Finding Cubango....(part 2)

Cubango was primarily recognizable simply by the fact that there was a large crowd of chattering Brazilians milling around in the street. I finally spotted a tiny door that said "Academicos do Cubango", through which people were slowly drifting in ones and twos, and I followed them, climbed up a tall, broad flight of green-and-white stairs, and emerged high up in a long, tall vast room whose walls were completely painted in green and white. With green-and-white banners handing from all the rafters, green-and-white flags hanging from the walls, and green-and-white drums in neat rows all over the floor. The Cubango quadra (rehearsal hall).

I looked around for Jonas, didn't see him, and then noticed a little pack of gringos. Some of them looked familiar... three or four of the faces... a little bit familiar... but from where??? I finally just went up and asked, in English, "Do I know any of you from somewhere?" and one of the women peered at me and said, in perfect English with a slight German accent: "Yes.... but from where?"

We stared at each for a second and then she said:

"Bloco X!"

Of course! It was Martina from Bloco X! It turned out they were all German samba players, and I'd met some of them three years ago when I went to the Bloco X samba weekend in Germany. (Bloco X being the mega-bloco of the best European sambistas that forms briefly in the summer, as a sort giant party/reunion/rehearsal/samba weekend. Attended by players from almost every country in Europe. I'd been the sole American.) (Yes, I once flew 8000 miles from Oregon to Germany just to attend a samba weekend. Yes, I am an addict.)

So suddenly I had a whole new bunch of German friends. A lot of them (most? all? can't remember) were from Cologne, which apparently has forty! I said FORTY! FORTY! different samba groups. Just the one city of Cologne. Forty samba groups! Of varying quality, sure, but how is forty samba groups in a non-Brazilian city even possible? (And what the hell is wrong with the United States? No, wait, never mind, it'll take years just to begin to commence to start discussing what is wrong with the United States...) Anyway, they also tell me Cologne has a "very good" Carnaval, apparently quite the party. It's a real Carnaval, i.e. on the actual Carnaval weekend, in February. "Icy cold," they warned me, "but lots of fun." It's going on my list of Carnavals that I have to visit some day (and now I've got friends there, too!)

Finally Jonas arrived, bateria members started arriving, people were putting on straps and grabbing sticks, grabbing drums....

I was hovering by the bateria when something happened that has never happened before. One of the Brazilian caixa players looked at me closely, and then came up and said (in perfect English): "Are you Kathleen?" Huh? Yes, but how did he know my name was Kathleen? I said yes, and he said "I read your blog. One of my friends sent out a tweet, you know, on Twitter, saying he'd just found a blog that mentioned Cubango, and it was your blog. Last night. So, I thought that might be you. Welcome to Cubango!" Wow... It honestly had never occurred to me that a Brazilian bateria player might find a blog entry of mine, let alone find it less than 24 hours after I'd posted it. I felt very surprised, and very welcome... and suddenly at home, because suddenly I already had friends in Cubango. (HI DANIEL!)

I'd assumed I'd just be watching, at least at first, but then I saw that all the German players had put on straps, picked up sticks and caixas... so I thought "hey!" and I grabbed a caixa too, but Jonas started urgently motioning to me and I thought "aw..." but it turned out what he was trying to convey was that I needed to go get a bateria t-shirt from the t-shirt guy, and I thought "OH" and I went and got my bateria t-shirt and put it on and I grabbed a caixa, double-checked to make sure all the Brazilian caixa players who needed caixas had caixas, no prob, plenty of caixas to go around, cool, cool, and the repique started and we all started playing and it was ....

..... it was an earthquake, a volcano, an ocean, of samba. So, it turns out the Cubango bateria is really powerful. Yes, a lot of the players are new, as I'd heard from Jonas, but they're playing pretty dang well, and after about half a second of samba it became clear that there are a lot of very experienced players in the bateria too. The samba is SOLID. The third-surdos are killer. (I asked Daniel about the bateria later and he confirmed, yes, Cubango did hang on to some of its experienced people, and also lured some good people back who hadn't been playing recently. There's also some people who also play with Viradouro, and there's a van of tamborims and a set of directors that come all the way from Mocidade. So, piece by piece, the new bateria was assembled, out of a mix of good players who stayed, old players enticed to come back, new players freshly trained up, and a set of experienced directors who have a lot of Grupo Especial experience and who know each other very well.)

I noticed the bateria is still learning some of the bossas - Jonas stopped the bateria several times to re-explain certain bossas, to clarify where the caixas re-enter after a break, to drill the surdos on certain fancy hits. It rapidly polished up as the rehearsal progressed. And the samba itself was beautiful. The thing that always stuns me about the baterias here is the way the samba is so deeply solid and locked, from the very second it starts. A lot of foreign groups have sort of a wobbly start to the samba, and only lock in after about a minute or so; but these Rio groups, they're rock solid and swinging from the first millisecond. (I believe a lot of this is because of the very high quality of the surdo players. You cannot have that certainty, that clarity, if the first and second surdos don't start off with impeccable precision and thunderous volume, right from the repique call, right away with the first surdo's pickup and the second surdo's response.)

I played the whole rehearsal...over two hours... it was wonderful. I know I say a lot of things here are wonderful, and I tend to run out of superlatives, but this evening really WAS wonderful. It was just so amazingly thrilling and so, so RIGHT, to be right in the middle of all that fire, that energia, that thunder going right through your bones. Riding that wave again, playing in a real Rio escola-de-samba bateria again.

So, of course, I fell in love with Cubango.

As we were rolling along, I thought "Bless Gisele for mentioning to me once, years ago, that caixa is one of the most useful instruments to learn" - it was entirely because of Gisele's comment that I started learning caixa, and she was totally right, it's one of the few instruments where you can jump right in with an escola, not have to learn a lot of complicated desenhos (like tamborim), not have to fight for a spot on a rare drum (like surdo). (the other best-drum-to-learn is cuica, just btw.) I thought "Bless Jorge Alabe for teaching me this caixa pattern," and, a second later "And also for teaching me how to play em cima," and then "and also for that trick with the strap for tucking the caixa under your arm," and "And Monobloco for suffering my beginner-caixa-player fumblings" and "And the Lions for polishing me up to escola tempo, like, god, remember that couple of weeks last year when I was the ONLY caixa player and I could barely keep it together and Randy was so damn patient with me?" And a dozen other people and teachers and groups who have helped me along the way like that. All those little steps and all those different people and all those groups, all contributing, all helping me get to where I was tonight.

Two hours later it was finally time to stop... We ran through all the breaks a couple more times, and finally it was over. We had officially stopped and we were just supposed to be carrying our drums upstairs to the drum storage area, but as we were all carrying the drums over there, little bursts of samba kept breaking out. A caixa player would toy with 1 measure of samba, the next caixa player would pick it up, a nearby surdo would join in, and, like a contagious virus, it would spread through all the players till it was suddenly FULL VOLUME and the WHOLE BATERIA playing, and the directors had to blow their whistles and make us all stop. Then there would be maybe one second of silence. Then some other caixa player would start dinking around and another caixa player would pick it up, and a surdo would join in, and then, suddenly FULL VOLUME and the WHOLE BATERIA and the directors blowing their whistles STOP! (This all while we are carrying our drums up the stairs) Over and over... it's hard to stop a happy bateria, you know?

Finally all the drums were put away. Me and the Germans were all standing around sort of a mute happy daze, all grinning at each other. I got chatting with a girl - I am not actually sure whether she was one of the Germans or one of the Brazilians - I think she was in a separate set of tamborim Germans that was not part of "my" Cologne delegation, but, anyway, I noticed her because she was bouncing around (literally, bouncing up and down) in excitement because she'd just gotten her official bateria card. Meaning she was going to parade in Carnaval. I couldn't help thinking "Geeeee.... wowww.... to PARADE... wouldn't that be amazing.... to actually parade in Carnaval in the Sambodromo...." The one thing I've never done here. Knowing it was impossible, because Carnaval is, of course, only two and a half weeks away.

But then again, this is a new bateria, right? And they're still learning the bossas, right? Could it maybe be possible?

My bouncing, possibly-German friend asked in Portuguese: "Are you going to parade?" and I explained "Well, of course, you know, I'd LOVE to, but it's impossible, isn't it? It's too late, isn't it?" and she said "You should ask. Why not ask?"

She looked at me very seriously for a moment and said, "You'll never parade if you don't ask."

I gathered up all my courage and approached Jonas and said "Could I possibly maybe parade? I couldn't parade, could I? Would it be possible maybe what do you think?" I am pretty shy (really!) about this sort of thing - though certain Lions will laugh when they read this, I am not naturally the pushy type - and I didn't have my subjunctives all lined up the way they should have been, and I was very nervous and it all came out very garbled. But he got the idea, and he leaned over and said something complicated and fast that included the word "agogos" - bells. What is he saying, is he saying I should play bell? What? My trilingual German friend Nana was standing right next to me, so I asked her what he had said. She looked at me with that very wry, amused Nana look (Nana is always highly entertained by the Portuguese difficulties of other gringoes) and she said "He's offering you a spot in the bateria. To parade."

(Turns out what he'd said was, 3 bell players had gone missing and skipped rehearsals - meaning there were 3 extra costumes, and 3 spots, for, say, an extra caixa player.)

OH.

Sou Cubangoooooo!!