Batuca's first show!

I'm staying with my friends Eduardo and Olivia, who I met years ago when I first came to Rio. Eduardo's a professional musician and directs Carnaval street bands here - his specialty is bands that play a variety of Brazilian rhythms, not only samba - and Olivia, who is professionally a film director, loves to play as well. Anyway, the next morning I'm blearily awakening at mid-day after my late-night Tijuca adventure, when Eduardo comes knocking on my door saying "Vamos tocar?" ("Let's play?") and saying something about terceira. Ten minutes later I've chugged down some coffee and Eduardo's saying in Portuguese, "So, I've got this brand new group, about forty drummers, and we've got our first ever public show, and since it's a brand new group it's mostly beginners so I think we need you on terceira, is that okay? You don't mind playing terceira do you? It'll be simple. Very easy. There's only four pieces and each has two or three different patterns and just a few hand signs and a couple of breaks and an entrance and an ending thing, and sometimes a little weird thing in the middle, okay? Very easy! Don't worry, you can just watch Vanessa and you'll be fine!" 

An alarmingly short time later I'm in a little van full of excited chattering Brazilians heading over the long bridge to Niteroi, the city on the other side of the bay from Rio. The group turns out to be called "Batucalacatuca", or Batuca for short. (Eduardo's previous group, a group I played in for years, was called "Bangalafumenga" and I'm trying to figure out what his deal is with these extremely long names that start with B?) Several of the bell players adopt me for some reason and give me a variety of festive little hats to wear and help me cut up my t-shirt. (you always have to wear the band t-shirt when you are playing in a Carnaval street band, but it seems to be required that the girls all immediately cut pieces off of the t-shirts and re-work them into much sexier little tanktops decorated with festive little colored ribbons.) Then suddenly there we are in Niteroi, milling around on a little street by a new hostel that is hosting our little Carnaval show. Ages pass with no clear plan apparent, everybody wandering around chattering, drums piled up all over the street. We start drifting over to a tiny street bar that has sprung into existence on the corner and start chugging down coconut-smoothies, which are absolutely incredible.  I see a cluster of perhaps a dozen black guys coming drifting up the street. They're all wearing identical green t-shirts and I realize they must have just finished parading in one of the local Carnaval groups here in Niteroi. They stand in a bunch with their arms folded over their chests, watching us with that skeptical "can these white girls actually play?" sort of look. I'm starting to get a little worried that I've stupidly agreed to perform in a group whose repertoire I only saw for the first time a couple of hours ago, but Eduardo zips by a few times to mention again "Just stand next to Vanessa," and "You'll be fine, just watch Vanessa", except I he forgets to point out who Vanessa is. Then all of a sudden we're starting! I think, well, hell with it, I strap on the terceira, I get in the middle of the 35 or so drummers, suddenly we're playing and I realize that next to me is a slender, tanned Brazilian woman who also has a terceira on, and she is playing like HELL. Strong and clean, and wonderful technique. All her syncopations are spot on. I decide "I'm just going to assume this is Vanessa", and I play next to her for the entire show. Watching her for every break. Laying out of the 1st measure of each piece and coming in on the 2nd once I see what the pattern is. She realizes what I'm doing and shoots me a grin now and then.

Pretty soon I've got hold of the rep and - My. God. It is so magical playing terceira again. I feel like I've come home after years of exile.  Even though it's a new bloco, even though it's mostly beginners, this is SO much fun. The repertoire is fantastic. (Eduardo has a particular skill at devising arrangements that are not too technically difficult, and are achievable by beginners, but that have a truly intense fun groove once all the different instruments are playing together). We're not playing all that fast or anything, but the whole crowd is dancing. I look over to the side at one point and spot all the black guys in the green t-shirts again, and they're all dancing now. One of them actually holding his beer cup in his teeth just so he can clap his hands over his head while he dances.

Partway through the parade I realize it was definitely a stupid idea to jump in on terceira without having played it in years. There's certain back and leg muscles you need just to be able to carry the thing, there's stamina you need to build up, there's calluses you need on your hands, there's arm muscles that need to strengthen. An hour into the show I'm dripping with sweat, my legs are shaking, my back aching, I've got bruises on both knees and blisters in 3 different places on my right hand. I also have a POUNDING headache that I have not managed to shake since the plane flight, I dimly realize I haven't really had much sleep in the last forty-eight hours, I feel basically like hell. And yet I'm so happy, and I keep thinking: This is where I'm supposed to be. Playing terceira in Rio. 

If there is a Heaven, if you go to your favorite ever moment, this is where I'll be: playing terceira in Rio. Perhaps right at that gorgeous moment in the maculele when we switch from pattern 1 to pattern 2 and the terceiras come rolling in like thunder, like wild galloping horses. Everybody dancing, all my friends around me.

At the end the slender Brazilian woman turns to me. It turns out she is indeed Vanessa. She says with a smile, "Toca bem." (You play well.)

Watching terceira

I'm finally back in Rio and simply can't believe it's actually been THREE YEARS since I was here. Everything seems so extremely familiar; I feel certain I must have been here just a few months ago, and have to keep reminding myself that I was last here in 2011. 

I started a new marine biology job in 2011 that requires a certain amount of commitment, and I could only come for a short trip in 2011, and only a short trip now in 2014. The great thing about short trips though is they take the pressure off. I've arrived just 1 week before Carnaval, which is way too late to join any of the major groups. They've all been rehearsing for months by now. The major escolas closed out their final rehearsals of the year on the weekend that I arrived (last weekend before Carnaval). But that's actually really relaxing because it means I don't have to dash around like a madwoman from one rehearsal to the next. I don't have to feel like I "have" to parade in the Sambodromo, or "have" to play with a Grupo Especial escola, or any of that. I'm purely here to see my friends. I'm just here for fun, and I think: I'm just going to relax. I'll do a bit of work for my job, I'll go see the Monday parades, I'll go to the beach... I won't even try to play anywhere.

So of course the second I arrive, bleary-eyed and exhausted after a six-hour delay in New York due to a sleetstorm, an extremely long red-eye overnight flight and then a bewilderingly long taxi ride ("Apologies," said the taxi driver, "there's a parade group in the street up ahead"), my friend Olivia greet me with a huge hug and then says immediately "Oh, before I forget, my mother's playing with Unidos da Tijuca this year [one of the very best groups] and their last rehearsal is tonight at midnight and she could take you along if you like? Oh and - my new band is playing our first show tomorrow afternoon... do you want to play?"  

What else can you say but "yes" and "yes"?

So off I went to Unidos da Tijuca. This is an escola rehearsal, which of course means, it STARTS at midnight and goes till four in the morning. This is completely normal for the weekend rehearsals of hte major samba parade groups. And the whole community shows up: eighty-year-old women, tiny little kids, the hot sexy passista dancers, and everybody in between - everybody's there, from midnight to four in the morning.

So once again there I was camped out at the foot of Tijuca's bateria stand (the elevated bandstand), watching Casa Grande ("Big House", the tall white-haired director of the Tijuca bateria) call in the band with that thunderous breathtaking entry. Once again squeezing my way through crowds of chattering Brazilians to buy an Antarctica beer or two, a few waters, a mysterious little pastry full of mysterious something, maybe a caipirinha. It was a full-on rehearsal, complete with passista dance show, a quite long practice sessions for the baianas. (The baianas are older women who dance in hoop skirts. In one of Rio's more peculiar parade requirements, every parading group in the competition is REQUIRED to have a large section of women over the age of 40 who are all wearing hoop skirts. The ingenious thing about this old rule is it makes women-over-the-age-of-40 a valued group of parade members.)  They also have 2 pairs of flag-bearers practicing their mesmerizing spinning dance (this is another parade requirement, with its own set of peculiar rules). But, as always, I ended up drifting over to the bateria. It's the first time I've been able to be with a real Rio bateria in years and I'm blown away by the crispness of Tijuca's tamborims, the incredible clean, locked swing of the snares, the strength and power of the third-surdos.

The third-surdos (terceiras) kept catching my eye. Terceira is the smallest of the bass drums and the one that does the most complicated patterns. It typically does a lot of fill and syncopations and it's a tremendously exciting part to play. There's also usually competition to play terceira; you have to be very solid technically and pretty strong too, and there's constant jockeying for who gets to play it. It actually used to be my specialty - I was surdo section leader ages ago back in Seattle, and have played surdo in several groups here in Rio in my 2006-2008 time when I was mostly living here. But I haven't played it in years now. 

So I kept standing at the base of the Tijuca bateria section, looking up at the terceira and thinking, aw, I'm just here on vacation, but.... jeez, it would be fun to play terceira again, wouldn't it?

By the time two-thirty rolled around I was really staggering with fatigue. Olivia's mom Tanit eventually decide to leave "early" (2:30am) and drove me back home, weaving her way in and out of huge amounts of construction, which she says is all World-Cup and Olympics related. We spent the whole drive back talking about escolas, and Tanit launched into one of those Rio-samba-fan discussions that I love so much: All the gossip from every escola, which group has the best song this year, why on earth Mocidade's songs have been so bad recently and how wonderful it is that they have a good song this year, who's got the best parade theme and who has the worst, which band has the best snares, who's got the best swing.

She says, "Two weeks from now it will all be over. And then I'll be thinking, now what do I do on Saturday nights? For months and months now, I go rehearse with Unidos da Tijuca on every single Saturday night! Everybody goes into a little bit of a depression after Carnaval, you know, because suddenly we don't know what to do with ourselves."

I'm still thinking about terceira the next morning when Eduardo pokes his head in my door and says "Can you play terceira today? We kind of need you on terceira at our show today. You don't mind, do you?"