian culture and so firmly entrenched in the national identity.

In the 1980s, the samba has undergone a renewal with the growth of pagodes , informal neighborhood parties where beer and samba music flow. Pagodes are especially popular among poor and black Brazilians, and the music is mainly for them.

“Intimately, My Black,” a samba pagode sung by Grupo Fundo do Quintal, begins:

Don’t listen to her,

That woman is a sharpie.

In front of others

She calls me ‘that Negro’

And intimately, “my black.”

Pagodes have produced a flock of new samba stars, including Zeca Pagodinho, Jovelina Perola Negra and Grupo Fundo de Quintal. Their LP records sell hundreds of thousands of copies. In Brazil, 100,000 copies is a golden record.

The pagode movement peaked in 1987, and some observers say it is fading. But samba pagode records continue to sell, and in poor neighborhoods of Rio, numerous pagodes each week still draw large crowds. Fundo de Quintal’s leader, known as Bira, told an interviewer that a Wednesday night pagode where he plays in a working-class district of northern Rio overflows with people every week.

“ Pagode is authentic samba,” Bira said. “ Pagode goes on.”

Radio Tropical, an FM station in Rio, began playing mostly samba music in late 1985. Within a year, its audience ratings jumped from eighth place to second place among about 20 FM stations, and it has remained in the top five since then.

Some other Rio stations occasionally play sambas if they are sung by such famous Brazilian vocalists as Chico Buarque, Gal Costa, Beth Carvalho or Martinho da Vila. But only Radio Tropical and Radio Carioca, a small AM station, devote most of their air time to a samba format that includes samba pagode .

Armando Campos, manager of Radio Tropical, said other stations discriminate against samba music because major advertisers reject it.

“They think that people who listen to samba are poor people without purchasing power, which is not true,” Campos said.

Rio’s top 50 LP records in mid-February included eight albums of predominantly samba music. Marina Ghiaroni, a spokesman for the BMG Ariola record company, said Zeca Pagodinho’s latest samba pagode album sold 85,000 copies in its first 14 weeks. An album by Alcione, a throaty female singer who does both sambas and love songs, sold 200,000 in its first 14 weeks.

Those are remarkably good numbers on the Brazilian record market, but no match for non-samba records by American luminaries such as Tracy Chapman or Brazilian superstars like Roberto Carlos. Ghiaroni suggested that samba sales would be better with a little more help from major radio stations.

“The big-audience radios are not playing samba,” Ghiaroni said. “It is a serious problem, because you know that radio is the big seller of records.”

With practically no radio promotion, a new LP by veteran samba singer Paulinho da Viola recently sold 14,000 in its first four weeks. The album’s title is “Eu Canto Samba,” “I Sing Samba.”

Paulinho da Viola’s sambas are quieter and smoother than the exuberant music of Grupo Fundo de Quintal, but the essence is the same: 2/4 time, intricate patterns of percussion rhythm and a seductive syncopation that demands body motion to fill in the missing beat. On a recent afternoon in the fashionable beach neighborhood of Leblon, gray-haired Paulinho was rehearsing with his samba band in an empty nightclub. Deftly strumming his cavaquinho , a kind of ukulele, he sang:

For a long time I’ve heard

All that empty chatter

Saying the samba died.

Only if it was at daybreak!

Samba is joy.

The samba endures, Paulinho said in an interview, “because the people continue to do the samba. It is something in the Brazilian spirit. I have the impression that it will never die. . . . There are moments when it isn’t played and it isn’t heard. And suddenly, it rises up again.”

One of the earliest mentions of samba in Brazilian literature appears in the notes of Freire Alemao, a botanist, on an 1859 visit to the northeastern province of Ceara. Describing a dance in the slave quarters of a large estate, Alemao said more than 100 black men and women formed a circle in the yard.

“The instruments were drums (and) pieces of pottery with which they tormented the ears, and even more so with chants, cries and cheers,” he wrote. “The (white) ladies went up close to the circle, as well as the men, and watched with pleasure the lubricious dances of the blacks, and the grotesque jumping of the Negroes.”

The origin of the word samba is obscure, but according to one version, it comes from semba , which meant “navel” in an Angolan dialect. In early samba circles, slaves took turns dancing, signaling with a movement of the belly for the next dancer to come in, according to that version.

The samba was urbanized in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. Black families who came to Rio from the northeastern province of Bahia held samba parties in the back patios of their houses. The urban samba was influenced by the lundu and the mexixe , more sedate popular music that had mixed Portuguese and African origins.

The white upper class of Rio regarded the samba as vulgar and lascivious. The police broke up samba parties, detaining participants and seizing instruments. To avoid trouble, samba music was sometimes thinly disguised as a polka or lundu .

In a 1979 book, social scientist Muniz Sodre wrote that black Brazilians cultivated and promoted the samba as a means of asserting their cultural identity.

“The samba then was not, therefore, merely a musical expression by a marginalized social group; it was an effective instrument in the struggle for affirmation of black ethnicity in the urban Brazilian framework,” Sodre wrote.

As interest in the samba grew, the music gained respectability. In 1916, the first samba record was made. It was “Pelo Telefone,” or “Over the Telephone,” a song with satirical lyrics about police tolerance of illegal gambling. Sung by a popular musician known as Donga, it was a huge success. In the next carnival, then a nascent festival with little of the extravagant color and mass excitement that it would later generate, “Pelo Telefone” was the song of the season.

And from then on, the samba was the music of the carnival. Samba schools, costumed groups formed to dance and sing in carnival parades, developed into major institutions. They began competing by making elaborate floats that illustrated the enredos , or story lines, of specially written sambas.

By the late 1920s, the samba cancao , or samba song, had become Brazil’s favorite year-round radio music. The lyrics, employing popular slang and often ironic or humorous, usually portrayed life and love from the point of view of the urban lower classes. A hero of the samba was the malandro , a Bohemian figure who lived more by his wits than by work.

In the late 1950s, university-educated musicians blended samba rhythms with jazz, and the resulting bossa nova became popular around the world.

The latest innovations in the samba have come from the pagode , where songs are often improvised and new combinations of instruments are used. Many pagode groups have followed the lead of Grupo Fundo do Quintal by adding the banjo to the traditional guitar, cavaquinho , drums and other percussion instruments.

Purists say the pagode movement has regenerated authentic samba music at its original level, the popular gathering and the informal party. That is only natural because it is there, as singer Alcione said in an interview, that the syncopated beat is most addictive.

“The opium of the Brazilian people is samba,” she said.