Forro at the Estudantina

I went with my friend Denise & her boyfriend last night to the Gafieira Estudantina for a night of forro. Last year I used to see the Estudantina's hand-painted dance banner hanging from its balcony, whenever I was walking around the Praca Tiradentes, but I'd never been up there. The Estudantina, turns out, is one of Rio's old ballroom dance halls (gafieiras). It was founded in 1932. Denise told me her mother used to come there to dance in the 1940's, and she'd come there to dance in the 1980's, and now here we were in 2006. They have a mixed selection now of forro, samba, and all kinds of modern stuff, but always forro on Thursdays.

Like most of the grand old dance halls, like Asa Branca and Democraticos, the Estudantina is up on the second floor, a big room paneled in dark wood, with an skinny balcony (1 foot deep) stretching across the entire front of the building. I could lean out the balcony and see clear across the long plaza, and make out the fuzzy shapes of people dancing to pagode way across the plaza in the Centro Cultural Carioca. Denise told me the Praca Tiradentes used to be a grand, classy place back in Rio's elegant era of the 1940's.

I'd seen a little forro before but this was the first time I had seen the "pe-de-serra" style of forro - "foothills of the interior" style, i.e., country style, the really authentic style. Zabumba, accordion, triangle, and a singer (the triangle player). Playing mostly baiao rhythm but with an occasional slower xaxado, and sometimes a faster thing that I was told later was arrasta-pe. It reminded me amazingly of cajun music - the endless flow of the triangle, the rich sound of the accordion, the voice wailing over the top of it all. The only thing missing in the was the Cajun folk fiddle. And the dancing crowd of men and women pressed tight seemed to be doing zydeco dance! I swear, it was so similar to zydeco - both in basic form, in the hip movement, and in the pressed-tight body style. (Sooooo tight it reminded me of the Simpsons episode where they go to Brazil and see all the Brazilian dances, "the Samba, the Lambada, and a new one that's very popular, the Penetrada".) A little smoother, but the similarity was eerie.

And then a player came up on stage with an odd-looking unvarnished fiddle. My first sight of a rabeca, the Brazilian fiddle. He was holding it folk-style, low on the chest; and using an old 19th-century style handmade wooden bow. (Back when bows were actually shaped like bows. And none of that tension-control stuff - who needs a fancy tension control knob when you can just press on the horsehair with your thumb?). He started playing the most incredibly beautiful solo and my jaw almost hit the floor. SO gorgeous. Then the band entered. Wow. First of all, wow, it was so beautiful; and second of all, wow, I could have been in Louisiana, it was now SO like Cajun fiddle music - the style of the melody, the way it flowed, the marriage with triangle and accordion. The only difference was just that syncopated kick of the zabumba.

It was truly beautiful. I have a weak spot anyway for folk fiddle. (I used to play bowed bass in a Hungarian gypsy fiddle band, and also have a substantial weakness for Cajun, Cape Breton and Irish fiddle traditions.) I stood there watching the rabeca player, and thought "I have been such a damn samba snob, to have ignored forro all this time." Then I danced for a long time; with my friends (Denise turns out to be an excellent lead!), and also with a couple random guys who asked, who also turned out to be excellent leads.

The similarity of the music to Cajun, and of the dance to zydeco, still puzzles me. Doing a little google'ing of "cajun and forro" today, I found that lots of accordion players have picked up on the odd similarity. And I found a note by an experienced zydeco dancer who had seen the recent documentary "Saudade do Futuro" and was amazed to see Brazilians dancing what appeared to be pure zydeco. Later I remembered that forro is thought to have been influenced from dances held "for all" (= "forro") by US Air Force stationed in Natal (just north of Recife) during World War II. Who knows, maybe there's some connection? I don't know. But anyway, it was beautiful, and it was a door into an entirely different part of Brazil.

If you go:
Gafieira Estudantina, Praca Tiradentes 79
www.estudantinamusical.com.br
The website has a flyer that you can print out and bring, for a discount.
Thursday is forro night. Expect the first band to not even start till 12:30am.