The real Olodum

Flew up to Salvador last Tuesday for a week and a half fix of northeast stuff. I've had bad internet access here so I haven't done much writing, but short version.... I'm so happy with Salvador. It sucked me right back in. I feel like I've been here for months. It's already sort of hard to remember Rio!

After Rio, Salvador seems very tiny and charming. Everything is very compact; everything I need is either in the touristy beach district of Barra, where there is a tiny, cute beach right outside my charming pousada (Village Novo - highly recommended) or in the touristy cobblestoned downtown district of Pelourinho, which has all the bands, shows, drum classes, and dance classes that I could want all clustered in the same little eight-block radius. After the vast miles-long sweep of the Rio beaches and the hours-long odysseys to escolas and classes there, everything here seems very easy. The cabs are much cheaper, the people friendlier (often too friendly - I am currently avoiding 3 different guys who won't leave me alone - but that's another story), and the Portuguese seems clearer. And it's safe here, much safer than Rio.

I've had a lot of funny coincidences. My first minute here, when I walked out of the airport and was bumbling around looking for the bus, I walked up to a random clump of people to ask them where the bus was. Who should it be but Guinga, the brilliant guitarist/composer from California Brasil Camp, and his wife, plus the ten-string guitar player and full band that he was on tour with. Guinga and his wife both recognized me and invited me to the show they were playing the next night at the Teatro Castro Alves. My friend Pat and I went. It was an extraordinary show, primarily featuring the ten-string-guitar player, who uses the traditional guitar styles of the northeast countryside (beautiful resonant open tunings) with original jazz-y compositions. Backed up with brilliant percussion, sax and bass, plus Guinga. It was amazing.

And then I found out that not one but THREE dancer friends of mine from Seattle are all living here studying dance - Aileen, Ella and Gabrielle. We all had Thanksgiving together at Ella's place by the beach. Ella used her mom's fantastic recipe to roast a big fat delicious chicken (we couldn't find a turkey), plus we had a huge delicious vat of mashed potatoes, some delicious Brazilian appetizer thingys that Aileen knows how to make... it was so delicious. And it was really nice to have friends to spend Thanksgiving with. For the last couple years I've completely ignored every family-related holiday - Thanksgiving, Christmas and all birthdays (including my own) passed by like they didn't exist - and I'd forgotten what a sweet holiday Thanksgiving is, really, probably America's best. The idea behind it is so pure: Be thankful.

Since then I've been hanging out on beautiful beaches in the mornings - beautiful! beautiful! beautiful beaches! (ho hum, another invite from another retired diamond dealer to another private beach cabana in yet another tropical paradise...) And taking drum and orixa dance classes in the afternoons, and seeing shows at nights. Mostly I've been in Pelourinho, where on most nights the street band Swing do Pelo and the girls' group Dida prowl the streets with a powerful bank of drummers. Pelourinho's also got six big stages - three permanent indoor stages, and three more set up on the streets every Tuesday. You can catch "rehearsals" of the Carnaval blocos there most nights. Olodum plays every Tuesday; Dida and Motumba every Friday; and Ile Aiye plays on Saturdays out in their home neighborhood of Liberdade.

Well, they're called rehearsals but they're really stage shows, with only a few drummers, some singer prancing around, some backup band, and a really terrible sound system. It's fun and all, but it is always completely impossible to hear the drummers clearly (especially the hand drums) and it is PACKED, cheio, lotato, WAY too crowded to move or dance or see anything or even breathe. I always go there perfectly happy, pay thirty reais (15 dollars) to stand there smushed tight in a sweaty crowd thinking "This is great! I'm so happy!" with stiletto-heeled girls stepping on my feet, drunk guys spilling beer on me, people elbowing and shoving for their little inch of space. I am always truly happy but after a whole half hour suddenly I'm think "That was great! Now I'm bored!" Five minutes later I'm out in the streets dancing to real drumming at last (for free), thinking "This is great! I'm so happy!" I guess the stage shows are just not my thing.

I'm taking timbal classes with Macambira, an enthusiastic teacher who runs two group percussion classes every day and who can easily take you through EVERY intro, break, groove, and clave variant of every afro bloco in Bahia. Pat and I ended up playing timbal alongside a third student who began to alarm us with the ease with which he was picking everything up. At the end of class, Macambira challenge the third guy to a speed duel, and we all took off into one of those truly lightspeed timbal sambas. I was able to keep up (!), though it was easily the fastest I've ever played timbal in my life, and I was only just hanging on. Turned out at the end that the guy wasn't a student - he's a pro drummer friend of Macambira's who has been playing in Olodum since he was a little kid. We got chatting with them both and they got into a fascinating discussion/demo about how all samba-reggae and afro-samba groups used to play the same groove, with the same clave and same third-surdo part, and how they'd diverged over time to the point where now they are all immediately recognizably by their distinctive parts. The Olodum guy played some of the "antigo" old-style claves for us. It was so interesting. Then he told me that Olodum runs a second rehearsal, a real rehearsal, every Sunday at 5pm. So we went.

It was perfect. No band, no crappy sound system. A full bank of 35 drummers or so. Tons of room to dance, lots of people leading great dance moves, and plus it's only 10 reais! THAT'S what I've been looking for! There was a singer, which gave it all that crucial melodic underpinning that I love - but just a singer, nothing else.

They spent two hours rehearsing and then broke into a full-on party. For the rehearsal part they seemed to be in the middle of judging a series of possible Carnaval songs. One after the other, different singers came on, each singing just 1 song, a cappella at first, while down in the drum band the mestre was intently following the lyrics in a big notebook he had that was full of printouts of song lyrics. Eventually the mestre would call the band in, with one of 4 basic grooves (3 versions of samba-reggae, or a funk), and accompany the song for a few more cycles. Three judges on stage scribbled down comments after each song, then on to the next song. It was really interesting to hear what Olodum's basic grooves are, just the essence, without the fills, frills and extra stuff that they'll add later.

At 7pm, their regular singer came on, and the party started. Pat and I could both feel the band relax, and their sound become much more confident and powerful, as they swung into their full familiar repertoire. The third-surdos were continually horsing around with little choreographies - one guy would start some move and all the others would pick up on it and join him for a while, and then somebody would start something else. Way in the back row, the first and second surdos were continually challenging each other with mallet-flipping and surdo-lifting moves and generally crazy acrobatic stuff, basically not paying any attention at all to the rest of the band and just in their own world of insanity, occasionally flinging a mallet accidentally down the fire-escape where some kid would have to go scramble after it. (In samba-reggae, there is a tradition that the first and second surdo players do the most elaborate, showiest, dramatic moves - because they have the most open patterns with the most room to do crazy stuff. They also have the craziest hairdos!) I recognized several of the surdo players from Swing do Pelo's street parades last year - don't know if they've switched to Olodum, or if they've always played with both groups.

I took tons of movies and taped the whole thing with my trusty, beloved Edirol digital recorder. (I love my Edirol) I always seem to be the 1 white girl way up RIGHT in front of the band, absolutely as close as I can possibly get, all alone pressed up against the security barrier, while all the other tourists are hanging way back. I get a lot of nice reactions about it, though, the players grinning at me and mugging for the camera. And I started to get a really good feel, at last, for Olodum's several flavors of samba-reggae, the several different claves, the fourth surdo part, and how it all fits together. Would love to spend a couple months drumming with them.... some other year! I noticed they did have 2 girls (one on repique, one on caixa).

When the party started, the audience tripled in size and little clumps of samba-reggae dance choreography started appearing. Pat and I ended up in different clumps, Each clump was a set of fabulous black dancers, plus either Pat or me (the sole white dancer, in each case), ringed by a bunch of white tourists holding video cameras. The Salvadorean dancers seemed really pleased to find 1 white tourist who could dance - once I tried to leave and people grabbed me with a lot of "no, no, stay and dance some more, you dance really well" gestures. Pat reported that over on her side of the hall she'd gotten the same response to her dancing, lots of thumbs-ups and delighted reactions. After seeing some of the other white tourists try to dance a little bit, we realized why they were so pleased with us! I've been around great American dancers for so many years (in fact, I always feel really clumsy next to the Seattle and Portland dancer girls) that I'd forgotten that most whites really can't dance, and it was very startling to find out that in any clump of white tourists here I will probably be one of the best dancers. Oh my god... they are so bad!!!! It is really funny. But it's cute when they try! Three years ago that was me....