Down in the lower ranks

There are six tiers of samba escolas in Rio. Everybody knows about Grupo Especial, the gods of the six million dollar budgets. And then there's Grupo A, no slouches either, then Grupo B, all the way down to Grupo E.

Grupo A has several extremely good escolas; many of you know Império Serrano, Estácio de Sá, União da Ilha, and São Clemente. Basically Grupo A is where a very good escola that has no extra money will end up. You have to be rich to get into Especial - and to stay in Especial. Because the budget that the city of Rio provides to the escolas is just not enough for the size and quality of floats and costumes that Especial now requires. (It takes at least a R$5,000,000 budget to have a real shot of winning. The city of Rio provides R$2,200,000).

So Grupo A is actually pretty good.

Grupo B is a little more ragged, and is a great place to go if you want to just jump right into a bateria and start playing and even have a friendly welcome, and have a good chance of being asked to parade (versus having to beg to get to parade). Many international sambistas get their one peek into the Grupo B world via Alegria da Zona Sul, the Grupo B escola that rehearses right on Copacabana beach on Sunday afternoons. They're based in the favela right between Copacabana and Ipanema. (Yes, look up at the hills, there's a favela there! And it's a whole nother world...) I played with them several times - they're very friendly and welcoming, like, REALLY friendly, and they have a decent little bateria. No fancy breaks and not many good tamborim players, but there were enough solid surdos and caixas for it to swing right along.

If you've been in Grupo Especial it's easy to sniff at Grupo B, but look again. When they bring the flag out and the porta-bandeira starts whirling around, when the eight or ten members of the little dance group start their show and you see that they have a whole choreography worked out, when you see the mestre of the bateria get into a punching match with a caixa player who isn't swinging right, and on parade night when you see their gorgeous little floats that have been cobbled together in an old leaky warehouse somewhere - well, you realize how hard they're working. This is the real thing. The real community Carnaval. No, it ain't Especial, but they put on a good show. They have some pretty damn good floats, too - a Grupo B escola might have a budget of US$300,000 for their parade.

O Globo says there was stiff competition this year in Grupo B, with the top two finishers, Inocentes de Belford Roxo and Paraíso do Tuiutí, somehow grabbing 1st and 2nd place past the great parade of 3rd place finisher Unidos de Padre Miguel. The presdient of Inocentes was thrilled with their results (everybody thought Unidos de Padre Miguel was going to win) and joked "Now we'll show everybody how we're the third great escola to come from the Baixada region!" (The other two being Grande Rio and Beija-Flor, both just a wee bit more famous.) Inocentes spent R$600,000 on their parade this year, in case you were wondering - about US$400,000.

Oh, and, Alegria da Zona Sul finished a respectable 5th, out of 14 escolas.

I've never seen Grupos C, D and E. They seem to have a lot of shuffling going on between groups - at least the top two, and sometimes top three, finishers move up to the next group, and the lowest two or three move down. With pairs or trios of escolas moving up and down, there's lots of mobility between those groups. But I always wondered, what happens to the loser of Grupo E? They can't move down - there's no lower group.

Well, the C, D, and E results were published yesterday in O Globo. And the loser of Grupo E... the VERY WORST escola in all of Rio... is....

Canários das Laranjeiras! (Canaries of the Orange Trees.)

I shouldn't really be calling them the worst escola in Rio, because the poor Canaries only lost because they got socked with a 2-point penalty right off the bat before their parade had even started: they didn't have the minimum required number of paraders.

And the punishment for losing Grupo E turns out to be: they have to go one year without parading. They're going to have to skip the 2009 Carnaval.

I took one look at that name and thought - hey! They must be from Laranjeiras! Right around the corner from where I was living in Flamengo. Wouldn't it be fun to parade with a little escola from Laranjeiras? And help them avoid that two-point penalty for not having enough people? Maybe I'll join up.... but apparently not till 2010, of course!