Start on the THREE!

My new favorite place to live in Salvador: Santo Antonio, just north of touristy Pelourinho. Peaceful, winding cobblestone streets lined with unbelievably charming, and unbelievably rickety, old townhouses, all painted in bright colors with gingerbread trim picked out in white. Lots of the old buildings are getting fixed up now, and turned into pousadas and restaurants. And touristy Pelourinho is just a short walk away when you want to get to the dance and drum classes, the bars, and the bands. (just a very short walk, but dowwwwwn a big steep hill and uppppppp another one! It´s a good workout living here!

I found some friends who knew friends who had some rooms to rent, and I ended up in the most wonderful old house in Santo Antonio. Yeah, it's rickety, there's no hot water, the electricity is very dubious, the stairs are falling apart, there are no 90-degree angles anywhere (especially not the stairs!) and I can see the sky in a few places through the crude tile roof. But I have a huge high-ceilinged attic all to myself, and it's quiet and peaceful. The vast kitchen has an incredible view of
an old convent on a hillside covered with orange-flowered trees. And the other people in the house are just wonderful to hang out with. The couple that own the place turn out to be a former dancer from the Lions of Batucada, and her husband turns out to be none other than Bira, the marvelous drum teacher who I studied with when I first got to Brazil. It was Bira who got me started on timbal! They'll both be going back to the US this year and I'm hoping we all land in Portland, Oregon, because I'd really like to study more with Bira, especially candomble, his specialty.

Meanwhile, Ramiro's samba-reggae class has been storming along. It´s all I´ve been doing. Out of bed early in the morning, a little breakfast overlooking the vast Bay of Saints, then off to drum class for the whole morning and part of the afternoon. Then the long walk home in the heat through the street markets of bustling downtown Salvador. Buy a half-liter of little orange caja fruits and suck on them like candy...finally get home...Then a shower and lie down on the couch with the fan blowing on me... think about going to some of the other excellent dance & drum classes... plan to go to Bira´s candomble class... oops, napped right through it... get up and go have a chocolate crepe after nightfall. then to sleep at midnight in my vast, cool, empty,peaceful room. Repeat the next day.

It´s been a really peaceful, wonderful way to live. I am so glad I found a peaceful part of Brazil at last.

Tomorrow's the last day. We've covered a lot of varieties of samba dura, old samba-reggae, modern samba-reggae, merengue and cabula; lots of drills on entrances, exits, claves, and not getting crossed; an introduction to the "surdo bateria" that lots of blocos use for stage shows now (one player playing 3 surdos and a repique that are all mounted in a big semicircle around the player), and lots of great tips and drills on the vocabulary for timbal solos and repique solos.

Ramiro is a VERY good teacher. He also has a tendency that I love to drift off on historical/ethnomusicological tangents - usually sparked by some comment from his pro musician friend Leo (a great musician with a vast background encompassing Cuban), who is constantly piping up with a puzzled objection like "But, Ramiro, I never see the old guys playing that. They´re always playing this other thing" and off they'll go into some fascinating long talk about whether semba really is the ancestor of samba, is samba really 2/4 or 4/4 (to my delight, Ramiro is emphatically a 4/4 guy! yeah!), whether Rio-style samba is spiritually more Yoruba or more Bantu, what the relationship is between samba dura and samba de roda, why one of the surdos has been vanishing, whether flams are "before the beat" or "after the beat"... etc...

He drills us over and over again on "where's the 1", pointing out how, again and again, samba AND samba-reggae both always start and end on the 3. He's even brought in some "favorite wrong recordings" of big-name stars who did not grow up in the Salvador tradition, and got it wrong and started on the 1 instead or who even got crossed. Today he played a Maria Bethania recording of the great song "Sonho Meu" that had a beautiful classic 3 entrance, but later on the drumset player started doing lots of dull little breaks that resolved on the 1 instead of on the 3. hmm, come to think of it, a lot of the drumset players that I know in the US do the exact same breaks. It wasn't BAD, exactly, it just wasn't.... it wasn't rootsy. It sounded like a rock drummer who'd learned a samba pattern for drumset out of a book.

One student piped up, "So what if you start a song with a funny break that starts on the 1 instead of the 3? As long as everybody in the band is in agreement about it, there is no problem, is there?"

Ramiro's answer was simply: "Here is the problem. If you get used to playing that way, you'll never be able to play with guys from the street. If you invite them to sit in with you, everybody'll end up all crossed [playing the second half of the samba pattern while you´re playing the first half, and vice versa] and they'll be completely annoyed at you. And they won´t believe you, won´t respect you."

He's right. My old band VamoLa always used to start with a 6-count call that I now realize is bizarre. Basically the entire band enters crossed. I never could track down where this entrance came from - I suspect they picked this up from an unusual Mocidade call that is supposed to be done only when it comes on the heels of a two-count callout, but VamoLa got it out of context, without the two-count callout.

Within VamoLa, we were all in agreement about it, so, no problem, right? But as soon as I left Seattle I found I couldn't play with any other samba band, in Brazil or in the US, until I re-learned that entrance. I was perpetually getting crossed! After every call, every break! Even now, whenever I travel in and out of Seattle I get crossed - first when I arrive in Seattle, I'm crossed relative to VamoLa; then I adjust; then when go to another city, I'm crossed again. (Especially if I don´t have a caixa nearby to cue me.) And it´s embarrassing getting crossed! It is a beginner´s mistake; and on third surdo it is almost the worst thing you can do.

It really is worth it to learn the common language, if you want to be part of the wider community. Sure, innovate, do your thing, do whatever you want; but if you want to play with other people or other groups, learn the common language.