the original samba-reggae!

I'm back in Salvador... land of sun, samba-reggae, and slow internet connections. Of dancer friends, and weirdly pushy/friendly capoeira guys / male hookers / I-dont-know-what-they-are-exactly-but-they-sure-have-great-bodies on every street corner. Where any kid on a street corner can do a double aerial somersault.

I came up here for just a week to check out Ramiro Musotto's samba-reggae workshop this week (3 hours a day, Mon through Fri). It turns out to be EXACTLY what I've always wanted for afrosamba & samba-reggae. Finally all the pieces are coming together. Wow... there's such a difference between learning from an American who says "I learned this from a Brazilian guy in LA who said he heard it on an old Ile Aiye album, and there´s something like it in the Daniela Mercury DVD" versus "I helped record that album, and I created that arrangement for Daniela, but here is what they really played on the street."

Ramiro is the real deal. He´s an interesting case. He´s not a street musician; he´s a high-end pro. And he´s not black (which you´d think would be a requirement to teach samba-reggae in Salvador!). But it turns out he has 30 years of experience working with all the afro blocos - recording, producing, learning, working with the mestres, and, yes, playing in the street in carnaval. Plus a ton of international touring experience. It all seems to have given him a global perspective that seems to me to be richer and more complete than the teachers I´ve seen who have primarily played with just bloco. He can explain Ile Aiye´s style better than the Ile Aiye players who I´ve studied with. Plus, glory be, he can count! Not only does he know what we Americans mean by "where´s the one", he actually spent a half hour today drilling us on it. (teaching tip I picked up from Ramiro: always have somebody playing the full surdo line, especially when you´re demonstrating other instruments. It helps people get oriented to how all the parts are supposed to fit together, and where the main beat actually is.)

He´s got stories of famous musicians coming to Salvador, hearing a bloco a couple times, misunderstanding something, then recording a cd with the misunderstood rhythm, which was then played on the radio, which was heard by the Salvadorean musicians - who then changed their style in response! "If you´re not careful, you contribute to killing the very thing you love."

So, his point was, learn the original stuff and get it right.

We started off with the oldest rhythms of both Olodum & Ile Aiye. Ile Aiye´s original rhythm, which was the very oldest samba-reggae, is almost extinct now. The cds on which they play it are out of print. Ramiro said "There is one place in Salvador where you can still hear it, only on Friday nights. I want you all to go see it so you know I´m not lying! This rhythm was real! It is what all the afro blocos really used to play! Ile Aiye invented it, all the other blocos copied it, and they all played it for many years unchanged, till Olodum started innovating."

It was so interesting to see the antigo (old) style. It really was samba and reggae, plain and simple. Surdos and repiques doing samba, caixas doing reggae. Just one major innovation: a fourth surdo, doing a roll. The repique was even played with hand and stick back then. (It was Olodum that switched to 2 baquetas for repique, a technique they borrowed from candomble.)

All sorts of similarities with samba that I´d never perceived before came leaping into view. How have I never noticed before that they both always begin and end on the 3? That Olodum´s "merengue" is pure Mocidade samba, just with the caixa pattern moved to repique, and with Portela´s third surdo? That the third surdo in samba-reggae is playing a pure samba pattern? (actually, I know why I have never noticed this - it´s because American blocos tend to play samba-reggae with only the first, second, and fourth surdo, eliminating the third surdo.) And I never had even known Ile Aiye´s antigo repique pattern, which turns out to be the same rare, beautiful Rio repique variant that I´d seen in Odilon Costa´s book of Rio samba.

So it´s been cool. Two days into it and looking forward very much to the next three.