Sao Clemente mp3s are up

I've gotten about a month behind on posting my video and audio files, which are accumulating about a hundred times faster than I can go through them. I just downloaded 56 sound files off my Edirol, and lots of them are over two hours long! this is getting hopeless! And they're all really great stuff, too. Somewhere in there are all of Imperio Serrano's bell breaks....if I can only find them.... and yes, dancer friends, I WANT to post those dancer files if I can just FIND them....

Anyway, tonight I'm posting some mp3s from the very end of the Sao Clemente rehearsal tonight (at www.homepage.mac.com/sambakat).

The first has a solo & paradinhas from Sao Clemente's killer repinique player Nico. Check out the beautiful long paradinha.

The second file has Sao Clemente's funk. Sao Clemente's the only escola that I've seen do such a funky groove for such a long time, the only one that will go completely out of samba and really groove on another rhythm. cool eh? (especially those tamborims! really simple idea but so effective)

The third is their afoxe. Again, a lot of escolas have a simple afoxe that they'll go into very briefly, for 8 bars or so (usually as part of "The Wave"), but Sao Clemente sits with it an unusually long time.

Last is the full recording with all of the above plus some more samba.

My recorder was hanging down my back and was mostly picking up the third-surdo & caixa that were behind me. Actually you can't even hear any of the other surdos at all, that third was swamping the mic so much! But it's nice to get such a clear recording of just a third surdo, because he's doing lots of good classic third-surdo improv in there (especially, the "offbeats-short-short-long" motif - really classic.)

That particular caixa guy was playing mostly chatter, not the normal Sao Clemente ride, so ignore that caixa if you're trying to learn the Sao Clemente pattern. The real Sao Clemente pattern seems to be more or less:

RllX rlXl Xlrl Xllr

(X = rimshot, R = right center accent, r = soft right, l = soft left)

... though there are lots of variations, that's basically what I hear. This is what I think of as the "Super Strong 4" class of samba caixa pattern because there's a massive strong rimshot on 4, stronger than anything else. As opposed to the "Soft 4" class of caixa pattern, like Viradouro & Mangueira. Then there's Mocidade, the softest four of all, with pure bossa clave. (this is just my own way of thinking about it)

whew, I actually got 1 of the 56 sound files edited and posted; I can hardly believe it...