Musicking
Musicking
An Introduction to Brazilian Popular Music | Part 1
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode, we're joined by Cincinnati-based Brazilian music ensemble Estrada do Sol. Featuring core members Brian Cashwell (piano), Andrea Cefalo (vocals), and Kiko Sebrian (percussion), along with guest bassist Diego Jose de Silva, this episode explores the history of samba and how it has evolved over time.
Brazilian music is based on community. We have our poorness, we have our richness, but we try to suffer together, we try to be happy together through the music.
SPEAKER_02Hello and welcome to the Musicing Podcast. I am your host, Trinity Lay, and this is episode one of a two-part series covering an introduction to a variety of Brazilian popular music styles, focusing mainly on the history of samba in this episode. On this topic, we have the good fortune of being joined by four different guests from the ensemble Estrada do Sol, a Cincinnati-based Brazilian music ensemble that has a variety of different members. But today we'll be talking to core members pianist Brian Cashwell, vocalist Andrea Sefalo, and percussionist Kiko Sabrian, joined by guest bassist Diego José da Silva. In this episode, we'll be talking about the circumstances in which various Brazilian music styles we know today were developed, as well as how these styles transformed over time.
SPEAKER_04Ventura Luai.
SPEAKER_02How did all of this come about?
SPEAKER_01Yes. Hey, I hope you are doing good. It's a pleasure for me to talk about my career living here in USA. So I started my career as a musician in Brazil for 17 years, and I wasn't stuck there, but I'd like to do something different. And I talked to my wife, and we decided to do something together to come to USA. And in 2019, I applied for my master's degree in jazz, but in drum set. I started to do my master degree, but always I still having the passion to learn something different. On my second year of my first master's degree, my director, he was able to see my knowledge and my development in music, not just in playing drum set, but in arranging, in composing. And so it's hey man, you are a Brazilian guy, you have a huge knowledge in Brazilian music. Why do you think to lead the Brazilian ensemble? And Kiko, what was your start?
SPEAKER_00There was throughout actually my father's vinyl collection, Prague Rock to Brazilian music. And I listened to a lot of like uh Milton Nascimento albums, Clube da Esquina, Ton Jobin, Elise Regina. So that's his fault.
SPEAKER_02And when did you start playing?
SPEAKER_00So I started playing my instrument when I was a little kid, mostly rock and roll and this kind of stuff, but later on, when I was a teenager, about 18, with some other fellow musicians from town, like we were playing some Brazilian music, Caetano Veloso, João Donato, some uh originals, my drum teacher that Hill was also very into percussion, right? So he also put me in contact with all those instruments. Name is Deva Mili, yeah. And I was kind of around this time, like between 17-18, that was when I started getting my hands on the music.
SPEAKER_02And here we have Andrea. When I listen to the ensemble, you always have such a beautiful and clear voice, and it suits this music so well. So I wanted to learn a little bit about your background as a singer.
SPEAKER_05Thank you very much. I appreciate that. That's a lovely compliment. I think that I realized at a certain point that this was the direction I wanted to go in. Brazilian music is absolutely what I listen to the most of. It's definitely the soundtrack to my life. For a few decades now, I have listened to probably exclusively Brazilian music, even though what I was performing when I would perform out was mostly jazz, which I do love. But you know, at home I was listening to a lot of uh Joyce Moreno, a lot of Rosa Pasos, Paula Morellenbaum, Jacoberto. I I pick up from them a lot. I also think that my voice, anyway, you know, I've never had a lot of vibrato. I think that I do have a more clean, pure sound, and it does lend itself towards some of this music, Bossa Nova, uh, samba, etc.
SPEAKER_02So I'd love to talk a little bit about the history of Brazilian popular music styles like samba. And a lot of these styles originated in the more impoverished regions or favelas of colonial Brazil, where a lot of the Afro-Brazilian or indigenous people lived. As a vocalist, you see much of that conveyed in the lyrics.
SPEAKER_05I mean, that's like that's a really rich topic, I think. Especially if you talk about early Brazilian music. I mean, just like our history here is very complicated. I mean, Brazil has a complicated history, and that is very much present in the music. We wouldn't have samba if we didn't have slaves in Brazil. There were like four million slaves that came from Africa, and the indigenous people were were dying at that time from illnesses and other reasons.
SPEAKER_01If you have a chance to go to Brazil, go to Northeast. Because all those rhythms that you have now very popular in Brazil, how samba, all that stuff comes from Northeast. Because Brazil started northeast, so we had all the mixing of Europeans with the African people come as slavers, and also with the indigenous, the local people in Brazil. So we had those mixing, and it's good to know. Uh, if you compare with the United States and Brazil, uh, in Brazil, the slavers they were allowed to keep their own instruments, in USA not. So that's made the huge impact in Brazilian music that you have nowadays. That's another very important thing to know. In Brazil, they were able to keep their own instruments.
SPEAKER_00A lot of the base of the Brazilian music, right? Coming a lot from like African religion, African parties, and that goes to the beginning. Now I don't remember exactly the dates. Uh I wanna say like beginning of 20th century. I had this a lot of migration from Bahia to Hill. And we have these houses, Chias Baianas, the aunts from Bahia, right? So they would have those parties inside of their house, and those parties, those houses were organized in a way that in the front of the house you have the shoru happening that is more like uh fancy, right? Like music because very classical oriented, and then you go it starts going to the back of the house, like you have samba happening in the middle, and food, and and and in the very back of the house you have the religious music, the really traditional, more like close to the African. So there's this is kind of an operation that a big opinion, you know, like the musicians would go there, and you can imagine you have different musicians, people from different neighborhoods going there, things are melting in this social environment.
SPEAKER_02So popular music, including samba and styles related to it, have had a complicated relationship with the ruling powers. Since it emerged from these poor working-class neighborhoods, mainly black and brown, it was always associated with the poverty there, the living conditions there, um, which caused it to be stigmatized and criminalized, and also censored by certain regimes because of the politically outspoken nature of some of the lyrics. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
SPEAKER_00Well, closer to my generation, I said to say that generation that are my parents, right? I can talk more about the censorship that happened during the dictatorship during the 60s, right? You have a military dictatorship there, and the musicians, well, artists, they would have to find ways to express themselves throughout this dictatorship. So kind of if Force said uh actually the artists you come with lyrics to trick the military government to put their information out there and and kind of pro protest music, right? We call that protest music. So the really intricate poems where they would uh talk about uh oppression and uh the the the militaries they would kind of uh uh yeah no that's fine, yeah, they would not understand. So they were how they say here pulling their legs throughout poetry. Uh many songs, some songs are really actually very heavy. Chico Buarke has a bunch of those songs. Muton Nascimento has some of yeah, yeah, so there's a bunch of protest songs where they would use this season of like making lyrics kind of obscure in the meaning.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I read about some songs that were written during this time where a toxic or abusive relationship was used as a hidden critique of the relationship between the people and the government. And these were examples of poetry which slipped through the censorship filter.
SPEAKER_05And we get into more like in the 60s, uh, the Trepacalia movement. We had a lot of musicians from Bahia that were sort of fed up with uh what was happening politically, and they were using music as a way to speak what they were frustrated about. But you know, as a result of that, Gilberto Gill and Caetano Veloso were seen as a threat, and they were held captive for a long time and then eventually had to leave the country.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's really interesting how many artists were put into either exile or they got in trouble with the police and they were punished somehow, and they weren't able to portray any image of Brazil that wasn't ideal. Yes.
SPEAKER_01Uh Tropical was a movement that mixed like Brazilian music with rock and roll. And we have later like fusion, that's a mixing of Latin music, jazz, and so they are trying to create something new. As we have bebop after bebop, we have the we have cool jazz, you know, we have model jazz, we have hardbop. So art is integrated with people's life, art is expression of people facing and living, so that's that's really good because it's always move on.
SPEAKER_02Could you tell me a little bit about the Malandro character?
SPEAKER_05The Malandro during the early samba times, like I was saying, I mean, that was something that you would find in old sambas. In the in the favela, kind of a dark gangster type character.
SPEAKER_02They described it as since these people who were living in these really impoverished situations, they were against being exploited in the workforce. So they they idealized this image of this kind of scoundrel who was uh you know beyond the law and he would work on the fringes of society. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, it it's a really interesting character. But then once they started putting all of these limits on what you could sing about, they would have to change this character into somebody who is an upstanding citizen who did his work. But you know, sometimes at the end of the day he wouldn't really be compensated correctly or he'd still be you know screwed over in some sort of way.
SPEAKER_00Musicians would be pursued as criminals at some point, you know, like, oh you were a vagabond, you don't work, you were a musician, right? It's like obviously this is like you are profiling the African Brazilian you know population because those guys are playing that music cook it let them find an excuse to put this guy in jail. There is a moment in history that samba it is elected to to represent the music of the country. So that's uh if I'm not wrong, that's throughout the government of uh Getúlio Vargas. So Vargas they're trying to create uh a Brazilian national identity. So okay, that's this samba, it's gonna be what it's gonna represent. So that that makes the thing go to the mainstream as well, and then you have all these guys, the artists, like radio artists, they are getting recording all the samba like repertoire that makes it more and more popular. So that's that's when it's kind of we have a stamp and say that hey, that's it, that's that's a thing.
SPEAKER_05It had its positives and negatives because then people were allowed to parade in carnival, and also that brought about the development of samba cansau, which was like a more refined samba, like a singable samba. A lot of what we do is probably falling into that category of samba cansau.
SPEAKER_02When we think about the adoption of samba as a Brazilian national music, it also changed its nature drastically because it now represented Brazil as a nation, not just the experiences or the difficulties or the lives of the impoverished and exploited neighborhoods that were once so central to the music in its conception. So it became decriminalized and destigmatized, and more people could access it and enjoy it. But also the focus of the lyrics became depoliticized and the sound became more melodic and refined for wider and perhaps more Western audiences. The Brazilian popular music that we are familiar with today is very different than it was originally, but at the same time, it exists as a continuation of that history, which is important to remember and tell. I hope you tune in.