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?"