Surfing in wartime

Most Thursday afternoons, I walk the mile from my apartment to Botafogo to the cute little music studio that I rent for practice. It's a nice walk through a bustling, peaceful neighborhood full of little shops and sidewalk vendors. When I'm done I walk back home, past all "my" sidewalk vendors: the popcorn man, the woman who sells candies, the guy with the wheelbarrow full of fruit, the woman selling the home-made clothes. I walk past the newstand, the juice bar, the tiny police booth.

This Thursday, though, I decided to take a little break from practicing and go to my friend Katrina's surf camp for a couple days. It is in southern Rio, in the beach neighborhood of Recreio. She'd told me which three buses could get me there from central Rio: the 175, the 179, or the S-20. So I packed up my stuff and headed out to the big avenue where all the buses run. Brazilian bus drivers regard all bus stops as highly optional, and so I sat for over an hour trying to flag down one of the elusive S-20s, which kept cleverly zipping by in the third lane over. I was almost lulled into a daze by Rio's magnificent, endless fleets of buses, which endlessly rumbled by, in clumps of four and five, like small herds of elephants. I missed two 175's and stupidly let a perfectly catchable, slow-moving 179 get past me too, but finally got the next S-20 and began the long rattly ride to the south.

While I'd been sitting there at the bus stop, waiting for the bus, traficantes (drug traffickers and their mercenary armies) pulled up in front of that little Botafogo police station a mile down the same street, and started an intense firefight, trying to kill the policeman in the tiny police booth. (He was shot in the arm but survived.) All the street vendors and pedestrians bolted in all directions. The woman who sells the sweets was caught right in the thick of the firefight. She threw herself on top of her 6-year-old son. She was shot several times in the back and died almost immediately, but her body slowed the bullets enough so that only one bullet hit the kid, and it did not kill him. Another street vendor grabbed the wounded child and hauled him out of there, while he was crying "My mom fainted! Please don't let her die!" He is in the hospital now, still asking for his mother, and still has not been told that his mother is dead.

(If I had been following my usual Thursday routine, I would have been walking exactly there at about that time. But instead, all I saw were some police cars with lights flashing, as my S-20 bus speeded past Botafogo on its way south.)

Earlier that morning, to the north, 20 armed traficantes stopped a bus at random on the Avenida Brasil highway, where I travel by bus several time a week to the great samba escola Mocidade. It was a bus from Rio to Sao Paulo, full of sleepy travelers who had spent Christmas in Rio with their families and were headed back home to Sao Paulo. (I've taken that bus in the other direction, from Sao Paulo to Rio.) The traficantes threw gasoline inside and set it on fire. The bus exploded in flames almost instantly. Passengers flung themselves from the windows, but many were burned badly, including a professional model who was burned over 40% of her body and whose face is now completely destroyed. Seven people were not quick enough. A couple who had fallen asleep next to each other; a few people who could not get their windows open. They were "carbonized", as the newspapers say here. It looks like, judging from the horrible pictures I just saw, they just had time to crawl out of their seats and into the aisle.

Similar attacks were occurring all over the city. Five other police stations were attacked. Ten other buses were burned, though on most of the others the traficantes allowed the passengers to disembark first, since the attacks were, in theory, primarily targeted at the police. It was all a "protest" by the Red Command, an Mafia-like organized network of the gangs of traficantes that control most of the city slums. They are angry about the recent trend of "militias" that have recently been expelling the traficantes by force from many favelas. The militias are informal assemblages of angry citizens and off-duty policemen, and they have appeared in over 80 favelas (Rio's hillside slums) to date, mostly in the last few years.

The Red Command does not like the militias, and wished to send a message to the new state administration, which takes office on January 1st.

Several of the Rio newspapers just listed huge numbers on the front page today:

18-32-7-11-8-6

which stood for:
18 dead (most of them policemen)
32 wounded (actually, now it's 40)
7 burned alive
11 buses burned (now 13, if I've counted right)
8 cars burned
6 police stations attacked with grenades, bombs and gunfire.

This is actually still minor in comparison to the 998 dead in Sao Paulo earlier this year in another police-traficantes war, also instigated by the Red Command. The Red Command seems now to have swung their attention to Rio.

The major wave of attacks seems to be over, but small-scale attacks are still happening. Another bus was burned today in Nilopolis (where I was last week to see Beija-Flor); there was another firefight in Duque de Caxias (where I go every week to see Grande Rio); another bus burned in Cantagalo, right between Copacabana and Ipanema (where I go several times a week). Most of Rio's 48 bus companies shut down this morning. Without any announcements about it - the buses simply vanished off the streets, like frightened animals. They are slowly reappearing now.

The military police are now occupying 23 favelas, including every favela near Copacabana and Ipanema (Rocinha, Vidigal, etc.), and also many more distant ones such as the "City of God" (the favela made famous from the movie of the same name). Though this may sound like an improvement, the police are widely considered to be not much better than the traficantes. They have a reputation of corruption, viciousness, brutality and greed. They always have the right to shoot to kill here in Rio, and they use it liberally. Any police occupation of a favela usually leads to a miserable cycle of further violence and counter-retaliations.

The new governer, who does not actual take control till January 1st, insists that Rio's traditional massive New Year's party will go on as planned. He is considering calling in the Brazilian Army to help patrol the Copacanaba and Ipanema New Year's parties. Actually, the traficantes traditionally target police stations, buses, banks, and cars on the major highways - but not tourists per se. Small blessing, but it's something.

There was a similar war in 2002 when the traficantes tried to take over the entire city. Nana, my German friend, told me about how, in 2002, her bus to the Mocidade escola drove straight through a firefight. Bullets went right through her window, just missing her. Yet she continued taking the bus to Mocidade.

As for me... I had no idea any of this was happening, and neither did the bus driver on my S-20 bus. We rattled our way south, yesterday afternoon. I didn't know exactly where I was going, and I showed my little page of scrawled directions to the woman sitting next to me, the ticket taker, and the bus driver, all of whom studied it with intense interest for several minutes. Later they very carefully deposited me at the correct bus stop, and the bus driver carefully performed an elaborate and very helpful pantomime about where exactly I should walk next, accompanied by a chorus from the other participants, in Portuguese, of "the bus has to TURN HERE... but YOU... keep WALKING STRAIGHT.... ONE MORE BLOCK.... then you TURN RIGHT!" They were so kind and helpful. As Brazilians generally are. I walked where they'd said, found Katrina's lovely hostel, and spent all day bodyboarding in the beautiful Recreio beach, and all day today surfing. Then today I bought some newspapers.

It's strange, learning Portuguese. First I learn the simple words and phrases, like "jump" and "window" and "next to" and "many" and "throw" and "two", from Portuguese textbooks that have harmless sentences like:

"The cat JUMPED onto the table."
"Please open the WINDOW, Mr. Jones."
"The book is NEXT TO the pencil."
"There were MANY people at the movie theater."
"THROW me the ball!"
"I would like to buy TWO ice creams."

Then I run across the same words in the news, in these eyewitness statements (from O Globo and O Dia):


Quem nao PULOU pela JANELA foi engolido pelo fogo.
- "Whoever didn't JUMP out of the WINDOW was swallowed by fire."

Me arrastei ate um canteiro e fiquei duas horas esperando ajuda, AO LADO DE pessaos ensanguentadas e queimadas.
- "I dragged myself to a garden and waited two hours for help, NEXT TO bloody and burned people."

Nao havia como nos alcancar porque eram MUITOS tiros.
- "There was no way to reach us because there were MANY gunshots."

Ela gritou para o filho se abaixar e SE JOGOU sobre ele, para tentar protege-lo.
- "She screamed for her son to get down, and THREW HERSELF on him, to try to protect him."

Ela ainda suspirou DUAS vezes e morreu.
- "She just breathed TWO times and died."

Christmas in Rio

(If you're on my "friends" email list, you've already gotten a slightly different version of this by email. This is an expanded description of Christmas in Rio.)

Christmas always seems sort of surreal here because it's so hot! It's high summer now and it's been
over 100F most of this week. But the Christmas decorations in the stores have fake snow - plus reindeer, sleighs, Santa, carolers, artificial fir trees, the works. Like I said, surreal. The Christmas trees especially seem surreal, to me, because apparently Brazilians have latched on to the idea that a Christmas tree should be conical, but none of the native trees are the right shape. (That shape only evolves where there's heavy snow.) Indoors, they use fake fir trees that keep making me think I have somehow been teleported back to the Pacific Northwest. I'm reminded of a Hawaiian friend of mine, who, when she first moved to Seattle, kept saying "Oh my god, there are wild Christmas trees everywhere! Just growing, like real trees!" I think the Brazilians, like my Hawaiian friend, don't think of Christmas trees as actual trees. In fact, outdoors, the public "trees" have no physical tree at all - just an elaborate conical arrangement of Christmas lights, suspended in mid-air on a wire framework. Took me a while to get used to the idea of a tree-less tree. But they're really beautiful, actually.

But the best part about Christmas here... the rabanadas, big cinnamon-sugar pastries that appear in the bakeries at Christmas time. Like portable French toast. Every Christmas party has an enormous tray of them. YUM.

Well, actually, as good as the rabanadas are, that's not the best part. The best part has been spending time with my friends and their families. Last year I spent Christmas completely alone. This year has been very different. 2 family Christmases, two extravagantly decorated trees, piles of gifts, super-excited kids running around, huge enormous feasts... I actually bought some presents (first time in 2 years!) and got some too. Including the 2007 samba-enredo cd!

In Brazil, the big family feast and present-opening seems to be on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day, or at least it was in my 2 families. The whole family, kids included, have the giant feast late on Christmas eve. Part of it was very familiar - turkey, ham, potatoes - and part was not - codfish balls, rabanadas, piles of roasted Portuguese chestnuts, and passionfruit mousse. No eggnog, but lots of champagne. Everybody stays up till midnight and opens ALL the presents right then, from midnight till about three am - kids included!

How does Santa come, in a tropical country with no fireplaces, and where no one will go to sleep to let him put the gifts under the tree? Well, of course, he just rings the bell or knocks on the door shortly after midnight, but when you open the door, there's nobody there - he's already dashed away in his sleigh - but there on the doorstep is a pile of presents! I guess he doesn't get any cookies, though. (coincidentally, you might spot a parent or grandparent or aunt scuttling away around the corner. Brazilian families are so large, nobody notices if one of the adults vanishes for a little while.)

Christmas in Brazil marks the end of the school year and the start of summer, sort of like Memorial Day does in the US. It's also a little vacation from the increasingly intense Carnaval preparations, which surged ahead in early December with the start of escola rehearsals at the Sambodromo (the big samba stadium). But for the two weeks bracketing Christmas and New Year's, there are no lessons, no classes, no escola rehearsals at the Sambodromo. Everybody just takes a little break. I'm planning to take a break too. I need it! I've been working super hard. I've been playing in three escolas (Sao Clemente,
Mocidade, and - rarely - a tiny bit at Grande Rio), and also in Monobloco's advanced class; plus renting studio time several times a week to practice; plus tamborim in the Monobloco beginner class, third surdo & repinique in Banga, and lots of private lessons; and hours and hours trying to practice and write out all my recordings, and hours and hours on long rattly bus rides to the distant escolas...

Some of it's going REALLY well. I can't believe Mocidade has let me play with them; and I'm a little surprised with how well caixa is going. And some is REALLY difficult - in my last tamborim class I got so frustrated that I started crying in the class and couldn't stop! Damn, there is nothing quite as maddening as trying to change an ingrained bad habit (my right hand keeps reverting to a caixa hold). And I have been completely stalled on pandeiro all month, bored with my practice routine and unsure what to aim for next.

It is stressful sometimes, having gambled so much to come here, and feeling such pressure (self-imposed) to do well. Time is slipping away! My trip here is half over already! And I've been getting super-exhausted from the all-night escola bus rides. So it will be good to have a break this week. I feel like I need to sleep for about a month.

So, time for a break. I'm heading to the Rio Surf Tour hostel for a few days... no rehearsals, no classes, or escolas... just me and the beach... and, well, I think I'll bring the tamborim and the pandeiro too! just in case! I'll just have some fun with them, no stress. And then, back to Copacabana/Ipanema for the enormous New Year's beach parties. And be ready for a beautiful new year.

Grupo A - still playing for fun

Feliz Natal everybody! As a Christmas present for everybody, I just noticed that mp3's of all the 2007 sambas, plus the lyrics, are online at the newspaper O Dia's excellent Carnaval website:

http://odia.terra.com.br/especial/rio/carnaval2006/#

I've been tuckered out recently and, in honor of the holidays, am taking a bit of a break this week from running around every night. I've been going to so many distant escolas that my samba friends have started calling me the "Guerreira de Samba" - the Warrior of Samba. Well, this Guerreira needs a little rest. So I stayed in tonight, and didn't go play in my Grupo A escola, Sao Clemente, and didn't even go see the excellent Tuesday choro at Trapiche Gamboa that I've managed to miss every single week since I got here.

But I thought that even if I didn't go to Sao Clemente, I'd write about it a bit, because I haven't yet described the Grupo A escolas at all.

Grupo A, or Grupo de Acesso, is the second group of the Carnaval escolas. Every year, one of its member escolas is promoted to Grupo Especial (the top group); and one is demoted to Grupo B. (I've been told there are lower groups, too, but have never seen hide or hair or them). Grupo A parades on Friday and Saturday of Carnaval, before Grupo Especial's famous Sunday and Monday parades. They're the great secret of Rio's Carnaval; they're really very good parades, the baterias have wonderful players (most of them also play in Grupo Especial), but they're doing it more for the joy of it than for the money and glamour - because Grupo A doesn't have any money or glamour! Old-timers always tell me that Grupo A is like Grupo Especial used to be in the good old days, a Carnaval of the people, before it became completely commercialized and touristified. And... Grupo A tickets only cost five dollars. (compare to US$200 or more for Grupo Especial!)

I'd planned this year to try to play in either Sao Clemente or Estacio de Sa, which are among the best of Grupo A. Unfortunately (from my point of view), Estacio de Sa won the Grupo A competition last year and was promoted to Grupo Especial, which immediately made it less likely that I could play there. But Sao Clemente turns out to be perfect. Its quadra is luxuriously close - just a single subway ride to downtown Rio!!! unbelievable!!! It's also actually my neighborhood escola, because it's based in Botafogo, just a half a mile from where I live. In fact I walk on Sao Clemente Street almost every day, on my way to my practice space in Botafogo. But most importantly, the Sao Clemente mestre and directors are friendly and willing to let visitors play. My friends Olivia and Tanit have recently started playing there too. "They're super nice at Sao Clemente. Unpretentious," says Olivia. On my first trip there, I was having a little trouble telling the directors apart, and later Tanit explained "It's all one family who runs this escola. I mean, literally one family. Brothers and cousins. And you can tell, because they all sort of look alike!"

After the raucous, enormous Friday and Saturday parties at the Grupo Especial escolas, I was shocked at how tiny Sao Clemente's Friday party was: a tiny clump of 25 players or so, lots of unused drums sitting around in piles, just a few bunches of friends watching. One beer stand. No food. Apparently, this is normal for Grupo A. "Hardly anybody comes to the weekend party before Christmas...." said the mestre. "Sometimes I think we shouldn't even really do this Friday thing till after New Year's. But, you should come on Tuesday! Tuesday is the technical rehearsal and it's much bigger." So I came the next Tuesday to find a bateria that was about five times bigger and ten times better, with a good set of porta-bandeiras and passistas practicing their dance choreographies on the main floor. (Still no food. But lots of beer.) It suddenly sounded like a genuine bateria. Powerful. And FAST!

Sao Clemente, turns out, also has the best repique player I've ever seen. They also get points for being the only escola so far whose caixa pattern I couldn't play instantly. This is partly because the Friday caixa players were playing about seven different variations. But even on Tuesday, when they'd settled down to business and were finally playing a single pattern, there were some soft double-right hits tucked into it that still elude me. I made do with the "standard" Viradouro/Salgueiro pattern, which fit well enough, but I still want to figure out what they're doing exactly.

So that's my Tuesday night escola!

Many foreign sambistas also run across Alegria de Zona Sul, a mid-range Grupo A escola that has its street rehearsal right on Copacabana beach every Sunday. At about 6pm, at the Ipanema end, near Posto 6. If you can play at all (especially if you have your own instrument) they'll almost certainly let you join. They are friendly and fun.

For a little more information about Grupo A, here are some excerpts from a recent article on Grupo A from the O Globo newspaper's Carnaval blog. As to who might win this year, the blog writer says:

"I think that maybe this is the year for Uniao da Ilha, which for years has tried to return to Grupo Especial, but has always "hit the goalpost" [just missed]. I doubt that Rocinha or Caprichosos will succeed in returning soon to the top group; I think that maybe they will have to spend some time in Acesso. Santa Cruz, Sao Clemente, and Tradicao are always among the favorites of Grupo A. And it seems to me that Arrancao, Cubango, and Imperio da Tijuca are in competition to see who will fall [to Grupo B]. The escola Renascer, for me, is still an unknown. This is just a general impression; we have to wait a little longer, because Grupo A's preparations always occur closer to the time of the parade."

Other tidbits (paraphrased):
- It's common belief that Grupo A gets very little funding from the city of Rio, compared to Grupo Especial. Not true. An escola in Grupo Especial gets R$361,000 from the city, and one in Grupo A gets R$280,000, which really isn't too bad. However, the Grupo Especial escolas also rake in an enormous amount of money from TV contracts for Carnaval, cd sales, the ticket sales from the Sambodromo, and ticket sales at their weekly parties. All told, a Grupo Especial escola can count on about R$2,700,000 per year. (That's the "official" money, not including the substantial funding that many escolas get from the neighborhood gangsters, nor the recent trend for sponsorship for undisclosed amounts from Venezuelan oil companies and the like)

- Caprichosos fell to Grupo A this year. They apparently didn't like the tiny TV deals offered to the Grupo A escolas, and refused to sign the TV contract. As a result, Caprichosos' parade will not be televised this year! The other nine Grupo A escolas will be televised but apparently they will just cut to commercials during Caprichosos' parade. Ouch.

101 unlistened-to Brazilian cds

I finally found the Sambas-de-Enredo 2007 cd in a Lojas Americanas store today. They also had a big rack of cheap cds of lots of classic Brazilian artists - Chico Buarque, Elis Regina, Cassia Eller, etc. etc. I collected a stack to buy but then put them all back, realizing that (a), I'm broke, and (b), my shameful secret - I never listen to Brazilian cd's! I always intend to, but almost never do.

Truth be told, there are probably fewer than 15 Brazilian cd's that I've actually managed to listen to all the way through. I have a huge stack of Brazilian cds that I've listened to only the first 1 or 2 tracks of, if that. Often I wonder if I actually like Brazilian music at all! Because I can never seem to make myself listen to any of it! I love to PLAY it... but not listen to it. Not to cd's, anyway. This, of course, is a hideous musical flaw, because it means I don't know the repertoire.

Partly it's that there is no place that I can listen to cd's here. I can't play music in my apartment, because my roommate is always working; can't take my ipod on the street, because it'd get stolen instantly; can't listen to music in the car, because I have no car.

Partly it's lack of time; I always feel such intense, burning pressure to practice. If I have even a speck of free time I know I must, must, must practice! I have felt this pressure since I started percussion three years ago. It is relentless. It has never let up.

But there's something else too. To be honest, I get incredibly bored listening to cd's. This is not just Brazilian music - it's almost all music. There are decades-long gaps in my knowledge of American music, too. It is a very rare cd that can hold my attention all the way through. It's grueling! I have to force myself to sit still - if my attention flickers for a moment, which it usually does halfway through the second track, suddenly I discover that I have wandered away into another room, or left the house entirely. To make myself get through a whole cd, I have to plan a whole day around it, and then glue myself to the chair by approaching it as scientific research: "Now I will listen to this whole cd and I am NOT allowed to leave this chair." It's exactly as appealing as sitting down to study the latest issue of General & Comparative Endocrinology. (Really.) Sometimes the cd annoys me so much (by being boring and predictable) that I get really angry at it.

Does this mean I don't actually like music???

But every now and then a song will punch through and I will fall so terribly in love with it. I remember getting completely furious at a big Chico Buarque compilation cd - I hated almost all of the tracks and was stomping around swearing at the cd player, but was determined to get through it - but then I fell instantly in love with "Vai Passar". I listened to it probably 20 times in a row, immediately memorized the lyrics, found the chords on-line, transposed them to a different key that I could sing in, adapted the chords for Bulgarian tambura (the only instrument I had handy at the time), learned to play it, that night. It grabbed me completely.

Rarely, VERY rarely, an entire cd will grab me (Jorge Aragao has managed to do this twice! And Monobloco and Timbalada, once each.)

And invariably, those few times I find songs I like, they turn out to be all-time classics, the most beloved song of the artist's career, or the best song of the year, or the decade....

So maybe it alll just means I have ridiculously high standards for songs. Or a violently strong predisposition for certain keys or chord progressions... or certain kinds of rhythmic texturing and orchestration.... The melody seems almost irrelevant, actually. A musician boyfriend of mine was often able to predict which songs I would fall in love with, based only on their harmonic structure. (Rule #1 was, it had to be predominantly minor or hijaz. Never major!)

I haven't figured it out yet.... but I hope I can find some way to lower my standards, or expand my range of tolerance.... Because I really have GOT to learn more of the repertoire. Of all kinds of music, not just Brazilian.

The train to Mocidade

I posted 2 updates yesterday but I think only the second went out on the email update. So if you didn't get the post about Grande Rio, check the blog website (riostories.blogspot.com) - and, there are Grande Rio Sambodromo movies up at homepage.mac.com/sambakat.

Today I made the huge long trek out to Padre Miguel again, this time on the train with Nana and another new sambista friend, from South Africa, Avron.

The train itself was an adventure. I'd never realized that the Metro station Central, which I've ridden past many times, is directly under the Central do Brasil train station - yup, the station featured in the movie "Central do Brasil". And YES, it's just as crowded as the movie showed!!! The subway was the worst, actually. I've done a lot of rush-hour subway commuting in my life, but this was one of the very most crowded subway rides I've ever had! It started to seem positively impossible that a single other human being could squish on to that subway car, yet at each station, somehow, more people kept squishing on. Finally it reached that completely wedged state in which people can't even shift their feet to keep their balance. As we pulled into Central, the driver hit the brakes a little hard and the whole jammed mass of people all tipped helplessly forward, and everybody said:

"woooOOOOOOOOOoooooo!!!!"

....but then they all tipped back into place.

Then the doors opened and people EXPLODED out of the subway car, charging up the stairs to the train stations. How could one subway train have held so many people??? Up above, they all sprinted into the train station, divided neatly into 5 groups heading out on the five train lines, and then waited in 5 long tense mobs on the train platforms till the next empty trains pulled in. Then, the second those train doors open, it's like the Olympic five-yard dash! I've never seen people sprint so fast for so short a distance! The doors open and POW, everybody just rockets into the train like little human meteors, ZOOM, to the nearest seat, leaving little firey trails in the air behind them. Because, of course, there are nowhere near enough seats. Then suddenly it's all over and everyone's just sitting peacefully (or standing resignedly), suddenly serene and calm, while the train waits quietly with its doors open for another three minutes.

Of course I didn't get a seat - my Rio reflexes aren't that sharp yet. I'd already spent 45 minutes standing on the subway and now, another full hour standing on the train. At least when you finally get there you are right at Mocidade! The train station is literally right across the street from the quadra.

Tonight's rehearsal was the ensaio tecnico, the technical rehearsal, where they work only on the Carnaval song. It's much more serious than the Saturday rehearsal, and they're much more restrictive about who they'll let play. They've been letting me play as sort of a visiting guest, late on Saturdays, but I'm not a full member of the bateria (and can't even try to be unless I can make that two-hour (one way), all-night-long journey three times a week!). So I wasn't sure I'd be able to play at all tonight, not even caixa. I asked Jonas, though, and he said to go head and play if there was an extra caixa, which there was!

I noticed they were even taking attendance - there was a man at a little table with big notebooks for each section of instruments, each book with a page for each player. One by one, each player came up and signed in for tonight. One woman seemed to be taking an unusually long time fiddling with the book, until two other players came up and distracted the attendance-taker. Then she flipped instantly to her page and signed in twice, once for this week and once for last week. She saw me watching and gave me a wink and a grin as she left the table.

We all trooped outside - tonight was going to be a street rehearsal, to practice marching - and somehow I ended up in the scariest spot, RIGHT by the lead repiques, RIGHT at the front of the caixa section, and RIGHT in front of the scary director who had thought I'd screwed up on surdo last weekend. But, you know what, it went fine! I can hardly believe it but I seem to be able to play caixa pretty clean at that tempo now. (150bpm) Just two weeks ago I had that "15-minute barrier" where my arms would suddenly give out, and a week before that it just seemed flat impossible to play clean at 150 at all, even for a minute. But, as of last Saturday, suddenly I can play for hours. Except when I walk... yeesh... there's my next thing to work on, playing at 150 while I walk.... it all went completely to hell then... and volume, I still need more volume!

It really does change your playing when you spend a long time in a bateria. This was my fifth long night of caixa in an escola in two weeks (three nights in Mocidade, two in Sao Clemente), and, every time, I feel my playing continue to change. My ability to play at tempo, my stamina, swing, control, clarity and volume are all changing. Partly it is just the effect of the players around me. Last night in Sao Clemente, there was an absolutely killer first-surdo next to me who was kicking me forward on every single measure. It was like having Thor, the God of Thunder, zinging a lightning bolt at me every second. He was as far forward (hitting the beat very slightly early) as you can get without actually rushing; and the VOLUME he had, good god, an entire wall of air would come at me and almost knock me over; and the kick-in-the-pants effect it had on me was astonishing. And tonight in Mocidade, there was a third-surdo directly behind me who was so powerful it felt like he was hammering directly on my shoulderblades. The force of his playing was actually making my caixa vibrate! There was a massive wall of tamborims right in front, and strong repiques all around me, and that third-surdo right behind me...

In those kinds of conditions you cannot help but start to absorb the FEEL of it all and start to produce it yourself. Almost unconsciously your playing starts to align with the swing and the drive, the garra (claws), that you feel coming from all around you.

We played and played and played. We practiced walking, stopping, walking, stopping, turning corners, going in and out of a recuo. There was a focus and intensity that I hadn't felt on the Saturday rehearsals. Jonas came down hard on the bateria for rushing. There's one break they'd rushed so horrifically at the Sambodromo that they skipped nearly an entire quarter note (!). In my mind, that particular break has started to seem like a litmus test for the Mocidade bateria. Jonas harassed them endlessly about that break tonight, cycling it over and over, till it calmed down and began to have a semblance of timing again.

My favorite break, though, is break 7. The bateria stops playing and freezes absolutely solid, like statues, for a full EIGHT measures of complete silence, then thunders into action again with a BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM! The rule is that you can't move AT ALL during those eight measures. The bateria has started to really get into the "freeze in place" game and guys are starting to freeze in silly dramatic poses with their arms up. (In a moment of characteristic brilliance last Saturday, Jonas suddenly lunged forward and kissed the Queen of the Bateria - an incredibly good-looking girl - just at the beginning of the break; then of course he had to stay there and continue kissing her for 8 more measures. )

It started to rain; nobody seemed to notice. It started raining harder, and harder, really pouring, but we just kept playing and playing.... getting wetter and wetter... The surdo players flipped their surdos over to play on the rain side (the side that has a plastic sheet stretched over the head). My sticks got slick in my hands and started slipping away. But the cool rain felt wonderful and I loved the abandonment of just keeping on playing, no matter what.

I tottered back home at 2am - two long bus rides and then a long walk. Honestly I don't know if I can keep making that grueling journey out to Padre Miguel. But I am very happy, and honored, to be playing in Mocidade at all, whenever I can.

Mirror mirror on the wall

... who's got the best bateria of all?

O Globo Online, Rio's biggest newspaper, has a nice samba blog that's full of Carnaval news every day. Last week the blog writers posed the two questions:
1. Who's got the best bateria in Rio?
2. What are the most distinctive baterias in Rio? (i.e. the ones you can recognize from a long way away)

It wasn't exactly a scientific poll, but quite a few people wrote in, with lots of heartfelt opinions, and in the end Imperio Serrano (Mestre Atila) and Grande Rio (Mestre Odilon) came in #1 and #2 for best bateria, respectively. Hey, those are exactly the 2 baterias I'd picked out last year as the best! cool! I ended up parading with Imperio last year partly because their bateria completely stunned me when I visited their quadra.

Mocidade, interestingly, was mentioned by a couple people as a bateria that was once among the best, but is no longer. Mocidade's had some hard times the last five years - some heavy-duty politics have been going on in Padre Miguel, and the bateria's suffered as a result. As much as it pains me to admit it, I can feel this. The tempo is wobbly and some breaks have actually failed (train wreck - the bateria stalled and stopped playing. I've never seen a Grupo Especial bateria do this before!). I got in trouble last Saturday because the surdo player next to me didn't know any of the breaks. He blew break after break; he missed almost all his entrances. One director was convinced it was me screwing up, but it wasn't!!!! I hope they'll give me another chance on surdo! Anyway, the point is, I've never seen a Grupo Especial surdo player screw up like that.

But the bright side is... a lot of people in the poll also said "But Jonas is turning things around at Mocidade". Jonas has only been mestre there for 1 year and he's going all out fixing the tempo problems, encouraging creativity, and he's really turned around the bateria's attitude. And people really love him. During one of my lessons with him he got into a very interesting speech about the topic of bateria morale. He said: Always smile. He also said, if someone screws up, say to them "You screwed up", but say it quietly into their ear - don't humiliate them, and once you've said it, let it go, and go back to smiling again. He encourages ideas from members, and is using a new paradinha developed by the 16-year-old repique player Bruno. He said, make them feel that it's THEIR group. That's exactly what one of the directors said to me after I'd thanked him for letting me play - "E nossa bateria", it's our bateria.

Jonas has also been asking me to come record every rehearsal that I can - so he can listen to the recordings, against a click track when possible, to identify where there are tempo problems. He's been asking other visitors for their recordings too, and has already straightened out the bateria on some tempo glitches this way.

So... go, Jonas! Mocidade is still a much-beloved escola with a lot of great players, and with a history of great innovation. They are the escola that invented paradinhas ("little stops", the little breaks that enhance the song). And they are good people. So everyone, including me, is hoping that these wobbly things are just temporary and that they'll soon return to their glory days. I'd certainly like to think that people won't be saying "jeez, Mocidade sure went downhill as soon as they let that gringa on surdo"!

Anyway, back to O Globo's poll. Three escolas were mentioned as having a truly distinctive sound:
Mocidade, because of its caixa pattern;
Mangueira, because of its unusual surdos;
Imperio Serrano, because of its quad bells.

(Grande Rio has quad bells too, but only a few. Imperio has a ton, and really showcases them. Few other escolas have any bells at all, of any type.)

So Imperio came in both as best bateria and as one of the most distinctive baterias. Imperio Serrano! The Mountain Empire. I promptly wrote an email to my friend Vitor at Imperio asking him when the technical rehearsals are, and what the closest subway station is. I have got to get out to that quadra and spend some time with that bateria!

E Grande Rio!

I went to Grande Rio's ensaio tecnico (technical rehearsal) at the Sambodromo on Sunday. There are 4 new little movies up at homepage.mac.com/sambakat - click on "Rio Movies" at the top. I'll post some more if I get some time tomorrow....

My wonderful samba-crazy friend Olivia always seems to turn up at any escola event, and sure enough she turned out to be parading in Grande Rio's Ala 3 - and she miraculously had an extra t-shirt (the official t-shirts are the only way you can get past security). So I paraded with her! We were well in front of the bateria, so I was able to finish the whole parade, then backtrack up the parade route to find the bateria in the second recuo (a spot on the side of the route where the bateria pulls out of the main parade flow for a while, and stays put, still playing, while the paraders go past). Got a magnificent half-hour recording of the bateria there. One of the bateria directors even started directing players to turn and play right into my recorder, so I have some nice recordings of individual parts. I stayed with the quad bells for a while, fascinated to hear them play many of the exact same long bell patterns that the Lions use (in Portland, Oregon, USA). Grande Rio is one of the very few escolas that uses bells. Bells seem to be standard in US baterias, but they're actually kind of rare in Rio.

The bateria guys seemed to love having a camera focused on them (check out the Cuica & Bells video! they were totally mugging for the camera) I also have a long section of the tamborims that I will post later.

Another movie shows the four third-surdo guys, plus a few caixa & bell friends of theirs, who seemed unable to stop playing when the parade ended. I almost felt like I know these guys by now since I spent a whole evening earlier at their quadra recording the third surdos. They were in a little clump counting off some little samba entradas over and over, including a "E Grande Rio!" shout ("it's Grande Rio!"). So cool.

My most puzzling movie shows the entire bateria stopping, turning to the left, and serenely giving the finger to something, or someone. (Watch the left hands of the two surdo players in the "Flip And Run" movie.) This was led by their mestre, Odilon, who right next to me, emphatically flipping off something. (no, not me! something behind me, I swear!) I have NO idea what that was all about and can only theorize that it was directed at either the judges' booth, or at the time clock that cost them the championship last year - they went 1 minute over the allotted 120 minutes, and got a penalty for it that cost them the championship. Whatever it was about, right after the flipping-off, Odilon had the whole bateria practice RUNNING, still playing. Baterias sometimes sort of speed-walk if the parade is going too long and they are in danger of a time penalty, but I have never seen a bateria actually run before. You better bet they're not going to get a time penalty this year!

All in all... Grande Rio completely blew me away. They always do anyway, and they went all out for this rehearsal. They had a huge fleet of buses that they put in the positions in the parade where the floats will be. They had several small floats already built and in place - two giant scarecrows in front of me, mysterious rolling trees wreathed in fabric yellow-and-orange flames, and a strange assortment of rolling oil cans. All three porta-bandeiras (flag-bearers) brought the full-size 2006 gowns to practice their dance. I watched one porta-bandeira for 20 minutes before the rehearsal while she went through the elaborate process of tying enormous layers of feathers onto her huge hoop skirt. It was a complex process and she was royally pissed off about it by the end, wrestling with the ornery backpiece, stomping, swearing, and throwing feathers around! Wished I could have helped, but it seemed wiser to stay a safe distance away.

It was a grand spectacle all around. And the bateria was SO tight. Not all baterias are this tight. Odilon, the mestre, is famous throughout Rio for his ferocious drive ("garra", claws), his musical creativity, and his no-nonsense attitude. He regularly cruises through the bateria asking players to play solo, and immediately tosses out anyone who isn't playing up to snuff. You really have to play perfect, all the time, to play in Grande Rio.

I had to miss most of Beija-Flor's rehearsal, unfortunately, but if all goes as planned I will catch them Thursday at their home quadra, along with Jorge Alabe & Curtis Pierre.

And check out this link, to the newspaper O Dia:
http://odia.terra.com.br/especial/rio/carnaval2006/fotos.asp#
...click on Grande Rio to see the photos from the rehearsal. See the picture of the ala members in green t-shirts singing their hearts out? The one in the black skirt is my friend Olivia! How cool is that! (I was just outside the photo.) You can actually sort of see us both in the photo of the giant scarecrows - but we are just dots behind the scarecrows - I'm a dot over to the left with a white skirt & black bag around my waist, and Olivia is the dot next to me in the black skirt. Two dots having a very good time.

The reason I am doing this

jeez, I've had no time for blog entries recently... sorry everybody! Seems like every day and night has been so full. I haven't gotten to bed before 2am in god knows how long, and 6am is common.

This week has been FULL. Too full... I'm exhausted... I'm starting to fry out! I think next week will be surf camp time.

Anyway, this week was Monobloco, Bangalafumenga, Sao Clemente, Mocidade and Grande Rio. For today's entry, Monobloco:

Monobloco is finishing up their "school year" this week. Monday they had the last rehearsal before the student show on Wednesday. A huge amount of people turned up - people I've never seen before - the stage was so packed that they realized they were going to have to split the advanced class into 2 sections, have 1 section play part of the show, 1 section play another part.

Partway through the class, Fred (caixa leader) and Junior (tamborim leader) both came zipping over time me asking "Do you know who that guy is? Is he a friend of yours?" - turns out there was another foreigner who had turned up, a guy they'd never seen before, who had jumped in on caixa in the beginner class without realizing that this was a formal class, not an open rehearsal. And not just any rehearsal, but the final rehearsal for the year-end student show. Fred and Junior, working on the theory that "All gringo sambistas know each other" (which is not too far off!) thought I might know who he was. I didn't then, but I think I do now - another foreign caixa player who's just moved to Rio, and who contacted me later. They wouldn't let him play....oh well... they wouldn't let me play last year either, when I showed up in December. Turns out, Monobloco gets swamped all the time with visiting foreigners who want to play but who don't know the repertoire. But, as I now understand from first-hand experience, their repertoire is just too complicated for a drop-in player to pick up on the fly. I thought I would have the repertoire nailed in a couple weeks, but, as I discovered two days later, I'm still shaky on it after a month! It's not that the patterns are all that hard, it's just that there's a lot of them, and...hoo... a whole lotta of hand signs.

Anyway - Wednesday night arrived, the night of the show. Freddy, the caixa leader, once again impressed me with his attention to detail as a caixa leader. He combed the packed lobby to pick out all the caixa players individually, and took us up to a quiet nook of the balcony, where he gave us a rapid-fire reminder of the ENTIRE Monobloco caixa repertoire: he went down the set list and chanted out every single caixa pattern, every break and convencao, every start and every end, reviewed every single hand sign, quizzed us on everything, and even stopped every now and then to check in with me to make sure I was following his Portuguese (he'd say to me in English "Are you understanding? Is everything clear?") Yup, yup, I said, everything's clear! The show started, we all went to watch the adorable kid's group ("Minibloco"), then I played tamborim in the beginner class, then it was time for the advanced class. I grabbed a caixa and immediately realized that I'd forgotten EVERYTHING Freddy had reviewed half an hour earlier. EVERYTHING. It was just all blown clear out of my head by the tamborim stuff I'd just been playing. Not helped by some mental conflicts from identical hand signs that cue different things in Bangalafumenga, VamoLa, and the Lions. Yikes!

Luckily, as we got into the songs it all started to come back to me. And Monobloco encourages a culture of "please DO look at your neighbor if you've forgotten a pattern, rather than guessing. Rule #1: Don't guess!!" So I felt ok about mooching off of other people - sneaking looks at other caixa players to be sure I was on the right pattern.

But, I need to put in some serious time on this before January! I don't like being the kind of player who only half-remembers what's coming up and has to look at her neighbors to be sure. I like to be the kind who's completely solid on her own. I like being the one who is always sure. Never dependent. Come January, you better believe it, I'll be there.

Halfway through the show, one of the singers started goofing around, putting in extra repeats of the refrains that kept taking everybody by surprise, but he was so funny about it, and the leaders started giving him such shit about it, and he kept doing it anyway, and they started giving him more shit about it, and everybody just started to loosen up and laugh. The show came alive. It stopped being a slightly-tense Student Recital and started being Music. And they were playing all my favorite songs... all the Monobloco classics. Everybody started jumping and dancing. The lights were shining in our eyes. I saw the crowd starting to dance in the aisles, I saw Junior and Freddy and Celso and all the others jumping around singing along with the lead singers, not worrying about us any more, just having fun. I looked down the line of surdos and caixas next to me and saw that everyone was dancing. I suddenly realized "I'm here in Rio playing with Monobloco!"

I've been having moments recently of worrying about next year, what I will do for a job, how I will get any money. Long confused worries of wondering, why I am putting in so much time and effort on studying music? When it is clear that it can never be a career for me. (I started too late. And, like there is a market for third-surdo and pandeiro players anyway!) I wonder, often, why am doing this? Toward what end? What can possibly come out of it?

But there I was on stage with everybody jumping around in the lights, playing my favorite songs, with this mob of a hundred people all leaping around exhilarated, everybody yelling "Rio Mara-vil-ha!" along with the singer, the surdo players pounding away, the caixas rocketing along, everybody jumping. Not a pro show, not for money, not for fame. Just a student show, with all their friends and family dancing in the hall. It was perfect. I thought, the reason I'm doing this is not toward any end; it's not for anything in the future. It's for right now, this moment right now.

bus vs bike

I was supposed to meet Junior Teixeira last Wednesday to line up a tamborim lesson, but he didn't show. No big deal; I just figured something had come up. I saw him the next Monday at Monobloco rehearsal, and he immediately came over to apologize for not meeting me. He said (in English) "A bus ran me." I thought maybe he meant he'd had to run to catch a bus and had missed it. Then he lifted his arm to show me an enormous scrape running down his forearm - it turned out, he meant "a bus ran over me". It turned out, he meant "a bus slammed into the back of my bike, destroyed the bike, spun me 360 degrees through the air, and I landed flat on my back in the middle of the street and ended up halfway under the bus with the huge tire one foot away and it just barely managed to stop in time, and I couldn't believe I was still alive, and I have scrapes and bruises all over, and the bike was destroyed, and I was so shaken I could barely crawl to the side of the street, and then I forgot to get the license plate number and the bus just drove away."

Jeez. I am so glad he wasn't killed. He is glad too. And now he has to buy a new bike, somehow.

At least, as bad as that was, it was just accidental. The really creepy stories in Rio are the ones of deliberate violence, and there are so many of those stories all the time... the first draft of this post had a few paragraphs summarizing some of those stories just from today's paper, but then I was too depressed to post it. Never mind. I'll spare you the story of the Sao Paulo couple, and the reasons why cars in Brazil are allowed to run red lights at night. Suffice to say... poor Brasil. I think of Seattle's bike community, which when I left was up in arms and having protest marches because cars in Seattle sometimes accidentally hit bicycles. Lucky Seattle. If only bike accidents were the worst thing that happened here in Rio.

On surdo at Mocidade

Saturday was such a long overwhelming day that it has blown my sense of time apart. It seemed to last about a week. I think it all took place in one day but I'm not even sure....

My friend Flavio's birthday party was yesterday, and I really wanted to say a quick hello to him before I left for Mocidade. But I made the mistake of acceping a ride to Flavio's party with some friends, who, it turns out, were planning wanted to drop by a different party first "just for a few minutes" (= two hours) "and it's also in Santa Teresa, very close" = in a remote, hilly part of Santa Teresa miles from anywhere, where not only are there no street cabs, but even the radio cabs aren't willing to come. So I was stranded... I missed the Padre Miguel bus...

Long story short, it was a Homeric odyssey, and very expensive, to get to Mocidade. I decided, either the gods didn't want me to go, or they were testing me. FOUR hours later, after missing all busses, after negotiating and waiting for FIVE different taxis who all either flaked out or their cars broke down, I finally found a willing cabbie to take me on the world's most horribly expensive cab ride all by myself all the way to Padre Miguel. Thirty-five dollars, one way!!! ow!!!! I am so broke, I couldn't believe I was spending the money, but that's how much I wanted to play....

So it was past 2 am when I finally got to Mocidade, and it felt like such a triumph just to get there.

I was, of course, hoping to play third surdo... but not really expecting anything, 'cause you never know. But there was a free caixa, so I started on that.

Caixa at escola speed is still strange for me. At first it seems very easy and I sound just fabulous. But about 15 minutes into it, suddenly I become completely incompetent, like I have never held drumsticks before in my life. It's got to be my arms wearing out, yet my arms don't feel tired - it feels more like my brain wore out. Suddenly my hands can barely even just keep the sticks alternating! It's frustrating to suddenly feel so incompetent! But there's nothing to do but keep trying, keep flogging at it, in hopes that next week, it'll be better.

So after I fried out on caixa, I kept slogging at it for a while, but was hoping to switch off to surdo & repique, where I could use a fresh set of muscles. But there seemed to be not many repiques, and I had no idea what the protocol was for surdo. Most instruments are first-come, first-served (after 2am), but not surdo. For surdo, directors point to certain people and move them deliberately to surdo. It's not ok to just pick one up. Directors especially guard first and second surdo. Foreigners usually aren't allowed on surdo, and women almost never, especially first and second.

So anyway, after a stint on caixa I started filming the third surdos, the same as I'd done last week. The lead repique player, a brilliant 16-year-old kid named Bruno, had been watching me playing caixa (during my good 15 minutes, thank god), and later noticed me watching the thirds. At the next break he began gesturing insistently that I should switch to third. He seemed to be convinced that I could not possibly understand a single word of Portuguese - he would never speak a single word to me, even when I spoke to him in Portuguese, but would only communicate in silent pantomime. Anyway, he started pantomiming, rather insistently, that I should play third surdo. Mestre Jonas gave me a thumbs-up about it too, and so I switched.

Surdo! Jonas was on third too, right next to me.

Surdo surdo surdo!

It's funny. Jonas had told me last week "You cannot show any fear" but I discovered immediately, that's easy; I simply don't feel any fear on surdo. I feel shy about other instruments - caixa, repique, tamborim. But on surdo, the moment I hook that big drum to my belt and feel its familiar weight leaning against my shins, there is no fear.

Bruno was on lead repique. I heard his call, and Jonas and I just flew into the samba. It is like: the starting gate opens and the horse charges out onto the limitless track ahead. No fear, only exhilaration.

I stayed on third for a long time, I don't know how long... many samba-enredos and a samba version of "Happy birthday" went by... I played every variation I knew, made up new ones, played off what the other guys were doing, starting trying to match the songs. I felt so comfortable. It felt like home.

People kept turning around and looking at me. I starting getting little thumbs-ups from caixa and repique players all around, and from the director who was leading. A woman in the front row, playing cuica, kept looking back at me with a wide smile.

Eventually Bruno gestured for me to switch to second-surdo. He and the assistant mestre (who was leading, while Jonas played), both mimed through a repique call to be sure I knew where to enter.

I switched to second. Played 2 samba-enredos there.

Bruno gestured for me to switch to first surdo. I switched to first. I stayed on first a long time.

My old friend first surdo - this where it all began, for me, with samba. Even after all this time, there is something about first surdo, the solidity and the power of it. You stand tall, reach deep, open your ears to everybody all around you, and power down.

We'd reached the late-night Feeding of the Bateria. Rounds of guys came by passing out beers and Guarana sodas. A guy with a big tray of little pastries walked by and stuffed two pastries into my mouth while I was playing - not exactly at my request - he did the same to the director, so both me & the director had our mouths were completely stuffed full, too full to chew, and we were almost choking on the crumbs. He couldn't use his whistle any more and had to cue everything with elaborate huge gestures. He caught my eye and saw me struggling to swallow too, and we both started laughing, and then laughing more because we couldn't even laugh without spraying crumbs all over. (Through all this, of course, I KEPT DRUMMING, you can't ever stop!!)

Eventually we got into a series of old samba-enredos with complicated calls that I'd never heard before. Bruno and the director both realized I didn't know any of the breaks, and Bruno started silently coaching me through the breaks, miming each one beforehand and then trying by sheer force of will and intense eye contact to get me through it when it finally happened. But eventually, of course, I completely blew an unusual call that I'd never heard before, that came out of a long weird paradinha in a place where I thought there'd be a 4-count call after it, but nah, it was an 8-count call. I went BOOM! , just at the wrong time! Ouch!!! That was that, at the next song off they switched me off to caixa again! That's the rule - once you screw up on first or second surdo, you automatically switch off at the next song. I'd always heard about this; but it didn't feel bad, as I'd always imagined it would. It seemed to just be routine; nobody holds it against you. Mocidade turns out to be very forgiving, actually, of the learning process. They have to be; they are training up new players all the time.

So, it turned out, they were all still really pleased with me, in spite of my big ol' bad boom at the end, and assumed I'd be back on surdo next week.

I was actually pretty glad to switch off - my arms were really exhausted and I'd shredded my hand. I had been developing a variety of blisters and had been switching to some different mallet holds, each of which would avoid the current blister but then would start a new blister. By now they'd all kind of blended together... all the skin on the side of my index finger had sort of pulled loose and slid down toward the thumb. Not a blister so much as a flaying. I even got a blister on my pinky (how did I do that?) and hammered my hand into the drum rods a couple times, and the next day I realized I had a four separate bruises on my knee, I think from all the jumping I was doing with the third surdo. It'll all heal up in a week. It always does.

Afterwards.... when the bateria finally stopped for the night... I was standing around in the courtyard, and one of the tougher directors came by. He said to the guy next to him, in Portuguese, "Check it out, she played everything! Third, second, first, she played everything, and she played WELL! And she didn't make "noise", she played well!" (noise, "barulho", apparently meant bad playing. "Ela nao fez barulho nao, ela tocou bem!") "Even on caixa she played well!" - he must have walked by in my first 15 minutes on caixa, thank god!

I felt so lucky.

Then the odyssey back. Nana and the Germans had left already; I'd been completely oblivious of the time.... and now I had no idea where to catch a bus back. But Jonas managed to connect me with a bateria member who lives not too far from me, who said he could give me a ride back, but "in just 15 little minutes, ok?" (quinze minutinhos!) = two hours. But it was so interesting, sitting there in the friendly outdoor bar outside Mocidade, the pagode band playing, the clumps of players arguing about escola details ("Well, what I think is, for the cd they really should do would Grupo Acesso does, record it live! It would have so much more energy...." "We need to solve that problem where, you know how the bateria doesn't quite all fit in the recuo and they sort of end up in an L shape, and half the band can't hear the other half?" "You should have seen Imperio Serrano last night at the Sambodromo, oh my god, they have this break with the bells that's so cool, it goes like this, look, look, check it out, they go DING DONG DING and everybody crouches down....")

I heard a rooster crow. An honest to god rooster! The sky was getting light. yikes! We finally piled into the guy's little car - the driver, me, and a friend of his. It was a tiny rattletrap 2-door car with the roof coming down in back, so I lay on my side in the tiny little back seat. Both guys had their windows wide open, and a galeforce wind was howling through the car. I was shuddering with cold. They put the Samba-Enredos 2007 cd on, and put the Mocidade song on endless repeat for the 45-minute drive back to Zona Sul. It was past 7am by the time I got back home.... and I was so wired I couldn't fall asleep.

If you have the courage

Another really busy week. I'm scrambling to assimilate the timbal stuff from Salvador, the full Monobloco repertoire on both caixa and tamborim, and Banga's several new pieces. oh man... I've played in so many groups in the last year and a half and every single one of them has about 50 new hand signs. (The biggest mental conflict for me is that crossed-arms signal used in Seattle to mean "stop" here means "caixas keep playing")

Had my first lesson with Mestre Jonas on Tuesday. It was really fabulous. I didn't realize that the lesson came with 2 excellent accompanists (Nana on surdo, and Sigga on caixa or repique) and that it would apparently go as long as I wanted it to - an hour and a half into it Jonas was still saying "What do you want to see next?" - plus it also included FIVE hours afterwards of drinking beer with all of them at the little bar nearby, during which Jonas insisting on buying all our beers, spending nearly half of the lesson money I'd just given him, and pretty much gave me a 5-hour Portuguese lesson for free too.

I was impressed with Jonas' teaching style. It's always interesting seeing how teachers do, or don't, adjust to your level, when they don't know you yet. Jonas knew nothing about me, so he started with Mocidade's most basic third-surdo (terceira; little bass drum) pattern, very slow; when he saw that I matched his timing perfectly on that, he added in the simplest variation; then the next, then the next, jumping levels rapidly when he saw that I knew some stuff already; until at about 15 minutes into it, he said suddenly "You're already a terceirista. So let's work more on combinations of variations and real-world situations and the musicality of improvisations." In the real world, third-surdo is an intense position - there's only a few of them (usually 4 or 6), it's extremely important for keeping the groove and tempo rolling for everybody else, and it's a showman position of strength and fire.

Jonas spotted some subtle things I hadn't noticed - "Most of your patterns are short, 4 or 8 counts long. Try longer ones, 12 and 16 or even longer" and "Answer your fellow third-surdo players. Give them room to do their solo, and let them finish it, and then do something else that builds off of what they did. But don't step on their solo." and "Move your whole body more when you play." and "Get a more musical tone out of the drum." He worked us through a whole variety of repique calls and entrances and exits, taught me a call-out and had me do all the call-outs from third; and showed me some beautiful combinations and motifs I'd never tried before, for solos.

Mocidade's thirds do not do long arranged patterns like in several other escolas. In Mocidade, the thirds all improvise almost constantly, and players seem encouraged to develop their own solo style. (From an audience perspective, I actually prefer the long arranged patterns - they are much louder and the crowd can hear them, and they support the song better. But from a player perspective, I ADORE improv. The audience can't really hear it, but it fires up all the players around you and keeps the band excited.)

So he had me practice that kind of solo'ing, trading off solos with him, as if we were both competitive thirds in the same bateria. (Once we coincidentally did the exact same random improv not once but THREE times in a row.) Finally he switched to discussing the third's importance in conveying tempo to the firsts and seconds. He put me in an imaginary, invisible bateria. He backed 20 feet away to my side until he was exactly as far away as I would be from a primeira surdo player in a real bateria, he put Sigga just where the repique player would be, and we played in an imaginary Mocidade for a while. He was challenging me to keep the swing and tempo perfect through all my variations so that Sigga and I stayed locked and Jonas was able to stay steady and comfortable on primeiro. I did pretty well till I bumbled some of the brand-new motifs I'd just learned, not too badly, but I could feel how those little inconsistencies made the boat rock, how Sigga and Jonas had to adjust.

He said later, "Thirds lead the caixas; and the thirds and caixas, together, lead the firsts and seconds [the big bass drums]; and they lead everybody else."

It was raining by now; the drums were getting wet; but I didn't want to stop. A man from Mangueira walked by and was delighted to find a tiny bateria in his neighborhood park on his way home. He immediately started trying to arrange us into Mangueira style! Then he realized who Jonas was and almost bashfully apologized ("I like Mocidade too, very much!").

At the end Jonas said I could come play in Mocidade if I like! Late at night, you know, after 2am when the best players rotate off and new people are allowed to play. He said, play repique or third surdo!

Later he said "Se voce tiver a coragem...." - "If you have the courage.... you could become part of the family, and parade with us. " Play before 2am, he meant. In the real bateria.

He was talking about third surdo. I was astonished. Women are not normally allowed on surdo at the top-league escolas. Not to practice, and never to parade. Maybe times are changing. (I know of 1 third surdo female in the Rocinha escola, in the second-tier league; I don't know of any currently in the top league, though I haven't been to all the escolas.) He warned me, "You cannot show any fear. Because they will all challenge you. Because you are not from the community, and you are a woman." He got talking very rapidly at this point, trying to convey something intensely important about the politics and perils of third surdo, but I was losing hold of the language and all I could grasp is that it is incredibly important that I either do, or don't, do something when the other players are, or are not, doing solos, and are, or are not, getting excited or angry with me....or... something... I should either stand my ground and keep solo'ing, or was he saying I should back off and not step on their toes when they are soloing? hmm.... shucks... I wonder what he said.... dang.... rats.... whatever it was, it was important! But the main point came through: You have to have courage. You cannot show any fear.

Through all this talking, I kept thinking I was only drinking 1 little glass of beer, but Jonas kept refilling that little glass. Later I realized we'd worked our way through seven 600-ml big bottles of Skol. For most of that there were only 3 people at the table, so, let's see... eep... could I have really drunk 1.4 liters of beer?? It goes down so easy here. And every now and then you toss your whole glass in the street if the beer in it has gotten too warm. (Brazilians are horrified by warm beer. "Oh no! Your beer is HOT! Your beer is TERRIBLY HOT!" they'll say, grabbing the glass and flinging the contents into the gutter as if it is poisonous. Then refilling it for you with icy cold beer.) We had a "sai dela", one for the road, and then a second sai dela and a third and a fourth. By the last saidela and the last of my 1.4 liters of beer, I had LOADS of courage and was ready to tackle any escola in the world!

The next day I booked 4 hours of studio time in Banga's new Botafogo studio, to practice third-surdo till my arms fall off.

Se voce tiver a coragem....

Mocidade!

First things first: my first podcast of sorts is posted. Nothing fancy, just a mp3 of Mocidade's bateria walking past me in their first Sambodromo rehearsal last night. You can hear all the different sections walking past, and then the sound truck (with the singers & cavaquinho) bringing up the rear.

(If you want the full flavor of the evening, I also posted the full 21-minute recording in which I fight my way back through the crowd to the bateria. They kept getting away from me, so you will keep hearing different sections ebb and flow past me. I managed to stay with the tamborims for a while.)

They are both at:
homepage.mac.com/sambakat/
click on "mp3s" at the top

And I'll post the lyrics below.


So anyway - Last year I kept hearing rumors of a semi-mythical German Escola Van. Apparently there was a German woman somewhere in Rio who takes a van of people to Mocidade and Beija-Flor every week. Well, I found her at last! The inimitable Nana Zeh, who turns out to be an energetic German ethnomusicologist of boundless energy and good cheer. She lives here full-time, plays tamborim in Mocidade, and is always happy either to take friends with her on the long bus ride, or, if there are enough friends, she hires a van and we all split the costs - plus her meeting place is only a 5-minute walk from my house - plus she knows Mestre Jonas and can coordinate lessons with him.

So suddenly I was in a van with a cheerful polyglot mixture of Germans, Norwegians, 1 American and 1 Brazilian. (The Brazilian woman turned out to be a biologist like me - she is the only Brazilian I've ever met who knew the name of lobo-guara, the beautiful maned wolf of the Brazilian savanna. I started to say "um lobo com pernas longas...", a wolf with long legs, and she immediately said "Lobo-guara.")

It was only 17 reais round-trip to get all the way to Mocidade! (I thought she said 70 at first, and I considered that cheap, since by cab it would cost me probably 160! ) 17 - I can afford 17! This means I can go to Mocidade every week! yay!

I had such a fabulous time there. Stayed in the bateria all night and even got to play caixa (near the end when they'll let anybody play). There was a shortage of caixas, and of straps, over on my side of the bateria, so after a while I turned my caixa over to one of the local young Brazilians who was looking around hopefully for unused caixas. Next time I'll bring my own caixa & strap so I don't have to feel like I'm cheating the locals out of a caixa.

It was an unusual experience to find myself thinking "Gee, they play kind of slow" and then find out later that they were playing at 140bpm. I've been thinking the same thing in Monobloco (which usually plays samba at 135). My sense of slow and fast has gotten warped! ah, unbelievably, now I can easily play at that speed - all that practice paying off at last... EXCEPT I couldn't hear myself at all. I have to practice playing louder.

We stayed till close to 5am - Nana is my kind of tour van operator, the kind who doesn't leave till the last drum is put away. I arranged a lesson with Jonas on repinique for Tuesday; and then got to see Mocidade again last night at the Sambodromo. This was the first weekend of the free Sambodromo rehearsals. Vila Isabel, Estacio, and Portela also played this weekend. Such fun, as always. At one point there was a Mocidade bateria director standing just in front of me on the other side of the fence. I recognized him - he had been watching me the night before when I played caixa. So I tapped him on the shoulder to say hi, and he recognized me too, & gave me a big friendly greeting. Mocidade has always been so friendly to me. They gave me and my parents an incredibly warm welcome when we visited last year. So I'm delighted to find that I'll be able to visit Mocidade more often now.

Mocidade Samba-Enredo - 2007

Divina criação
Do pó da terra ao sopro da vida
“ O Grande artesão do universo”
Legou ao homem a inspiração criativa
Ao deixar o paraíso, se fez preciso
Viver pelas próprias mãos
Com o passar do tempo
O mundo em evolução
Escravizado pela sua ambição
Vê o futuro ao simples toque do botão

Amar, viver, sonhar, acreditar
Que a alma é a fonte, energia da vida
Na máquina jamais se encontrará
A inspiração que faz nascer a poesia

Mãos que se entrelaçam
Da natureza, toda forma de expressão
Transborda em cada peça, sua imaginação
Tão belas, tão lindas
Uma cultura em cada região
Aplausos, às estrelas da folia
O sonho se transforma em alegria
Sou eu, tenho samba no pé, sou sambista
Nas mãos, o talento de artista
Eu me orgulho de ser artesão

Um Brasil feito à mão
Um só coração – liberdade!
Da emoção, eu faço a arte
Em verde e branco, com a Mocidade

back from Salvador

whew... just got back in to Rio... and have finally managed to post some Olodum movies & lotsa Salvador pics, including Thanksgiving, and 8-year-old Bianca's view of her home city, to:
www.homepage.mac.com/sambakat

Salvador is another universe. When I'm there I find it hard to remember Rio, and vice versa. They each seem completely all-consuming.

While there I was taking 2 drum classes a day with Macambira, who stormed us through several forms of samba-reggae, "samba dura", "samba normal", ijexa, seis-por-oito (6/8), and afro-samba. It was clearly all just the tip of the iceberg. Salvador is so great for hand drummers because they put hand drums in absolutely everything: bossa nova, samba, classic rock, everything, it's all got hand drums. For me it was really starting to fly. Macambira uses a different slap than I'm used to - sort of half-closed sharp POP without the bright ring. I still like the bright ringy slap, but was intrigued by the clean-ness of the POP, so I worked on that, with partial success. (There's also a floppy center slap, different than the bass) It felt good to focus on just timbal for a while and really work up some speed and fire, and try some solos. There is something about it; when it gets going fast there is such an adrenalin rush! I wish I had a couple more months ... a couple years, even ....

On my last evening I happened to meet Olodum's main teacher, who turns out to be the guy that who screens foreign musicians who want to play with Olodum. Apparently the deal is, you take a few lessons from him, and he checks you out to see if you can play in the main group. As soon as he was pointed out to me I said "OH! It's THAT GUY!" Over a year ago, on my first visit to Salvador, I started following a street band around in Pelourinho, and I was totally impressed with one particular surdo player, who could rip off the most blistering rolls with complete precision, while laughing the whole time and doing some crazy dance move and also teasing the guys on either side. I never forgot him. Well, that's Olodum's main teacher! So, it'd be fantastic just to get some lessons from him! and now I have his cell number! ha! I've got to go back to Salvador, for sure.

Back in Rio tonight, I gotta shift gears quick - Sambadromo rehearsals have started. But I missed the first rehearsal tonight when my plane was delayed. Brazil's had a crazy series of enormous airplane delays for the past month, mostly related to a confusing semi-strike by the air traffic controllers, in turn due to anger about the terrible crash of a private American jet with a Brazilian 737 over the Amazon last month. The Americans all survived; but the Brazilian 737 went down with no survivors. (this all seemed very remote to me, until this week when I realized I was on that very flight path & same airline, Gol. My flight to Salvador was the first leg of Gol's long flight that hopskotches up the coast and then heads to the Amazon.) The air traffic controllers were furious at the American pilots' insinuations that Brazilian air traffic control might have been at fault. It's all gotten intense media scrutiny - huge articles in the weekly newsmagazines with full-color graphics and timelines of the flight paths, etc., the whole nine yards. There is a huge investigation going on, and it is clear now that air traffic control was at least partly to blame. Recordings released last week show the controllers in Brasilia verbally authorized the little American jet to fly at the same altitude as the Gol jet. (but there are still some inconsistencies) It doesn't help that there's a huge radar black hole in the area of the Amazon where the crash occurred. Turns out that Brazilian air traffic control does not actually have radar coverage of all of Brazilian airspace, due to the vastness of the Amazon.

I think it's been embarrassing for the Brazilians, who seem to feel perpetually like a first-world mind trapped in a third-world body, and it has prompted one of those periodic Brazilian soul-searchings of "Why can't we get ourselves organized? When are we going to stop being a "developing" nation and be developed, already?" And having it just lead to a month of maddening, pointless airplane delays seemed just to make everyone feel worse.

And of course the loss of the 737 was just plain tragic. I think it has somehow rubbed salt in the wound that the little American plane, and everyone aboard it, survived - a handful of rich American jet owners and a New York Times reporter, no less.

So, it touched my life tonight only in this tiny, insignificant way of missing the Vila Isabel rehearsal at the Sambodromo tonight. Which doesn't really matter at all....