NYT
February 7, 2011
Fire in Rio Damages Carnaval Preparations and Dims Hopes of Many Performers
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — An early-morning fire in a warehouse district on Monday destroyed the costumes and dimmed the hopes of at least three prominent samba schools competing in Rio de Janeiro’s annual Carnaval parade. But city officials vowed that the event would go forward.
The fire in Samba City, an area near Rio’s port, destroyed floats and an estimated 8,400 costumes just a little less than a month before some 35 samba schools were to dance and parade with their elaborate floats in the world’s most famous Carnaval celebration, samba school officials said.
The unexplained fire was another psychological blow to a metropolitan area still recovering from landslides in nearby hillside communities last month that killed more than 840 people and left about 8,700 homeless. The natural disaster was Brazil’s worst.
The annual Carnaval parade is a sacred ritual to many Rio residents and an industry that generates thousands of jobs in the area. The schools invest millions of dollars in their parades, which involve up to 5,000 participants for each school, including dancers, drum queens and drummers.
Officials said the fire began around 7 a.m. and was contained after four hours. A thick plume of smoke that resembled a mushroom cloud reached high into the sky and was visible a few miles away. Many workers from the samba schools were sleeping inside the warehouses and were awoken by the smoke. Saimon García, 26, an artist for the school Acadêmicos do Grande Rio, jumped from the fourth floor, but was not badly injured.
The blaze damaged the hopes of the three samba schools whose warehouses were most affected by the fire: União da Ilha do Governador, Portela and Acadêmicos do Grande Rio. They are among 12 samba schools scheduled to parade in a special stadium known as the Sambódromo on March 6 and 7, the most prestigious slots of the four-day competition. The city of Rio constructed Samba City to house the elite schools.
“Our Carnaval was ready, beautiful; everything was perfect,” said Hélio de Oliveira, president of Acadêmicos do Grande Rio. But “everything was burned,” including eight floats and more than 3,000 costumes, Mr. de Oliveira said.
Rio officials said that they were investigating the blaze, but that their preliminary assessment had found no evidence that the fire had been started intentionally. Aylton Jorge Junior, who runs Samba City and is often called its “mayor,” said, “It seemed that the fire started in the warehouse of União da Ilha, but they deny that.”
The schools will now have to work round the clock to try to create costumes and floats that they normally spend a year making. Workers were downcast and tense on Monday afternoon near the site of the fire.
But officials from competing samba schools expressed solidarity, saying they would try to lend space, materials and professionals — whatever it took to see the rival schools through the competition. Samba school presidents met late in the day to discuss how they could help the schools affected by the fire.
Eduardo Paes, Rio’s mayor, said the city would provide assistance to the affected schools, which he vowed would all parade in the competition “one way or another.” He said the reconstruction of Samba City would begin “immediately.”
An emotional Mr. de Oliveira promised that Acadêmicos do Grande Rio would parade the 80-minute circuit down the Sambódromo. “The fire burned everything,” he said, “but it didn’t burn our Carnaval spirit.”
Roberta Nápolis contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.
Read the full story with photos and video link HERE.
Showing posts with label brazil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brazil. Show all posts
Monday, February 07, 2011
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Dorival Caymmi (1914-2008)
NYT
August 19, 2008
Dorival Caymmi, Singer of Brazil, Is Dead at 94
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Dorival Caymmi, a Brazilian singer and songwriter who helped lay the foundations of bossa nova, wrote Carmen Miranda’s first hit and gave legendary voice to the romance of the beaches, fishing villages and bathing beauties of his native Bahia, died on Saturday at his home in Rio de Janeiro. He was 94.
The cause was multiple organ failure, according to accounts in the Brazilian news media. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, praised him as “one of the founders of Brazilian popular music.”
Mr. Caymmi’s career encompassed 60 years and about 20 albums, the last one released four years ago. But his influence transcended such measurable milestones and found enduring expression in the music of Brazilian greats like Antonio Carlos Jobim, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.
In an introduction to an anthology of Mr. Caymmi’s work in 1994, Jobim, the driving force behind bossa nova, a sophisticated jazz style derived from samba, wrote: “Dorival is a universal genius. He picked up the guitar and orchestrated the world.”
From the beginning of his career, Mr. Caymmi musically imbued his country with a rhythmic, romantic identity that went well with Brazil’s enticing geography and sultry, bikini-clad women. His first and immediately popular song, written at 16, “O Que É Que a Baiana Tem?” (“What Is It About Brazilian Women?”), set the tone.
That song became the first hit of Carmen Miranda, whose well-displayed limbs, extravagant hats and exuberant voice made her a global sensation as the Brazilian Bombshell. In 1996, the publication News From Brazil said Mr. Caymmi taught Ms. Miranda to move her arms and hands with the music, which became her trademark.
Songs like “Marina” (1944) and “O Samba da Minha Terra” (1941) inspired the greats of bossa nova.
Mr. Caymmi’s easygoing style was compared by some to that of Bing Crosby, not least because of his similar velvety baritone.
The laid-back Andy Williams and Perry Como sang Mr. Caymmi’s “Das Rosas,” translated as “And Roses and Roses” by the American lyricist Ray Gilbert.
Romero Lubambo, a Brazilian guitarist who lives and plays in the United States, said in an telephone interview on Monday that it was impossible to overstate Mr. Caymmi’s public recognition in his own nation.
“Everybody who is alive in Brazil today has probably heard of him,” he said.
Writing in The New York Times in 2001, Ben Ratliff said Mr. Caymmi was perhaps second only to Jobim “in establishing a songbook of this century’s Brazilian identity.” A large part of this was evoking the life and dreams of working-class people, particularly fishermen.
Dorival Caymmi was born on April 30, 1914, in Salvador, the capital of Bahia state. He had several jobs, including that of journalist, and won a songwriting contest in 1936 as part of Salvador’s carnaval. Two years later he went to Rio de Janeiro to study law and perhaps look for a job as a journalist.
But he went into the music business, and firmly established himself with the song Ms. Miranda performed in the movie “Banana-da-Terra” (1939). He became a regular on Radio Nacional, and his fame grew. He recorded for five decades, both singing solo with his own guitar accompaniment and backed by bands and orchestras.
Mr. Caymmi married the singer Adelaide Tostes, who used the stage name Stella Maris. She survives him, along with their sons, Dori and Danilo, and their daughter, Nana, who are all also successful musicians.
News From Brazil reported that Mr. Caymmi’s nearly 70-year marriage survived some carousing on his part. It told of his wife’s finding him in a bar surrounded by women. She slammed a table, broke a glass, punched him, and left.
“He was a hard act to follow,” she said, “but it was worthwhile.”
August 19, 2008
Dorival Caymmi, Singer of Brazil, Is Dead at 94
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Dorival Caymmi, a Brazilian singer and songwriter who helped lay the foundations of bossa nova, wrote Carmen Miranda’s first hit and gave legendary voice to the romance of the beaches, fishing villages and bathing beauties of his native Bahia, died on Saturday at his home in Rio de Janeiro. He was 94.
The cause was multiple organ failure, according to accounts in the Brazilian news media. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, praised him as “one of the founders of Brazilian popular music.”
Mr. Caymmi’s career encompassed 60 years and about 20 albums, the last one released four years ago. But his influence transcended such measurable milestones and found enduring expression in the music of Brazilian greats like Antonio Carlos Jobim, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.
In an introduction to an anthology of Mr. Caymmi’s work in 1994, Jobim, the driving force behind bossa nova, a sophisticated jazz style derived from samba, wrote: “Dorival is a universal genius. He picked up the guitar and orchestrated the world.”
From the beginning of his career, Mr. Caymmi musically imbued his country with a rhythmic, romantic identity that went well with Brazil’s enticing geography and sultry, bikini-clad women. His first and immediately popular song, written at 16, “O Que É Que a Baiana Tem?” (“What Is It About Brazilian Women?”), set the tone.
That song became the first hit of Carmen Miranda, whose well-displayed limbs, extravagant hats and exuberant voice made her a global sensation as the Brazilian Bombshell. In 1996, the publication News From Brazil said Mr. Caymmi taught Ms. Miranda to move her arms and hands with the music, which became her trademark.
Songs like “Marina” (1944) and “O Samba da Minha Terra” (1941) inspired the greats of bossa nova.
Mr. Caymmi’s easygoing style was compared by some to that of Bing Crosby, not least because of his similar velvety baritone.
The laid-back Andy Williams and Perry Como sang Mr. Caymmi’s “Das Rosas,” translated as “And Roses and Roses” by the American lyricist Ray Gilbert.
Romero Lubambo, a Brazilian guitarist who lives and plays in the United States, said in an telephone interview on Monday that it was impossible to overstate Mr. Caymmi’s public recognition in his own nation.
“Everybody who is alive in Brazil today has probably heard of him,” he said.
Writing in The New York Times in 2001, Ben Ratliff said Mr. Caymmi was perhaps second only to Jobim “in establishing a songbook of this century’s Brazilian identity.” A large part of this was evoking the life and dreams of working-class people, particularly fishermen.
Dorival Caymmi was born on April 30, 1914, in Salvador, the capital of Bahia state. He had several jobs, including that of journalist, and won a songwriting contest in 1936 as part of Salvador’s carnaval. Two years later he went to Rio de Janeiro to study law and perhaps look for a job as a journalist.
But he went into the music business, and firmly established himself with the song Ms. Miranda performed in the movie “Banana-da-Terra” (1939). He became a regular on Radio Nacional, and his fame grew. He recorded for five decades, both singing solo with his own guitar accompaniment and backed by bands and orchestras.
Mr. Caymmi married the singer Adelaide Tostes, who used the stage name Stella Maris. She survives him, along with their sons, Dori and Danilo, and their daughter, Nana, who are all also successful musicians.
News From Brazil reported that Mr. Caymmi’s nearly 70-year marriage survived some carousing on his part. It told of his wife’s finding him in a bar surrounded by women. She slammed a table, broke a glass, punched him, and left.
“He was a hard act to follow,” she said, “but it was worthwhile.”
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Uncontacted Amazon tribe photographed
Reuters/MSNBC
Uncontacted Amazon tribe photographed
Images show Indians painted bright red, brandishing bows and arrows
By Stuart Grudgings
Reuters
updated 4:38 p.m. PT, Thurs., May. 29, 2008
RIO DE JANEIRO - Amazon Indians from one of the world's last uncontacted tribes have been photographed from the air, with striking images released on Thursday showing them painted bright red and brandishing bows and arrows.
The photographs of the tribe near the border between Brazil and Peru are rare evidence that such groups exist. A Brazilian official involved in the expedition said many of them are in increasing danger from illegal logging.
"What is happening in this region is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the 'civilized' ones, treat the world," Jose Carlos Meirelles was quoted as saying in a statement by the Survival International group.
One of the pictures, which can be seen on Survival International's Web site (www.survival-international.org), shows two Indian men covered in bright red pigment poised to fire arrows at the aircraft while another Indian looks on.
Another photo shows about 15 Indians near thatched huts, some of them also preparing to fire arrows at the aircraft.
"The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct," said Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, which supports tribal people around the world.
Of more than 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, more than half live in either Brazil or Peru, Survival International says. It says all are in grave danger of being forced off their land, killed and ravaged by new diseases.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Recife's 'frevo' rhythms fuel its intimate carnival
Miami Herald
Posted on Mon, Feb. 04, 2008
Recife's 'frevo' rhythms fuel its intimate carnival
BY MICHAEL ASTOR
Jelly-limbed dancers with tiny multicolored umbrellas, frolicking to frenetic frevo rhythms, make carnival in this Brazilian coastal city unique and for residents second to none.
Recife's frevo music -- which is accompanied by a frantic tip-toe dance in which participants leap into midair splits and fold themselves like contortionists as they land -- forms a carnival tradition distinct from the better-known samba.
While Rio de Janeiro's famed Samba parade, which takes place Sunday and Monday nights, is broadcast to millions of adoring fans, Recife's bash is perhaps Brazil's best kept secret. Late Sunday, the two traditions met in Rio de Janeiro's Sambadrome stadium where Mangueira, one of Brazil's best loved samba groups, sang Recife's praises.
''By paying for Mangueira's parade we are bringing national and international media attention for our carnival, which is the most democratic in Brazil and free to all,'' said Recife Mayor Joao Paulo Lima Silva, explaining the $1.7 million expense to the city's coffers.
In recent years, revelers turned off by Rio's commercialism and tired of being confined to the stands have begun looking elsewhere to cities like Salvador da Bahia -- where supermodel Naomi Campbell and music producer Quincy Jones are celebrating this year.
Those in search of a more intimate carnival have been heading to Recife and the neighboring colonial hilltop town of Olinda. Here, the vibrantly colored costumes and huge puppets may be dwarfed by the Rio's gargantuan floats and armies of uniformed dancers, but the lack of pomp is compensated for by the proximity.
Recife also offers up a potpourri of rhythms with names that seem to flow from poetry, like maracatu, caboclo, coco and ciranda.
''Mangueira has knelt before a carnival that is totally original and chocked full of culture. In Rio's there's just one, Samba,'' explains Alceu Valenca, a popular Brazilian musician.
That may be so, but in Recife one carnival rhythm stands above all the others and that is frevo.
Frevo is celebrating its centenary this year and Mangueira's theme samba this year is fittingly titled, 100 Years of Frevo, It's Enough to Lose Your Shoe.
''Frevo is the maximum expression of carnival, there's nothing like frevo and if we can put a minuet into our samba, we can certainly incorporate frevo,'' said Mangueira's carnival designer, Max Lopes.
Posted on Mon, Feb. 04, 2008
Recife's 'frevo' rhythms fuel its intimate carnival
BY MICHAEL ASTOR
Jelly-limbed dancers with tiny multicolored umbrellas, frolicking to frenetic frevo rhythms, make carnival in this Brazilian coastal city unique and for residents second to none.
Recife's frevo music -- which is accompanied by a frantic tip-toe dance in which participants leap into midair splits and fold themselves like contortionists as they land -- forms a carnival tradition distinct from the better-known samba.
While Rio de Janeiro's famed Samba parade, which takes place Sunday and Monday nights, is broadcast to millions of adoring fans, Recife's bash is perhaps Brazil's best kept secret. Late Sunday, the two traditions met in Rio de Janeiro's Sambadrome stadium where Mangueira, one of Brazil's best loved samba groups, sang Recife's praises.
''By paying for Mangueira's parade we are bringing national and international media attention for our carnival, which is the most democratic in Brazil and free to all,'' said Recife Mayor Joao Paulo Lima Silva, explaining the $1.7 million expense to the city's coffers.
In recent years, revelers turned off by Rio's commercialism and tired of being confined to the stands have begun looking elsewhere to cities like Salvador da Bahia -- where supermodel Naomi Campbell and music producer Quincy Jones are celebrating this year.
Those in search of a more intimate carnival have been heading to Recife and the neighboring colonial hilltop town of Olinda. Here, the vibrantly colored costumes and huge puppets may be dwarfed by the Rio's gargantuan floats and armies of uniformed dancers, but the lack of pomp is compensated for by the proximity.
Recife also offers up a potpourri of rhythms with names that seem to flow from poetry, like maracatu, caboclo, coco and ciranda.
''Mangueira has knelt before a carnival that is totally original and chocked full of culture. In Rio's there's just one, Samba,'' explains Alceu Valenca, a popular Brazilian musician.
That may be so, but in Recife one carnival rhythm stands above all the others and that is frevo.
Frevo is celebrating its centenary this year and Mangueira's theme samba this year is fittingly titled, 100 Years of Frevo, It's Enough to Lose Your Shoe.
''Frevo is the maximum expression of carnival, there's nothing like frevo and if we can put a minuet into our samba, we can certainly incorporate frevo,'' said Mangueira's carnival designer, Max Lopes.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
In Amazonia, Defending the Hidden Tribes
In Amazonia, Defending the Hidden Tribes
By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 8, 2007; A01
COLIDER, Brazil -- At first, few believed the story that two brothers told about four unknown Indians who suddenly appeared to them one afternoon on the outskirts of their village.
Like most Kayapo Indians, the brothers -- named Bepro and Beprytire -- live in a government-demarcated reserve, wear modern clothing and get energy from solar-powered generators. But the four unclothed visitors were a different kind of Kayapo.
They spoke in an antiquated tongue that seemed a precursor to the language spoken in the village, located in the Capoto-Jarina Indian Reserve in central Brazil. The four men had come from a tribe that had remained in the forest, the brothers said, untouched by the modern world.
Over the next seven days, the doubt expressed by the villagers evaporated when they saw more than 60 of the Indians emerge from the forest, sleeping in huts on the edge of the village.
Then as quickly as they had come, the Indians disappeared. They haven't been seen since.
The Indians' brief appearance this spring was enough to put them into the center of a debate that is increasingly challenging governments throughout the Amazon region: How should the rights and territories of isolated populations be protected when the locations of those groups remain largely unknown?
In recent months, Brazil and Peru have set aside protected areas for so-called uncontacted groups, which have never been spoken to and rarely -- if ever -- glimpsed. Brazil is believed to have more uncontacted tribes than any country in the world, and the government this year announced that as many as 67 tribes could be living in complete isolation -- considerably more than the 40 estimated earlier.
Previously uncontacted tribes have been discovered periodically since deep Amazon exploration began in the late 1800s. In the 1970s, for example, such tribes as the Panara were found as construction crews built roads into the forest, and periodic discoveries of small tribes continued in the following decades.
Today, because the Amazon region is shrinking by thousands of square miles a year, the chances of unintentional encounters involving such groups grow. The issue has become a significant focus for the Federal Indian Bureau, or Funai, the government agency that oversees indigenous groups.
Indigenous rights advocates have issued calls to protect largely unexplored areas of the forest from logging and mining. But the renewed focus on uncontacted groups has also sparked suspicions among skeptics, who believe the groups could be more mythical than real and suspect the numbers are exaggerated by special interest groups seeking to block exploration projects.
"It is like the Loch Ness monster," said Cecilia Quiroz, legal counsel for Perupetro, the Peruvian state agency in charge of doling out prospecting rights to energy companies eager to explore the country's vast interior. "Everyone seems to have seen or heard about uncontacted peoples, but there is no evidence."
'Why Now and Why There?'
Megaron Txucarramae grew up in the village where the uncontacted Indians approached the two brothers in late May. He was 2 years old when anthropologists first made contact with his own branch of the Kayapo tribe in the 1950s. He regularly heard his elders tell the story of how one part of the tribe had fled the anthropologists' advances to remain alone in the woods, never to be seen again.
Now Megaron is the regional representative for Funai in Colider, the nearest city to Capoto and two nearby reserves. The land, set aside for the Indians and protected from development, is a sprawling green expanse of dense jungle. Together, the three Kayapo reservations in the area are roughly the size of the Czech Republic.
When he heard of the isolated tribe's recent appearance, Megaron quickly flew to the village of Kapot to collect evidence. He took a miniature tape recorder with him, giving it to one of the brothers to slip into the pocket of his shorts while he spoke to the Indians. Taking pictures, he concluded, was out of the question.
"No one had a camera, and even if someone had had one, they were afraid of machines," Megaron explained later. "If anyone pointed a camera at them, the situation could have been very dangerous."
The group remained highly suspicious of the villagers, agreeing to talk only with the two brothers whom they had initially approached. They accepted bananas and cassava offered by the brothers but rejected rice because it wasn't part of their traditional diet, Megaron said. One of the old men in the group had a scar on his side, a wound that the villagers attributed to a run-in with illegal loggers, who occasionally were involved in bloody confrontations with Indians in the region in the 1990s.
"The man told Beprytire he had been hurt by a 'strong sound,' " Megaron said. "So we are guessing that he had been shot."
Most of the Indians were unclothed, though some of the men wore penis sheaths and most were partially covered by body paint. Some of the men also had plates inserted in their lower lips, creating the decorative protrusions seen in various Amazonian tribes.
Megaron closed the village to visitors -- a lockdown that remains in force. Officials were afraid that the previously uncontacted Indians could easily become sick. As has been proved in the past when uncontacted tribes are introduced to other populations and the microbes they carry, maladies as simple as the common cold can be deadly. In the 1970s, 185 members of the Panara tribe died within two years of discovery after contracting such diseases as flu and chickenpox, leaving only 69 survivors.
Antonio Sergio Iole, head of health services for Funai in Colider, quickly assembled a team of doctors and Kayapo assistants ready to travel to the village on a moment's notice. The team immediately realized how many difficult questions the tribe's appearance had raised for local authorities.
"Even the simple things are complicated," said Iole, who said his team remains on call to travel to the village should the tribe reappear. "How should we act in the first moment we approach them? Would they accept vaccine? Would they let us inspect their mouths? Listen to their hearts? Would they allow a doctor to treat the women? How would they physically react to treatment? Some vaccines have side effects -- how would they interpret a fever? And how would they react if we had to take someone away, even if it was for their own good?"
After the tribe left the village, Iole -- still in Colider -- began to notice that some other people around town were asking different questions:
Why couldn't anyone get a picture? Why was no one except the Kayapo allowed into the village? How could a group of people remain uncontacted in the 21st century? Could someone be making this whole story up for some sort of personal or political gain?
"I don't believe it -- this is an area with lots of loggers and farmers who are always going out into the forest, making studies," said Albeni de Souza, 22, a university student who works in a hotel in Colider. "Even the Indians from the tribes on reservations walk around the forest all the time. Someone would have seen them before."
That kind of doubt spreads easily in towns such as Colider, where logging companies and farmers have cleared most of the surrounding area and small planes regularly fly overhead. From the air here, the land looks much like the American Midwest -- a patchwork of farms. The picture is much different less than 250 miles away in Kapot -- unreachable by car and boat -- on the edge of an Amazon forest that is almost as big as the continental United States.
But even some officials have expressed doubt. In Peru, the representatives of Perupetro have questioned the timing of the appearance, which came weeks before the country plans to auction 19 oil and gas exploration licenses. Some of the concessions are located near the border with Brazil, where some nongovernmental organizations argue that uncontacted tribes reside.
Last month, the Peruvian government rejected oil exploration plans by Barrett Resources, a U.S. company, and by Spain's Repsol YPF, in part over concern about uncontacted tribes.
While not denying the existence of some isolated groups, Quiroz -- Perupetro's legal counsel -- was skeptical about the recent appearance of the Kayapo tribe.
"In this age of globalization," Quiroz said, "you have to wonder why now and why there."
Vanishing Without a Word
Several years ago, Brazil's government changed its policy regarding isolated tribes: Instead of taking the initiative to try to contact them, it now aims only to protect them. Contact is made only if the Indians themselves initiate it or the tribe is in imminent danger.
Funai officials plan to fly over the forest in the coming weeks to try to locate the area where the tribe is based, Megaron said. The plan after that is to build a small field station in the forest -- not to contact them but to protect the area and make sure loggers and farmers do not come near them.
That plan, of course, would be unnecessary if the Indians chose to make contact again -- a possibility that many of the local Kayapo hope happens.
"Everybody wants to see them, because we love to compare them with ourselves," said Bepko, 26, a Kayapo who lives in the village of Kubenkokre in a nearby reserve. "We just want to hear their stories and learn about what their lives have been like."
According to the stealth tape recording made by the brothers, there is evidence that at least some in the tribe would like to return.
Megaron said he was able to decipher the language sufficiently enough to determine that a young member of the tribe was trying to convince his elders that the contact was a good thing.
"The son told his father not to be afraid, that they would protect each other," Megaron recounted. "He then talked to his mother and tried to tell her that everything was okay and that the other group of Kayapo was their relatives."
It was later, Funai said, that a tribal leader emerged from the forest and persuaded everyone to leave the village.
"They might have been scared of the sound of airplanes," said Luis Sampaio, a biologist who for 12 years has worked with the Kayapo in the reserve, which features a small landing strip. "Or they could have been scared by the clothes they saw people wearing -- we are not sure."
Megaron said they left without explanation or warning.
"Uncontacted Indians," he said, "don't say goodbye when they leave."
Special correspondent Lucien Chauvin in Lima, Peru, contributed to this report.
By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 8, 2007; A01
COLIDER, Brazil -- At first, few believed the story that two brothers told about four unknown Indians who suddenly appeared to them one afternoon on the outskirts of their village.
Like most Kayapo Indians, the brothers -- named Bepro and Beprytire -- live in a government-demarcated reserve, wear modern clothing and get energy from solar-powered generators. But the four unclothed visitors were a different kind of Kayapo.
They spoke in an antiquated tongue that seemed a precursor to the language spoken in the village, located in the Capoto-Jarina Indian Reserve in central Brazil. The four men had come from a tribe that had remained in the forest, the brothers said, untouched by the modern world.
Over the next seven days, the doubt expressed by the villagers evaporated when they saw more than 60 of the Indians emerge from the forest, sleeping in huts on the edge of the village.
Then as quickly as they had come, the Indians disappeared. They haven't been seen since.
The Indians' brief appearance this spring was enough to put them into the center of a debate that is increasingly challenging governments throughout the Amazon region: How should the rights and territories of isolated populations be protected when the locations of those groups remain largely unknown?
In recent months, Brazil and Peru have set aside protected areas for so-called uncontacted groups, which have never been spoken to and rarely -- if ever -- glimpsed. Brazil is believed to have more uncontacted tribes than any country in the world, and the government this year announced that as many as 67 tribes could be living in complete isolation -- considerably more than the 40 estimated earlier.
Previously uncontacted tribes have been discovered periodically since deep Amazon exploration began in the late 1800s. In the 1970s, for example, such tribes as the Panara were found as construction crews built roads into the forest, and periodic discoveries of small tribes continued in the following decades.
Today, because the Amazon region is shrinking by thousands of square miles a year, the chances of unintentional encounters involving such groups grow. The issue has become a significant focus for the Federal Indian Bureau, or Funai, the government agency that oversees indigenous groups.
Indigenous rights advocates have issued calls to protect largely unexplored areas of the forest from logging and mining. But the renewed focus on uncontacted groups has also sparked suspicions among skeptics, who believe the groups could be more mythical than real and suspect the numbers are exaggerated by special interest groups seeking to block exploration projects.
"It is like the Loch Ness monster," said Cecilia Quiroz, legal counsel for Perupetro, the Peruvian state agency in charge of doling out prospecting rights to energy companies eager to explore the country's vast interior. "Everyone seems to have seen or heard about uncontacted peoples, but there is no evidence."
'Why Now and Why There?'
Megaron Txucarramae grew up in the village where the uncontacted Indians approached the two brothers in late May. He was 2 years old when anthropologists first made contact with his own branch of the Kayapo tribe in the 1950s. He regularly heard his elders tell the story of how one part of the tribe had fled the anthropologists' advances to remain alone in the woods, never to be seen again.
Now Megaron is the regional representative for Funai in Colider, the nearest city to Capoto and two nearby reserves. The land, set aside for the Indians and protected from development, is a sprawling green expanse of dense jungle. Together, the three Kayapo reservations in the area are roughly the size of the Czech Republic.
When he heard of the isolated tribe's recent appearance, Megaron quickly flew to the village of Kapot to collect evidence. He took a miniature tape recorder with him, giving it to one of the brothers to slip into the pocket of his shorts while he spoke to the Indians. Taking pictures, he concluded, was out of the question.
"No one had a camera, and even if someone had had one, they were afraid of machines," Megaron explained later. "If anyone pointed a camera at them, the situation could have been very dangerous."
The group remained highly suspicious of the villagers, agreeing to talk only with the two brothers whom they had initially approached. They accepted bananas and cassava offered by the brothers but rejected rice because it wasn't part of their traditional diet, Megaron said. One of the old men in the group had a scar on his side, a wound that the villagers attributed to a run-in with illegal loggers, who occasionally were involved in bloody confrontations with Indians in the region in the 1990s.
"The man told Beprytire he had been hurt by a 'strong sound,' " Megaron said. "So we are guessing that he had been shot."
Most of the Indians were unclothed, though some of the men wore penis sheaths and most were partially covered by body paint. Some of the men also had plates inserted in their lower lips, creating the decorative protrusions seen in various Amazonian tribes.
Megaron closed the village to visitors -- a lockdown that remains in force. Officials were afraid that the previously uncontacted Indians could easily become sick. As has been proved in the past when uncontacted tribes are introduced to other populations and the microbes they carry, maladies as simple as the common cold can be deadly. In the 1970s, 185 members of the Panara tribe died within two years of discovery after contracting such diseases as flu and chickenpox, leaving only 69 survivors.
Antonio Sergio Iole, head of health services for Funai in Colider, quickly assembled a team of doctors and Kayapo assistants ready to travel to the village on a moment's notice. The team immediately realized how many difficult questions the tribe's appearance had raised for local authorities.
"Even the simple things are complicated," said Iole, who said his team remains on call to travel to the village should the tribe reappear. "How should we act in the first moment we approach them? Would they accept vaccine? Would they let us inspect their mouths? Listen to their hearts? Would they allow a doctor to treat the women? How would they physically react to treatment? Some vaccines have side effects -- how would they interpret a fever? And how would they react if we had to take someone away, even if it was for their own good?"
After the tribe left the village, Iole -- still in Colider -- began to notice that some other people around town were asking different questions:
Why couldn't anyone get a picture? Why was no one except the Kayapo allowed into the village? How could a group of people remain uncontacted in the 21st century? Could someone be making this whole story up for some sort of personal or political gain?
"I don't believe it -- this is an area with lots of loggers and farmers who are always going out into the forest, making studies," said Albeni de Souza, 22, a university student who works in a hotel in Colider. "Even the Indians from the tribes on reservations walk around the forest all the time. Someone would have seen them before."
That kind of doubt spreads easily in towns such as Colider, where logging companies and farmers have cleared most of the surrounding area and small planes regularly fly overhead. From the air here, the land looks much like the American Midwest -- a patchwork of farms. The picture is much different less than 250 miles away in Kapot -- unreachable by car and boat -- on the edge of an Amazon forest that is almost as big as the continental United States.
But even some officials have expressed doubt. In Peru, the representatives of Perupetro have questioned the timing of the appearance, which came weeks before the country plans to auction 19 oil and gas exploration licenses. Some of the concessions are located near the border with Brazil, where some nongovernmental organizations argue that uncontacted tribes reside.
Last month, the Peruvian government rejected oil exploration plans by Barrett Resources, a U.S. company, and by Spain's Repsol YPF, in part over concern about uncontacted tribes.
While not denying the existence of some isolated groups, Quiroz -- Perupetro's legal counsel -- was skeptical about the recent appearance of the Kayapo tribe.
"In this age of globalization," Quiroz said, "you have to wonder why now and why there."
Vanishing Without a Word
Several years ago, Brazil's government changed its policy regarding isolated tribes: Instead of taking the initiative to try to contact them, it now aims only to protect them. Contact is made only if the Indians themselves initiate it or the tribe is in imminent danger.
Funai officials plan to fly over the forest in the coming weeks to try to locate the area where the tribe is based, Megaron said. The plan after that is to build a small field station in the forest -- not to contact them but to protect the area and make sure loggers and farmers do not come near them.
That plan, of course, would be unnecessary if the Indians chose to make contact again -- a possibility that many of the local Kayapo hope happens.
"Everybody wants to see them, because we love to compare them with ourselves," said Bepko, 26, a Kayapo who lives in the village of Kubenkokre in a nearby reserve. "We just want to hear their stories and learn about what their lives have been like."
According to the stealth tape recording made by the brothers, there is evidence that at least some in the tribe would like to return.
Megaron said he was able to decipher the language sufficiently enough to determine that a young member of the tribe was trying to convince his elders that the contact was a good thing.
"The son told his father not to be afraid, that they would protect each other," Megaron recounted. "He then talked to his mother and tried to tell her that everything was okay and that the other group of Kayapo was their relatives."
It was later, Funai said, that a tribal leader emerged from the forest and persuaded everyone to leave the village.
"They might have been scared of the sound of airplanes," said Luis Sampaio, a biologist who for 12 years has worked with the Kayapo in the reserve, which features a small landing strip. "Or they could have been scared by the clothes they saw people wearing -- we are not sure."
Megaron said they left without explanation or warning.
"Uncontacted Indians," he said, "don't say goodbye when they leave."
Special correspondent Lucien Chauvin in Lima, Peru, contributed to this report.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Rock star prods Rio's residents to stand up to the violence
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
from the May 15, 2007 edition -
Rock star prods Rio's residents to stand up to the violence
Lead singer Tico Santa Cruz is rousing Brazilians from their apathy with highly visible, creative forms of protest.
By Andrew Downie | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
RIO DE JANEIRO
Rock stars are often angry young men and Tico Santa Cruz is no exception. But the tattooed lead singer of the hit Brazilian band Detonautas has plenty to be angry about.
His hometown of Rio de Janeiro is a city under siege, with more than 6,000 homicides each year. Drug factions fight for control of the shantytowns that dot the city. Stray bullets from their firefights strike down two innocent people every three days.
What ticks off Mr. Santa Cruz the most is that so few people seem to care. So he now channels his frustration into rousing Brazilians from their apathy with highly visible, creative forms of protest. Of course, he's not the first celebrity to use his star power for a good cause. But he is one of the first to galvanize victims' families to confront Brazil's growing scourge of violence.
"There are no popular protests here, nothing starts from the ground up. It's like everyone is waiting for someone to guide them," says Santa Cruz. "I don't see myself as a leader but as an organizer, someone who can bring together people behind an idea. Lots of people have a common purpose but just don't know how to get there, and I help them focus on that."
Few people would argue that violence is the one fear that unites residents of Rio de Janeiro today. Carjackings, muggings, home invasions, and now stray bullets have changed the city irrevocably over the last few years. Seventeen people died each day from homicides last year, according to government figures.
Rousing an apathetic public
But Cariocas, as the citizens of the self-proclaimed Marvelous City are known, have been strangely placid. Perhaps believing the notoriously corrupt police force is beyond redemption and conscious that political pressure is largely ineffective, there have been few protests.
But now, as the number of barbaric acts of violence rises, angry citizens are finding new ways to demand justice and more often than not, Santa Cruz is involved.
Last month, in front of the Rio State Assembly, he had people dress as ghosts to symbolize phantom justice, policing and legislation.
In another, he organized bodies to lie out as if dead in front of the city's court building. And before that, he lent his support to an nongovernmental organization that planted 1,300 roses on Copacabana beach, one for each person killed in the state this year.
Tall, with arms covered in tattoos and small hoops through a pierced lip and eyebrow, the 29-something rocker is a physically striking man. He has a faint yet evident charisma and speaks with a steely integrity that makes him an effective communicator, especially when engaging the young fans of his band, one that is popular enough in Brazil to have opened shows for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The son of an engineer who lost everything and saw his family evicted from their home when he was 15, Santa Cruz has firsthand experience of life's reverses. He was already trying to rouse Rio's notoriously depoliticized youth when his band mate Rodrigo Netto was shot dead in an attempted carjacking last June.
But Mr. Netto's killing so angered him that he decided to devote more time to raising consciousness. Since then Santa Cruz, often with the support of his bandmates or friends who are poets, artists, and musicians, has given interviews, preached to crowds at rock concerts, and taken a road show to schools and universities.
He has also helped organize Rio United Against Violence, an informal umbrella group of victims and human rights organizations whose figureheads are all people whose tragedy has marked the city in recent months.
Those victims have responded to his crusade, and even though he is half the age of some of them they see him as a leader. The movement has no formal leaders and it is not dependent on Santa Cruz, but his ability to attract media attention make its protests more newsworthy and his fellow campaigners say his involvement is crucial in publicizing their plight.
A reluctant leader
"I am not sure he wants this role, but he is intelligent and articulate and he has taken on a very important task," says Lenin Novaes, a journalist whose son was killed by a stray bullet in April and who has worked with Santa Cruz to organize protests and debates. "He is one of those leaders who doesn't compromise but rather looks to mobilize people. At protests and marches against violence people listen to him and not because he is a musician but because he has something to say."
The problem for Santa Cruz is that Novaes, and most of the other active members of Rio United Against Violence, are people whose lives have already been marked by tragedy. As usual, Brazil's masses have shied away from outright confrontation, preferring to live with the despair rather than confront it.
Santa Cruz has worked hard to take his message to new audiences – to the housewives watching on daytime TV, for example, or to teenage music fans. And he has gained valuable media attention for his campaign.
But it has so far had no noticeable effect. If the people at home are watching or listening they have so far shown little desire to act.
"I don't think it's worth protesting," says Leda Bunde, a perplexed retired teacher's assistant who watched the ghosts protests in front of Rio's state assembly. "You have to wait for the government to wake up one day and see what's going on."
Santa Cruz is conscious of such apathy and knows this is one crowd he needs to win over. And with a steely resolution, he vows to continue objecting, demanding, instigating. There is, he says, no other option. For him or for Rio.
"I don't think that everyone needs to lose someone to violence to realize what is going on, but it's getting that way," he says. "When I started I felt really frustrated that no one paid any attention. But I don't think that I am going to change things overnight. I think I am planting a seed. Do your bit today because you don't know what will happen tomorrow. It's up to you."
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Brazilian Government Invests in Culture of Hip-Hop
NYT
March 14, 2007
Brazilian Government Invests in Culture of Hip-Hop
By LARRY ROHTER
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — In a classroom at a community center near a slum here, a street-smart teacher offers a dozen young students tips on how to improve their graffiti techniques. One floor below, in a small soundproof studio, another instructor is teaching a youthful group of would-be rappers how to operate digital recording and video equipment.
This is one of Brazil’s Culture Points, fruit of an official government program that is helping to spread hip-hop culture across a vast nation of 185 million people. With small grants of $60,000 or so to scores of community groups on the outskirts of Brazil’s cities, the Ministry of Culture hopes to channel what it sees as the latent creativity of the country’s poor into new forms of expression.
The program, conceived in 2003, is an initiative of Brazil’s minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, who will be speaking on digital culture and related topics on Wednesday at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Tex. Though today one of the country’s most revered pop stars, Mr. Gil, 64, was often ostracized at the start of his own career and so feels a certain affinity with the hip-hop culture emerging here.
“These phenomena cannot be regarded negatively, because they encompass huge contingents of the population for whom they are the only connection to the larger world,” he said in a February interview. “A government that can’t perceive this won’t have the capacity to formulate policies that are sufficiently inclusive to keep young people from being diverted to criminality or consigned to social isolation.”
As a result of the Culture Points and similar programs, Mr. Gil said, “you’ve now got young people who are becoming designers, who are making it into media and being used more and more by television and samba schools and revitalizing degraded neighborhoods.” He added, “It’s a different vision of the role of government, a new role.”
As the ministry sees it, hip-hop culture consists of four elements: M.C.’s (rappers), D.J.’s, break dancers and graffiti artists. At the Projeto Casulo, a community center here on a narrow, winding street at the foot of a favela, or squatter slum, all four art forms are being taught to dozens of young residents.
“This program has really democratized culture,” Guiné Silva, a 32-year-old rapper who is the director of the center, said during a tour of its simple concrete building. “We’ve become a multimedia laboratory. Getting that seed money and that studio equipment has enabled us to become a kind of hip-hop factory.”
Though links to music run strong and deep in Brazilian culture, the notion of using taxpayers’ money to encourage rap and graffiti art is not universally accepted. But because Mr. Gil’s musical judgment is widely respected, the level of skepticism and resistance is lower than might be expected.
“Gil still has to fight against other parts of the government in favor of things that everyone else there thinks are alienating junk, but he’s willing to do that, whether it’s on behalf of rap or funk or brega,” another style of music considered vulgar and lower class, said Hermano Vianna, a writer and anthropologist who works in digital culture programs. “He looks at that sort of thing not with prejudice, but rather as a business opportunity.”
On the other hand, some important exponents of hip-hop culture in Brazil, like the rapper Manu Brown and the writer Ferréz, remain skeptical and have chosen to keep their distance from the government program. Others are participating but complain of the bureaucracy involved.
“The idea is great because it has brought about a level of recognition we didn’t have before,” said the rapper Aliado G., president of an entity called Hip Hop Nation Brazil. “But people get frustrated when a project of theirs is approved, and they can’t get the money because they don’t know how to do all the paperwork.”
Brazilian rap, at least as it has developed in poor neighborhoods here in the country’s largest city, tends to be highly politicized and scornful of lyrics that boast about wealth or sexual conquests. In contrast, the funk movement in Brazil, also imported from the United States but centered in Rio de Janeiro, is unabashedly about celebrating sex, bling and violence.
“When U.S. rap groups come here and try to be ostentatious or do the gangster thing, they get booed off the stage,” Mr. Silva said. “We feel a kinship with Chuck D and Public Enemy” — known for their political commentary — “but we don’t have any respect for people like Snoop Dogg and Puff Daddy.”
Since established commercial radio stations and publishing houses have shown minimal interest in the music and poetry that new hip-hop artists are producing, or want to impose contract terms that are too stringent, rappers have developed their own channels to distribute their work. These range from selling their discs and books themselves on the streets and at shows to having the works played on a network of low-power but linked community radio stations.
“There is an entire industry being built in the informal sector,” Mr. Vianna said. “If you were to apply all the laws in place today, no producer can release a record from a favela. So you have to create a new model, and Gil is willing to do that.”
At the Projeto Casulo, the Culture Points program has produced a pair of documentaries about housing problems, complete with a rap accompaniment, that were broadcast on commercial television. The center has also generated a radionovela, a fanzine and a community newspaper and plans next to set up an online radio station to broadcast the rap songs that its musicians and those at similar community centers here have composed and recorded.
In addition, a Culture Ministry grant enabled Hip Hop Nation Brazil to publish a book called “Hip Hop in Pencil,” a collection of rap lyrics. After a first edition of 2,000 copies quickly sold out in 2005 and was nominated for a literary prize, a conventional publishing house was interested enough to negotiate a deal to publish subsequent editions.
“We had never before seen our story told in a book, and at first the publishing houses didn’t take us seriously,” said Toni C, one of the editors and authors of the collection. “Books had always been used as a weapon against us, and people didn’t know that such a thing as hip-hop literature existed. Now they do.”
Brazilian law also offers tax breaks to companies that contribute to cultural endeavors like films, ballet and art exhibitions. Rap music has now been granted similar standing, and as a result, some of the country’s largest corporations have begun underwriting hip-hop records and shows.
At a recent event in Campinas, a city of one million an hour’s drive from here, the sponsors included a power company, a bank, a construction business and an industrial conglomerate. As a troupe of break dancers strutted their most flashy moves, D.J.’s and M.C.’s railed against social, economic and racial inequality with lyrics like “Reality is always hard/for those who have dark skin/if you don’t watch out/you’ll end up in the paddy wagon.”
“It took a while for companies to wake up to the potential this offers,” said Augusto Rodrigues, an executive of the power company and the director of the cultural center where the show was held. “But there’s a hunger for cultural programs like this, in which for the first time in 20 years, the ideology of the periphery can express itself.”
March 14, 2007
Brazilian Government Invests in Culture of Hip-Hop
By LARRY ROHTER
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — In a classroom at a community center near a slum here, a street-smart teacher offers a dozen young students tips on how to improve their graffiti techniques. One floor below, in a small soundproof studio, another instructor is teaching a youthful group of would-be rappers how to operate digital recording and video equipment.
This is one of Brazil’s Culture Points, fruit of an official government program that is helping to spread hip-hop culture across a vast nation of 185 million people. With small grants of $60,000 or so to scores of community groups on the outskirts of Brazil’s cities, the Ministry of Culture hopes to channel what it sees as the latent creativity of the country’s poor into new forms of expression.
The program, conceived in 2003, is an initiative of Brazil’s minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, who will be speaking on digital culture and related topics on Wednesday at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Tex. Though today one of the country’s most revered pop stars, Mr. Gil, 64, was often ostracized at the start of his own career and so feels a certain affinity with the hip-hop culture emerging here.
“These phenomena cannot be regarded negatively, because they encompass huge contingents of the population for whom they are the only connection to the larger world,” he said in a February interview. “A government that can’t perceive this won’t have the capacity to formulate policies that are sufficiently inclusive to keep young people from being diverted to criminality or consigned to social isolation.”
As a result of the Culture Points and similar programs, Mr. Gil said, “you’ve now got young people who are becoming designers, who are making it into media and being used more and more by television and samba schools and revitalizing degraded neighborhoods.” He added, “It’s a different vision of the role of government, a new role.”
As the ministry sees it, hip-hop culture consists of four elements: M.C.’s (rappers), D.J.’s, break dancers and graffiti artists. At the Projeto Casulo, a community center here on a narrow, winding street at the foot of a favela, or squatter slum, all four art forms are being taught to dozens of young residents.
“This program has really democratized culture,” Guiné Silva, a 32-year-old rapper who is the director of the center, said during a tour of its simple concrete building. “We’ve become a multimedia laboratory. Getting that seed money and that studio equipment has enabled us to become a kind of hip-hop factory.”
Though links to music run strong and deep in Brazilian culture, the notion of using taxpayers’ money to encourage rap and graffiti art is not universally accepted. But because Mr. Gil’s musical judgment is widely respected, the level of skepticism and resistance is lower than might be expected.
“Gil still has to fight against other parts of the government in favor of things that everyone else there thinks are alienating junk, but he’s willing to do that, whether it’s on behalf of rap or funk or brega,” another style of music considered vulgar and lower class, said Hermano Vianna, a writer and anthropologist who works in digital culture programs. “He looks at that sort of thing not with prejudice, but rather as a business opportunity.”
On the other hand, some important exponents of hip-hop culture in Brazil, like the rapper Manu Brown and the writer Ferréz, remain skeptical and have chosen to keep their distance from the government program. Others are participating but complain of the bureaucracy involved.
“The idea is great because it has brought about a level of recognition we didn’t have before,” said the rapper Aliado G., president of an entity called Hip Hop Nation Brazil. “But people get frustrated when a project of theirs is approved, and they can’t get the money because they don’t know how to do all the paperwork.”
Brazilian rap, at least as it has developed in poor neighborhoods here in the country’s largest city, tends to be highly politicized and scornful of lyrics that boast about wealth or sexual conquests. In contrast, the funk movement in Brazil, also imported from the United States but centered in Rio de Janeiro, is unabashedly about celebrating sex, bling and violence.
“When U.S. rap groups come here and try to be ostentatious or do the gangster thing, they get booed off the stage,” Mr. Silva said. “We feel a kinship with Chuck D and Public Enemy” — known for their political commentary — “but we don’t have any respect for people like Snoop Dogg and Puff Daddy.”
Since established commercial radio stations and publishing houses have shown minimal interest in the music and poetry that new hip-hop artists are producing, or want to impose contract terms that are too stringent, rappers have developed their own channels to distribute their work. These range from selling their discs and books themselves on the streets and at shows to having the works played on a network of low-power but linked community radio stations.
“There is an entire industry being built in the informal sector,” Mr. Vianna said. “If you were to apply all the laws in place today, no producer can release a record from a favela. So you have to create a new model, and Gil is willing to do that.”
At the Projeto Casulo, the Culture Points program has produced a pair of documentaries about housing problems, complete with a rap accompaniment, that were broadcast on commercial television. The center has also generated a radionovela, a fanzine and a community newspaper and plans next to set up an online radio station to broadcast the rap songs that its musicians and those at similar community centers here have composed and recorded.
In addition, a Culture Ministry grant enabled Hip Hop Nation Brazil to publish a book called “Hip Hop in Pencil,” a collection of rap lyrics. After a first edition of 2,000 copies quickly sold out in 2005 and was nominated for a literary prize, a conventional publishing house was interested enough to negotiate a deal to publish subsequent editions.
“We had never before seen our story told in a book, and at first the publishing houses didn’t take us seriously,” said Toni C, one of the editors and authors of the collection. “Books had always been used as a weapon against us, and people didn’t know that such a thing as hip-hop literature existed. Now they do.”
Brazilian law also offers tax breaks to companies that contribute to cultural endeavors like films, ballet and art exhibitions. Rap music has now been granted similar standing, and as a result, some of the country’s largest corporations have begun underwriting hip-hop records and shows.
At a recent event in Campinas, a city of one million an hour’s drive from here, the sponsors included a power company, a bank, a construction business and an industrial conglomerate. As a troupe of break dancers strutted their most flashy moves, D.J.’s and M.C.’s railed against social, economic and racial inequality with lyrics like “Reality is always hard/for those who have dark skin/if you don’t watch out/you’ll end up in the paddy wagon.”
“It took a while for companies to wake up to the potential this offers,” said Augusto Rodrigues, an executive of the power company and the director of the cultural center where the show was held. “But there’s a hunger for cultural programs like this, in which for the first time in 20 years, the ideology of the periphery can express itself.”
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Gilberto Gil, Digital Arts, and Intellectual Property
New York Times
March 11, 2007
Music
Gilberto Gil Hears the Future, Some Rights Reserved
By LARRY ROHTER
SALVADOR, Brazil
ON Wednesday the Brazilian minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, is scheduled to speak about intellectual property rights, digital media and related topics at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Tex. Two nights later the singer, songwriter and pop star Gilberto Gil begins a three-week North American concert tour.
Rarely do the worlds of politics and the arts converge as unconventionally as in the person of Mr. Gil, whose itinerary includes a solo performance at Carnegie Hall on March 20. More than 40 years after he first picked up a guitar and sang in public, Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira is an anomaly: He doesn’t just make music, he also makes policy.
And as the music, film and publishing industries struggle to adapt to the challenge of content proliferating on the Internet, Mr. Gil has emerged as a central player in the global search for more flexible forms of distributing artistic works. In the process his twin roles have sometimes generated competing priorities that he has sought to harmonize.
As a creator of music, he is interested in protecting copyrights. But as a government official in a developing country celebrated for the creative pulse of its people, Mr. Gil also wants Brazilians to have unfettered access to new technologies to make and disseminate art, without having to surrender their rights to the large companies that dominate the culture industry.
“I think we are moving rapidly toward the obsolescence and eventual disappearance of a single traditional model and its replacement by others that are hybrids,” Mr. Gil said in a February interview at his home here in northeast Brazil, one day before the start of Carnival. “My personal view is that digital culture brings with it a new idea of intellectual property, and that this new culture of sharing can and should inform government policies.”
Raised in the poor, arid interior of the Brazilian northeast, Mr. Gil, 64, has been straddling disparate worlds most of his life. No black Brazilian had ever served as a cabinet minister before he was appointed four years ago, and as a young man fresh out of college he worked for a multinational company at a time when few black Brazilians had access to such jobs. Later, during a military dictatorship, he was jailed and then forced into exile in Britain.
After returning to Brazil in the 1970s he made records that urged black Brazilians to reconnect with their African roots, and was an early champion here of Bob Marley and reggae. But Mr. Gil has also read widely in Asian philosophy and religions and follows a macrobiotic diet, leading the songwriter, producer and critic Nelson Motta to describe his style as “Afro-Zen.”
In person Mr. Gil is warm, calm and engaging, a slim, dreadlocked figure with an elfin, humorous quality that tends to disarm critics. As both individual and artist he has always tended to be open-minded and eclectic in his tastes; the poet Torquato Neto once said of him, “There are many ways of singing and making Brazilian music, and Gilberto Gil prefers all of them.”
A fascination with technology has been another constant in Mr. Gil’s long career. He wrote his first song about computers, called “Electronic Brain,” back in the 1960s, and has regularly returned to the theme in compositions like “Satellite Dish” and “On the Internet,” which was written in the early 1990s and contains this verse:
I want to get on the Web
Promote a debate
Bring together on the Internet
A group of fans from Connecticut
I want to go on the Web to contact
Homes in Nepal and bars in Gabon
“I don’t think there is anyone quite like Gil anywhere in the world,” said John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead lyricist who is a friend and the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the groups in the forefront of the drive to reform the current intellectual property rights system. “He’s a spearhead. He’s been thinking about I.P. issues forever and clearly gets the importance of all of this. But he’s also in a unique position to implement his ideas.”
One of Mr. Gil’s first actions after becoming culture minister in 2003 was to form an alliance between Brazil and the nascent Creative Commons movement. Founded in 2001, Creative Commons is meant to offer an alternative to the traditional copyright system of “all rights reserved,” which the movement’s adherents — from scientists and artists to lawyers and consumers — believe has impeded creativity and the sharing of knowledge in the Internet age.
In its place Creative Commons has devised a more flexible structure that allows artists to decide what part of their copyright they wish to retain and what part they are willing to share with the public. With input from Mr. Gil and many others, the organization has created licenses that permit creators and consumers to copy, remix or sample a digital work of art, so long as the originator is properly credited.
More than 145 million works have been registered with Creative Commons licenses, including videos, photographs, written texts, blogs and of course music. Because Brazil is “a country that has music in its genetic code,” to use Mr. Barlow’s phrase, and because Brazilian music has become a global force, the idea of loosening the automatic control of artistic works by a handful of conglomerates headquartered a hemisphere away has resonated strongly here.
“Look at remixing on music sites, which has become a core of creativity on the Internet and produced a huge archive of legally usable music,” said Lawrence Lessig, the author of “Free Culture” and founder of Creative Commons. “That has allowed a whole bunch of people to display themselves as artists and be picked up by record labels and Web sites, and all of that began because Gil got us to think about what kind of freedom was necessary for music.”
As culture minister Mr. Gil has also sponsored an initiative called the Cultural Points program. Small government grants are issued to scores of community centers in poor neighborhoods of some of Brazil’s largest cities to install recording and video studios and teach residents how to use them.
The result has been an outpouring of video and music, much of it racially conscious and politically tinged rap or electronica. Since Brazilian commercial radio, which is said to be riddled with payola, will not play the new music, the creators instead broadcast their songs on community radio stations and distribute their CDs independently, at markets and fairs, rather than through existing record labels.
With that project, “you’re now creating freely licensed content and demonstrating the creativity latent in the society,” Mr. Lessig said.
Brazil’s official stance on digital content and intellectual property rights is in large part derived from Mr. Gil’s own experience. In the late ’60s he and his close friend Caetano Veloso, along with a handful of others here and in São Paulo, started the movement known as Tropicalismo, which blended avant-garde poetry, pop influences from abroad and home-grown musical styles then scorned as corny and déclassé.
In a way, the Tropicalistas engaged in sampling before digital sampling existed, using cut-and-paste, mix-and-match collage techniques that are common now but were considered bizarre at the time. In recent years their music and approach has been embraced by pop performers as diverse as David Byrne, Nirvana, Beck, Nelly Furtado and Devendra Banhart.
When “world music” first appeared in the United States and Europe and Mr. Byrne, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and others began incorporating Brazilian rhythms into their work, Mr. Gil was initially skeptical of the phenomenon, complaining of “cultural safaris” by adventurers in Land Rovers “looking for all the rare specimens.” But thanks in large part to technological advances, he said, that practice has “changed completely,” and pop stars are now “more respectful” of other cultures.
“Today the hegemony of the North has, in a certain form, been broken,” he said. “Local tendencies are allowed to manifest themselves and adopt their own languages and forms of packaging. It’s no longer that vision of transforming some regional raw material into a single, standardized product. Today you have all kinds of local scenes that utilize universal elements,” like Brazilian, South African and Arab rap.
As a Tropicalista, Mr. Gil was also involved in an episode that is Brazil’s equivalent of Bob Dylan being booed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. When the Tropicalistas played electric guitars and rock rhythms at a São Paulo song festival in 1967, they were jeered and accused of being agents of American imperialism who were trying to impose noxious foreign influences on Brazilian music.
Mr. Gil’s complaints about the inequities of copyrights are derived in part from his own experience. Like many other musicians he signed contracts early in his career that essentially gave away publishing rights to the songs he wrote. But he waged a seven-year court battle to regain his rights, which ended recently with a favorable ruling that opens the door for other Brazilian artists to regain their rights as well.
“The old contracts were completely concessionary, in which all rights over the work were ceded to the contract holder, in absolute form,” he said. “I fought to bring my own work back under my control, arguing that there exists a unilateral right to break the contract. And we won. It was the first time this happened in Brazil, based on an artist’s rescinding a contract, and without a negotiated accord.”
Now that Mr. Gil has regained ownership of his own catalog of more than 400 songs, he is putting the concept of “copyleft,” as the alternative system is sometimes called, into practice. He retains all rights on some songs, some rights on others and declaring “no rights reserved” on others, which are now free for others for use in remixes or videos.
With such an approach an artist “no longer needs to transfer the administration of his rights to an entity called the record company, the movie studio or the song publisher,” Mr. Gil said. “He can do it himself.”
DESPITE all his brushes with politics over the years, it was only at the end of the ’80s, when he was elected to the City Council here in Brazil’s third-largest city, that Mr. Gil ventured into conventional party politics. His constituency was an unusual mixture of poor and working-class blacks and middle-class, mostly white, environmentalists.
But he withdrew after one term, turning aside requests he run for Brazil’s Congress by saying he was tired of partisan bickering and wanted to resume his performing career. Many Brazilians were therefore surprised when he jumped back into politics after the country’s first left-wing government was elected in 2002 and he was offered the cabinet post of culture minister, and then again late last year when he agreed to stay on for a second term.
“I still don’t like politics,” he said. “I’d rather see my position in the government as that of an administrator or manager. But politics is a necessary ingredient. You have politics in the government, with ministers, on the issue of how the budget is divided, the cake sliced up, the distribution of resources. You have to choose priorities, to tend to some and not to others.”
Mr. Gil’s tenure has not been without controversy. He is a member of the Green Party, not the ruling Workers’ Party, so when he was first appointed, some party loyalists were miffed that the job had not gone to one of their own, and responded with manifestos criticizing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s choice of a pop star thought to be ideologically suspect.
“You have to remember that Tropicalismo was fought by the traditional Stalinist left, and that even today some of those same people are in the Workers Party and the unions,” said Mr. Motta, who is also the author of “Tropical Nights,” a history of Brazilian popular music since the 1960s. “They want to bring culture under state control and know nothing about the digital world and the Internet, so of course they oppose a true revolutionary like Gil, who has always pushed for new things.”
Since Mr. Gil became minister, Brazilian government spending on culture has grown by more than 50 percent, testimony both to his prestige and negotiating skills. As minister he has devoted time to selling Brazilian music abroad, but has also labored to draw attention to Brazilian film, painting, sculpture and literature in foreign markets.
“One thing to remember about Gil,” said Hermano Vianna, an anthropologist, writer and a leading figure in Brazil’s digital culture movement, is that “he sees culture not just as art, but also as an industry. To Gil culture is not just an accessory but an important part of the economy and even a motor of economic development.”
Over the last four years, though, Mr. Gil has cut way back on his own performances, the part of being a musician he says he enjoys most, and nearly stopped recording. His most recent disc, “Gil Luminoso,” is a collection of 15 of his songs, including “Electronic Brain,” that he rerecorded in 1999 with just voice and guitar, to accompany a book about him.
Why give up something as gratifying as playing music for the wear and tear of public administration? “Life is not just pleasure,” he said. “The first phrase of the Vedic scriptures is that ‘All is suffering.’ Difficulty is stimulating, challenging, it’s an element of the pulse of life.”
Besides, he is at a point in life “where I no longer want to have a commitment to my career, in the classical sense of a profession,” he said. “I no longer see music as a field to be exploited. I see it now as an alternative area of action, part of a broad repertory of possibilities that I have. Music is something visceral in me, something that exudes from me, and even when I’m not thinking about it, I will still be making music, always.”
March 11, 2007
Music
Gilberto Gil Hears the Future, Some Rights Reserved
By LARRY ROHTER
SALVADOR, Brazil
ON Wednesday the Brazilian minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, is scheduled to speak about intellectual property rights, digital media and related topics at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Tex. Two nights later the singer, songwriter and pop star Gilberto Gil begins a three-week North American concert tour.
Rarely do the worlds of politics and the arts converge as unconventionally as in the person of Mr. Gil, whose itinerary includes a solo performance at Carnegie Hall on March 20. More than 40 years after he first picked up a guitar and sang in public, Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira is an anomaly: He doesn’t just make music, he also makes policy.
And as the music, film and publishing industries struggle to adapt to the challenge of content proliferating on the Internet, Mr. Gil has emerged as a central player in the global search for more flexible forms of distributing artistic works. In the process his twin roles have sometimes generated competing priorities that he has sought to harmonize.
As a creator of music, he is interested in protecting copyrights. But as a government official in a developing country celebrated for the creative pulse of its people, Mr. Gil also wants Brazilians to have unfettered access to new technologies to make and disseminate art, without having to surrender their rights to the large companies that dominate the culture industry.
“I think we are moving rapidly toward the obsolescence and eventual disappearance of a single traditional model and its replacement by others that are hybrids,” Mr. Gil said in a February interview at his home here in northeast Brazil, one day before the start of Carnival. “My personal view is that digital culture brings with it a new idea of intellectual property, and that this new culture of sharing can and should inform government policies.”
Raised in the poor, arid interior of the Brazilian northeast, Mr. Gil, 64, has been straddling disparate worlds most of his life. No black Brazilian had ever served as a cabinet minister before he was appointed four years ago, and as a young man fresh out of college he worked for a multinational company at a time when few black Brazilians had access to such jobs. Later, during a military dictatorship, he was jailed and then forced into exile in Britain.
After returning to Brazil in the 1970s he made records that urged black Brazilians to reconnect with their African roots, and was an early champion here of Bob Marley and reggae. But Mr. Gil has also read widely in Asian philosophy and religions and follows a macrobiotic diet, leading the songwriter, producer and critic Nelson Motta to describe his style as “Afro-Zen.”
In person Mr. Gil is warm, calm and engaging, a slim, dreadlocked figure with an elfin, humorous quality that tends to disarm critics. As both individual and artist he has always tended to be open-minded and eclectic in his tastes; the poet Torquato Neto once said of him, “There are many ways of singing and making Brazilian music, and Gilberto Gil prefers all of them.”
A fascination with technology has been another constant in Mr. Gil’s long career. He wrote his first song about computers, called “Electronic Brain,” back in the 1960s, and has regularly returned to the theme in compositions like “Satellite Dish” and “On the Internet,” which was written in the early 1990s and contains this verse:
I want to get on the Web
Promote a debate
Bring together on the Internet
A group of fans from Connecticut
I want to go on the Web to contact
Homes in Nepal and bars in Gabon
“I don’t think there is anyone quite like Gil anywhere in the world,” said John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead lyricist who is a friend and the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the groups in the forefront of the drive to reform the current intellectual property rights system. “He’s a spearhead. He’s been thinking about I.P. issues forever and clearly gets the importance of all of this. But he’s also in a unique position to implement his ideas.”
One of Mr. Gil’s first actions after becoming culture minister in 2003 was to form an alliance between Brazil and the nascent Creative Commons movement. Founded in 2001, Creative Commons is meant to offer an alternative to the traditional copyright system of “all rights reserved,” which the movement’s adherents — from scientists and artists to lawyers and consumers — believe has impeded creativity and the sharing of knowledge in the Internet age.
In its place Creative Commons has devised a more flexible structure that allows artists to decide what part of their copyright they wish to retain and what part they are willing to share with the public. With input from Mr. Gil and many others, the organization has created licenses that permit creators and consumers to copy, remix or sample a digital work of art, so long as the originator is properly credited.
More than 145 million works have been registered with Creative Commons licenses, including videos, photographs, written texts, blogs and of course music. Because Brazil is “a country that has music in its genetic code,” to use Mr. Barlow’s phrase, and because Brazilian music has become a global force, the idea of loosening the automatic control of artistic works by a handful of conglomerates headquartered a hemisphere away has resonated strongly here.
“Look at remixing on music sites, which has become a core of creativity on the Internet and produced a huge archive of legally usable music,” said Lawrence Lessig, the author of “Free Culture” and founder of Creative Commons. “That has allowed a whole bunch of people to display themselves as artists and be picked up by record labels and Web sites, and all of that began because Gil got us to think about what kind of freedom was necessary for music.”
As culture minister Mr. Gil has also sponsored an initiative called the Cultural Points program. Small government grants are issued to scores of community centers in poor neighborhoods of some of Brazil’s largest cities to install recording and video studios and teach residents how to use them.
The result has been an outpouring of video and music, much of it racially conscious and politically tinged rap or electronica. Since Brazilian commercial radio, which is said to be riddled with payola, will not play the new music, the creators instead broadcast their songs on community radio stations and distribute their CDs independently, at markets and fairs, rather than through existing record labels.
With that project, “you’re now creating freely licensed content and demonstrating the creativity latent in the society,” Mr. Lessig said.
Brazil’s official stance on digital content and intellectual property rights is in large part derived from Mr. Gil’s own experience. In the late ’60s he and his close friend Caetano Veloso, along with a handful of others here and in São Paulo, started the movement known as Tropicalismo, which blended avant-garde poetry, pop influences from abroad and home-grown musical styles then scorned as corny and déclassé.
In a way, the Tropicalistas engaged in sampling before digital sampling existed, using cut-and-paste, mix-and-match collage techniques that are common now but were considered bizarre at the time. In recent years their music and approach has been embraced by pop performers as diverse as David Byrne, Nirvana, Beck, Nelly Furtado and Devendra Banhart.
When “world music” first appeared in the United States and Europe and Mr. Byrne, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and others began incorporating Brazilian rhythms into their work, Mr. Gil was initially skeptical of the phenomenon, complaining of “cultural safaris” by adventurers in Land Rovers “looking for all the rare specimens.” But thanks in large part to technological advances, he said, that practice has “changed completely,” and pop stars are now “more respectful” of other cultures.
“Today the hegemony of the North has, in a certain form, been broken,” he said. “Local tendencies are allowed to manifest themselves and adopt their own languages and forms of packaging. It’s no longer that vision of transforming some regional raw material into a single, standardized product. Today you have all kinds of local scenes that utilize universal elements,” like Brazilian, South African and Arab rap.
As a Tropicalista, Mr. Gil was also involved in an episode that is Brazil’s equivalent of Bob Dylan being booed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. When the Tropicalistas played electric guitars and rock rhythms at a São Paulo song festival in 1967, they were jeered and accused of being agents of American imperialism who were trying to impose noxious foreign influences on Brazilian music.
Mr. Gil’s complaints about the inequities of copyrights are derived in part from his own experience. Like many other musicians he signed contracts early in his career that essentially gave away publishing rights to the songs he wrote. But he waged a seven-year court battle to regain his rights, which ended recently with a favorable ruling that opens the door for other Brazilian artists to regain their rights as well.
“The old contracts were completely concessionary, in which all rights over the work were ceded to the contract holder, in absolute form,” he said. “I fought to bring my own work back under my control, arguing that there exists a unilateral right to break the contract. And we won. It was the first time this happened in Brazil, based on an artist’s rescinding a contract, and without a negotiated accord.”
Now that Mr. Gil has regained ownership of his own catalog of more than 400 songs, he is putting the concept of “copyleft,” as the alternative system is sometimes called, into practice. He retains all rights on some songs, some rights on others and declaring “no rights reserved” on others, which are now free for others for use in remixes or videos.
With such an approach an artist “no longer needs to transfer the administration of his rights to an entity called the record company, the movie studio or the song publisher,” Mr. Gil said. “He can do it himself.”
DESPITE all his brushes with politics over the years, it was only at the end of the ’80s, when he was elected to the City Council here in Brazil’s third-largest city, that Mr. Gil ventured into conventional party politics. His constituency was an unusual mixture of poor and working-class blacks and middle-class, mostly white, environmentalists.
But he withdrew after one term, turning aside requests he run for Brazil’s Congress by saying he was tired of partisan bickering and wanted to resume his performing career. Many Brazilians were therefore surprised when he jumped back into politics after the country’s first left-wing government was elected in 2002 and he was offered the cabinet post of culture minister, and then again late last year when he agreed to stay on for a second term.
“I still don’t like politics,” he said. “I’d rather see my position in the government as that of an administrator or manager. But politics is a necessary ingredient. You have politics in the government, with ministers, on the issue of how the budget is divided, the cake sliced up, the distribution of resources. You have to choose priorities, to tend to some and not to others.”
Mr. Gil’s tenure has not been without controversy. He is a member of the Green Party, not the ruling Workers’ Party, so when he was first appointed, some party loyalists were miffed that the job had not gone to one of their own, and responded with manifestos criticizing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s choice of a pop star thought to be ideologically suspect.
“You have to remember that Tropicalismo was fought by the traditional Stalinist left, and that even today some of those same people are in the Workers Party and the unions,” said Mr. Motta, who is also the author of “Tropical Nights,” a history of Brazilian popular music since the 1960s. “They want to bring culture under state control and know nothing about the digital world and the Internet, so of course they oppose a true revolutionary like Gil, who has always pushed for new things.”
Since Mr. Gil became minister, Brazilian government spending on culture has grown by more than 50 percent, testimony both to his prestige and negotiating skills. As minister he has devoted time to selling Brazilian music abroad, but has also labored to draw attention to Brazilian film, painting, sculpture and literature in foreign markets.
“One thing to remember about Gil,” said Hermano Vianna, an anthropologist, writer and a leading figure in Brazil’s digital culture movement, is that “he sees culture not just as art, but also as an industry. To Gil culture is not just an accessory but an important part of the economy and even a motor of economic development.”
Over the last four years, though, Mr. Gil has cut way back on his own performances, the part of being a musician he says he enjoys most, and nearly stopped recording. His most recent disc, “Gil Luminoso,” is a collection of 15 of his songs, including “Electronic Brain,” that he rerecorded in 1999 with just voice and guitar, to accompany a book about him.
Why give up something as gratifying as playing music for the wear and tear of public administration? “Life is not just pleasure,” he said. “The first phrase of the Vedic scriptures is that ‘All is suffering.’ Difficulty is stimulating, challenging, it’s an element of the pulse of life.”
Besides, he is at a point in life “where I no longer want to have a commitment to my career, in the classical sense of a profession,” he said. “I no longer see music as a field to be exploited. I see it now as an alternative area of action, part of a broad repertory of possibilities that I have. Music is something visceral in me, something that exudes from me, and even when I’m not thinking about it, I will still be making music, always.”
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Brazil samba school leader slain in Rio
Brazil samba school leader slain in Rio
By MICHAEL ASTOR, Associated Press Writer 31 minutes ago
A leader of one of Rio's premiere samba parade groups was shot to death early Wednesday, just days before the city's famed Carnival celebrations.
Guaracy Paes Falcao, 42, vice president of the samba school Salgueiro, was killed in his car by unidentified gunmen before dawn while leaving the group's headquarters with a woman, who was also shot to death, police spokesman Renato Barone said.
Barone would not say whether authorities had suspects.
The killings came a day after police entered a Rio slum and clashed with drug gangs in shootouts that killed six people, including at least four suspected gang members.
Also Wednesday, more than 600 people attended a Mass for a 6-year-old boy who was dragged to death by thieves trying to steal his mother's car. Police have arrested five suspects, one of whom is 16.
After the Mass, the demonstrators took to the streets shouting "Peace" and "Justice."
Rio de Janeiro Gov. Sergio Cabral said he will soon deliver a letter to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, signed by the boy's parents and other crime victims, demanding that Brazilian states be given more power to harshly punish juvenile offenders. "Enough war, we want peace," the letter says.
Rio has suffered deadly clashes recently between police, drug gangs and so-called militias made up of off-duty officers who have expelled gangs from about 90 of the city's 600 slums. The militias have managed to reduce drug-related violence but are charging residents and business owners for protection.
Virtually all the recent violence has been confined to "favelas," vast shantytowns and slums where millions of poor people live. Little if any has spilled over into well-heeled beach areas where more than 600,000 Brazilian and foreign tourists are expected to start gathering in coming days to celebrate Carnival.
Wednesday's shooting happened in Tijuca, a middle-class neighborhood surrounded by slums on the city's north side.
The city's samba schools kick off the traditional Carnival parade in this city's "Sambadromo" stadium Sunday. Other celebrations begin as early as Thursday.
Another Salgueiro leader who was one of Falcao's cousins, Waldemir Garcia, was killed three years ago in Rio. Garcia had been an alleged kingpin of an illegal numbers game.
Police did not suggest a motive yet for Falcao's death, but local media reported there had been a long history of bad blood between Garcia and Falcao, and it's long been an open secret that Rio's annual samba parade — the centerpiece of Carnival celebrations — is funded by the numbers game bosses.
___
Associated Press Writer Tales Azzoni in Sao Paulo, Brazil, contributed to this report.
By MICHAEL ASTOR, Associated Press Writer 31 minutes ago
A leader of one of Rio's premiere samba parade groups was shot to death early Wednesday, just days before the city's famed Carnival celebrations.
Guaracy Paes Falcao, 42, vice president of the samba school Salgueiro, was killed in his car by unidentified gunmen before dawn while leaving the group's headquarters with a woman, who was also shot to death, police spokesman Renato Barone said.
Barone would not say whether authorities had suspects.
The killings came a day after police entered a Rio slum and clashed with drug gangs in shootouts that killed six people, including at least four suspected gang members.
Also Wednesday, more than 600 people attended a Mass for a 6-year-old boy who was dragged to death by thieves trying to steal his mother's car. Police have arrested five suspects, one of whom is 16.
After the Mass, the demonstrators took to the streets shouting "Peace" and "Justice."
Rio de Janeiro Gov. Sergio Cabral said he will soon deliver a letter to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, signed by the boy's parents and other crime victims, demanding that Brazilian states be given more power to harshly punish juvenile offenders. "Enough war, we want peace," the letter says.
Rio has suffered deadly clashes recently between police, drug gangs and so-called militias made up of off-duty officers who have expelled gangs from about 90 of the city's 600 slums. The militias have managed to reduce drug-related violence but are charging residents and business owners for protection.
Virtually all the recent violence has been confined to "favelas," vast shantytowns and slums where millions of poor people live. Little if any has spilled over into well-heeled beach areas where more than 600,000 Brazilian and foreign tourists are expected to start gathering in coming days to celebrate Carnival.
Wednesday's shooting happened in Tijuca, a middle-class neighborhood surrounded by slums on the city's north side.
The city's samba schools kick off the traditional Carnival parade in this city's "Sambadromo" stadium Sunday. Other celebrations begin as early as Thursday.
Another Salgueiro leader who was one of Falcao's cousins, Waldemir Garcia, was killed three years ago in Rio. Garcia had been an alleged kingpin of an illegal numbers game.
Police did not suggest a motive yet for Falcao's death, but local media reported there had been a long history of bad blood between Garcia and Falcao, and it's long been an open secret that Rio's annual samba parade — the centerpiece of Carnival celebrations — is funded by the numbers game bosses.
___
Associated Press Writer Tales Azzoni in Sao Paulo, Brazil, contributed to this report.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Review of 1938 Brazilian recordings
NYTimes
January 25, 2007
Long-Lost Trove of Music Connects Brazil to Its Roots
By LARRY ROHTER
SÃO PAULO, Brazil, Jan. 24 — From the mid-1930s onward, the American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax led expeditions into the Deep South, searching for authentic blues and folk singers. Thanks to those efforts, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie made their first recordings and a template for American popular music was set.
Early in 1938, Mário de Andrade, the municipal secretary of culture here, dispatched a four-member Folklore Research Mission to the northeastern hinterlands of Brazil on a similar mission. His intention was to record as much music as possible as quickly as possible, before encroaching influences like radio and cinema began transforming the region’s distinctive culture.
Traveling by truck, horse and donkey, they recorded whoever and whatever seemed to be interesting: piano carriers, cowboys, beggars, voodoo priests, quarry workers, fishermen, dance troupes and even children at play.
But the Brazilian mission’s collection ended up languishing in vaults here. Only now, after nearly 70 years, is the registry of what Mr. de Andrade called a “prodigious treasure doomed to disappear” finally available, in the form of a six-CD boxed set that documents the roots of virtually every important style of modern Brazilian popular music, from samba to mangue beat.
“This is an important event because all of the main tendencies, whether European, African or Indian in origin, are represented and are detectable,” said Marcos Branda Lacerda, the director of the CD project, organized by the government here in Brazil’s largest and most prosperous city. “Everything is encompassed, and when you listen, you can hear the influences that would radiate outward” and make Brazilian music the global force that it is today.
The CD set, called “Musica Tradicional do Norte e Nordeste 1938,” consists of more than seven hours of music, drawn from the 1,299 tracks by 80 performers, totaling nearly 34 hours, that the folklore team recorded in five states in northern and northeastern Brazil during the first half of 1938.
Many of the styles documented on the records proved to be a major influence on the Tropicalismo movement, which emerged here in the 1960s and today has international admirers who include David Byrne, Beck and Devendra Banhart. The founders of that movement, mainly Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé and Gilberto Gil, currently Brazil’s minister of culture, come from the interior of the northeastern state of Bahia and openly acknowledge their debt.
“This is the music I heard as a kid in my father’s store, and it’s where all the richness and strength of Brazilian popular music comes from,” Mr. Zé said in an interview. “As sons of the Portuguese, Caetano and Gil and all the rest of us tropicalistas absorbed this folk influence, transmuted it and then took it to the world.”
Mr. Zé also noted that the music of the Brazilian northeast that came from Portugal was itself a result of cultural mixing, especially from the Arab domination there during the medieval era. The lyrics of some songs in the compilation date back to troubadours’ tales from that era, but the Arab presence manifested itself mainly in a vocal style characterized by a fondness for bent notes.
“That influence is still there in Brazilian popular music today,” he said. “I hear it most clearly and beautifully when Caetano sings. He has developed a sophisticated, inventive way to use these modulations that were quite common in the singers we heard there in the backlands of the northeast.”
Though the expedition’s main focus seemed to be on rhythms, guitarists are likely to be especially interested in the third and fourth discs, which include field recordings of duos known as repentistas. Like the blues, this guitar-based genre emphasizes call and response and often employs the mixture of braggadocio and insults that Americans know as “the dozens.”
Thirty years ago, after a visit here, a reporter played some recordings of repentistas for the American primitivist guitarist John Fahey. As someone interested in folk music around the world, Mr. Fahey expressed curiosity about the tunings and scales they used and pointed out that some of the gruff, raspy, somewhat nasal vocals reminded him of Son House and Bukka White.
“It gives me chills just to think of the similarities” between American blues and the music of the northeast, Mr. Zé said. “It’s like Mother Africa ended up with grandsons in Alabama and Pernambuco,” the state where the folklore team began its mission.
Of the three main cultural streams that have blended to make Brazil what it is, the Amerindian element is less represented on the discs than the European and African components, Mr. Lacerda said. But the collection contains songs performed by bandas de pífano, the fife and drum groups that are Indian in origin, as well as recordings of praiás, a largely Indian musical ritual that has all but vanished from modern Brazil.
The original project was the idea of Mr. de Andrade, one of Brazil’s most prominent intellectuals in the 20th century. A poet, novelist, critic, art historian, musicologist and public official, Mr. de Andrade had studied to be a pianist but in 1923 became one of the founders of the modernist literary movement, which dominated Brazil’s cultural scene for decades to come.
“By the 1930s, Mário de Andrade and others felt an urgency to register popular manifestations of culture before it was too late,” said Flavia Camargo Toni, a musicologist who wrote part of the liner notes for the set. “Most of the northeast had not received electrification yet, so life was completely isolated, and few people had traveled. So he felt he had to take advantage of the moment.”
During World War II, copies of the recordings were sent to the Library of Congress in Washington. A decade ago, Rykodisc released a single disc sampler, co-produced by Mickey Hart, drummer of the Grateful Dead, and called “The Discoteca Collection,” as part of the Library of Congress’s Endangered Music Project, but it was not until 2000 that restoration efforts began here.
“When I first saw the material back in the 1980s, the roof was falling down, water was leaking in, and I thought we were going to lose it all,” Mr. Lacerda said. “But I was greatly surprised when I found most of the 78s to be in good condition, and when they weren’t, we were lucky enough to find duplicates that we could copy straight to CD and then eliminate a lot of the hisses.”
During its travels, the Andrade expedition also collected musical instruments and other objects and filmed and photographed dances and festivals. The result of those undertakings have been put on display at the municipal cultural center here, including the team’s notebooks from the field, the Presto Recording Corporation equipment it used and transcriptions of interviews with performers.
At the time the recordings were made, Brazil was ruled by a dictatorship that had outlawed Afro-Brazilian religious practices. As a result, the folklore team required a letter of authorization from the police in order to do its work, and “a goodly portion of the objects they collected, especially the drums, came from confiscated material at police stations,” said Vera Lucia Cardim de Cerqueira, a curator at the center.
For all of Brazil’s musical sophistication and exposure to international styles of music in recent years, that heritage continues to be relevant. Mr. Zé referred specifically to “What’s Happening in Pernambuco: New Sounds of the Brazilian Northeast,” which will be released on Mr. Byrne’s Luaka Bop label on Feb. 7 and which he said was saturated with rhythms derived from those the folklore expedition documented.
In the past, Brazil “has not had a culture of preservation,” Ms. Camargo Toni said, complicating efforts to place the country’s musical evolution in its proper context. But with the mission’s recordings available at last, she said, Brazilians now have “the possibility of listening to the past thinking of the future.”
“We can show what we were, what we are today and how that came to be,” she said.
January 25, 2007
Long-Lost Trove of Music Connects Brazil to Its Roots
By LARRY ROHTER
SÃO PAULO, Brazil, Jan. 24 — From the mid-1930s onward, the American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax led expeditions into the Deep South, searching for authentic blues and folk singers. Thanks to those efforts, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie made their first recordings and a template for American popular music was set.
Early in 1938, Mário de Andrade, the municipal secretary of culture here, dispatched a four-member Folklore Research Mission to the northeastern hinterlands of Brazil on a similar mission. His intention was to record as much music as possible as quickly as possible, before encroaching influences like radio and cinema began transforming the region’s distinctive culture.
Traveling by truck, horse and donkey, they recorded whoever and whatever seemed to be interesting: piano carriers, cowboys, beggars, voodoo priests, quarry workers, fishermen, dance troupes and even children at play.
But the Brazilian mission’s collection ended up languishing in vaults here. Only now, after nearly 70 years, is the registry of what Mr. de Andrade called a “prodigious treasure doomed to disappear” finally available, in the form of a six-CD boxed set that documents the roots of virtually every important style of modern Brazilian popular music, from samba to mangue beat.
“This is an important event because all of the main tendencies, whether European, African or Indian in origin, are represented and are detectable,” said Marcos Branda Lacerda, the director of the CD project, organized by the government here in Brazil’s largest and most prosperous city. “Everything is encompassed, and when you listen, you can hear the influences that would radiate outward” and make Brazilian music the global force that it is today.
The CD set, called “Musica Tradicional do Norte e Nordeste 1938,” consists of more than seven hours of music, drawn from the 1,299 tracks by 80 performers, totaling nearly 34 hours, that the folklore team recorded in five states in northern and northeastern Brazil during the first half of 1938.
Many of the styles documented on the records proved to be a major influence on the Tropicalismo movement, which emerged here in the 1960s and today has international admirers who include David Byrne, Beck and Devendra Banhart. The founders of that movement, mainly Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé and Gilberto Gil, currently Brazil’s minister of culture, come from the interior of the northeastern state of Bahia and openly acknowledge their debt.
“This is the music I heard as a kid in my father’s store, and it’s where all the richness and strength of Brazilian popular music comes from,” Mr. Zé said in an interview. “As sons of the Portuguese, Caetano and Gil and all the rest of us tropicalistas absorbed this folk influence, transmuted it and then took it to the world.”
Mr. Zé also noted that the music of the Brazilian northeast that came from Portugal was itself a result of cultural mixing, especially from the Arab domination there during the medieval era. The lyrics of some songs in the compilation date back to troubadours’ tales from that era, but the Arab presence manifested itself mainly in a vocal style characterized by a fondness for bent notes.
“That influence is still there in Brazilian popular music today,” he said. “I hear it most clearly and beautifully when Caetano sings. He has developed a sophisticated, inventive way to use these modulations that were quite common in the singers we heard there in the backlands of the northeast.”
Though the expedition’s main focus seemed to be on rhythms, guitarists are likely to be especially interested in the third and fourth discs, which include field recordings of duos known as repentistas. Like the blues, this guitar-based genre emphasizes call and response and often employs the mixture of braggadocio and insults that Americans know as “the dozens.”
Thirty years ago, after a visit here, a reporter played some recordings of repentistas for the American primitivist guitarist John Fahey. As someone interested in folk music around the world, Mr. Fahey expressed curiosity about the tunings and scales they used and pointed out that some of the gruff, raspy, somewhat nasal vocals reminded him of Son House and Bukka White.
“It gives me chills just to think of the similarities” between American blues and the music of the northeast, Mr. Zé said. “It’s like Mother Africa ended up with grandsons in Alabama and Pernambuco,” the state where the folklore team began its mission.
Of the three main cultural streams that have blended to make Brazil what it is, the Amerindian element is less represented on the discs than the European and African components, Mr. Lacerda said. But the collection contains songs performed by bandas de pífano, the fife and drum groups that are Indian in origin, as well as recordings of praiás, a largely Indian musical ritual that has all but vanished from modern Brazil.
The original project was the idea of Mr. de Andrade, one of Brazil’s most prominent intellectuals in the 20th century. A poet, novelist, critic, art historian, musicologist and public official, Mr. de Andrade had studied to be a pianist but in 1923 became one of the founders of the modernist literary movement, which dominated Brazil’s cultural scene for decades to come.
“By the 1930s, Mário de Andrade and others felt an urgency to register popular manifestations of culture before it was too late,” said Flavia Camargo Toni, a musicologist who wrote part of the liner notes for the set. “Most of the northeast had not received electrification yet, so life was completely isolated, and few people had traveled. So he felt he had to take advantage of the moment.”
During World War II, copies of the recordings were sent to the Library of Congress in Washington. A decade ago, Rykodisc released a single disc sampler, co-produced by Mickey Hart, drummer of the Grateful Dead, and called “The Discoteca Collection,” as part of the Library of Congress’s Endangered Music Project, but it was not until 2000 that restoration efforts began here.
“When I first saw the material back in the 1980s, the roof was falling down, water was leaking in, and I thought we were going to lose it all,” Mr. Lacerda said. “But I was greatly surprised when I found most of the 78s to be in good condition, and when they weren’t, we were lucky enough to find duplicates that we could copy straight to CD and then eliminate a lot of the hisses.”
During its travels, the Andrade expedition also collected musical instruments and other objects and filmed and photographed dances and festivals. The result of those undertakings have been put on display at the municipal cultural center here, including the team’s notebooks from the field, the Presto Recording Corporation equipment it used and transcriptions of interviews with performers.
At the time the recordings were made, Brazil was ruled by a dictatorship that had outlawed Afro-Brazilian religious practices. As a result, the folklore team required a letter of authorization from the police in order to do its work, and “a goodly portion of the objects they collected, especially the drums, came from confiscated material at police stations,” said Vera Lucia Cardim de Cerqueira, a curator at the center.
For all of Brazil’s musical sophistication and exposure to international styles of music in recent years, that heritage continues to be relevant. Mr. Zé referred specifically to “What’s Happening in Pernambuco: New Sounds of the Brazilian Northeast,” which will be released on Mr. Byrne’s Luaka Bop label on Feb. 7 and which he said was saturated with rhythms derived from those the folklore expedition documented.
In the past, Brazil “has not had a culture of preservation,” Ms. Camargo Toni said, complicating efforts to place the country’s musical evolution in its proper context. But with the mission’s recordings available at last, she said, Brazilians now have “the possibility of listening to the past thinking of the future.”
“We can show what we were, what we are today and how that came to be,” she said.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Brazilian Carnival composer Braguinha dies
NYTimes
December 28, 2006
Braguinha, 99, a Composer of Brazilian Carnival Songs, Dies
By SIMON ROMERO
Correction Appended
Braguinha, the Brazilian composer of Carnival songs whose humorously ironic melodies influenced generations of Brazilian musicians, died on Sunday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 99.
Braguinha died after suffering a generalized infection, according to a statement from Dr. João Luiz Ferreira Costa of the Pró-cardíaco Hospital in Rio de Janeiro, the newspaper Folha de São Paulo reported.
Born Carlos Alberto Ferreira Braga, and known for part of his long career by another stage name, João de Barro, Braguinha outlived contemporaries with whom he worked in Rio de Janeiro starting in the 1930s, like Noel Rosa and Almirante. He rose to prominence in what was considered a golden age for the Carnival songs known as marchinhas. His work’s influence extended to the innovative Bossa Nova and Tropicalista musical movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
Braguinha’s songs were often nuanced celebrations of female sensuality and evocative of the lush tropical bounty of Brazil’s vast territory. Compositions like “Twist no Carnaval,” “Chiquita Bacana” and “Yes, Nós Temos Bananas” (“Yes, We Have Bananas”) contributed to his legend, with performers like Caetano Veloso subversively riffing on them in later decades as musical creativity became a way of challenging societal norms and political repression in Brazil.
The song “Touradas em Madri” (“Bullfights in Madrid”), written with Alberto Ribeiro, was one of Braguinha’s most popular and was considered a precursor to the Tropicalista movement. The song became a national obsession when fans chanted its verses during the 1950 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, in which Brazil defeated Spain.
Braguinha was born in 1907 into a middle-class family — his father was a factory manager — in the Jardim Botanico district of Rio de Janeiro. He adopted the stage name João de Barro so his plunge into the bohemian life of a musician would not tarnish his family’s status.
By the late 1930s Braguinha had become a towering figure in Brazilian popular culture. He became instrumental in adapting North American cartoons and children’s songs to Brazilian tastes. He retooled Disney productions and tales like “The Three Little Pigs” into Portuguese. He often took substantial liberty with translations and lyrics in these adaptations, as he did with “Sorri,” a Portuguese version of Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile,” originally part of the theme music from the film “Modern Times” about keeping your chin up during hard times. The Brazilian musician Djavan, one of that country’s most popular performers, did his own version of “Sorri,” illustrating the long reach of Braguinha’s influence.
Braguinha was also a successful screenwriter, movie director and record producer, helping to start the careers of musicians like Elizeth Cardoso, Emilinha Borba and Jorge Goulart.
He is survived by his wife, Astreia; a daughter; three grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
In 1984 Braguinha won what is perhaps the highest honor in Brazil for a popular composer: his life became the theme of a song for Mangueira, the samba school that emerged victorious in the Carnival parade in Rio de Janeiro that year.
Correction: December 29, 2006
An obituary yesterday about Braguinha, an influential composer of Brazilian carnival songs, referred imprecisely to a song for which he wrote a Portuguese version. “Smile” was originally part of Charlie Chaplin’s theme music for his 1936 film, “Modern Times,” and lyrics by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons were added in 1954. It was not a song from the film.
December 28, 2006
Braguinha, 99, a Composer of Brazilian Carnival Songs, Dies
By SIMON ROMERO
Correction Appended
Braguinha, the Brazilian composer of Carnival songs whose humorously ironic melodies influenced generations of Brazilian musicians, died on Sunday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 99.
Braguinha died after suffering a generalized infection, according to a statement from Dr. João Luiz Ferreira Costa of the Pró-cardíaco Hospital in Rio de Janeiro, the newspaper Folha de São Paulo reported.
Born Carlos Alberto Ferreira Braga, and known for part of his long career by another stage name, João de Barro, Braguinha outlived contemporaries with whom he worked in Rio de Janeiro starting in the 1930s, like Noel Rosa and Almirante. He rose to prominence in what was considered a golden age for the Carnival songs known as marchinhas. His work’s influence extended to the innovative Bossa Nova and Tropicalista musical movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
Braguinha’s songs were often nuanced celebrations of female sensuality and evocative of the lush tropical bounty of Brazil’s vast territory. Compositions like “Twist no Carnaval,” “Chiquita Bacana” and “Yes, Nós Temos Bananas” (“Yes, We Have Bananas”) contributed to his legend, with performers like Caetano Veloso subversively riffing on them in later decades as musical creativity became a way of challenging societal norms and political repression in Brazil.
The song “Touradas em Madri” (“Bullfights in Madrid”), written with Alberto Ribeiro, was one of Braguinha’s most popular and was considered a precursor to the Tropicalista movement. The song became a national obsession when fans chanted its verses during the 1950 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, in which Brazil defeated Spain.
Braguinha was born in 1907 into a middle-class family — his father was a factory manager — in the Jardim Botanico district of Rio de Janeiro. He adopted the stage name João de Barro so his plunge into the bohemian life of a musician would not tarnish his family’s status.
By the late 1930s Braguinha had become a towering figure in Brazilian popular culture. He became instrumental in adapting North American cartoons and children’s songs to Brazilian tastes. He retooled Disney productions and tales like “The Three Little Pigs” into Portuguese. He often took substantial liberty with translations and lyrics in these adaptations, as he did with “Sorri,” a Portuguese version of Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile,” originally part of the theme music from the film “Modern Times” about keeping your chin up during hard times. The Brazilian musician Djavan, one of that country’s most popular performers, did his own version of “Sorri,” illustrating the long reach of Braguinha’s influence.
Braguinha was also a successful screenwriter, movie director and record producer, helping to start the careers of musicians like Elizeth Cardoso, Emilinha Borba and Jorge Goulart.
He is survived by his wife, Astreia; a daughter; three grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
In 1984 Braguinha won what is perhaps the highest honor in Brazil for a popular composer: his life became the theme of a song for Mangueira, the samba school that emerged victorious in the Carnival parade in Rio de Janeiro that year.
Correction: December 29, 2006
An obituary yesterday about Braguinha, an influential composer of Brazilian carnival songs, referred imprecisely to a song for which he wrote a Portuguese version. “Smile” was originally part of Charlie Chaplin’s theme music for his 1936 film, “Modern Times,” and lyrics by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons were added in 1954. It was not a song from the film.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Forró in Brazil
New York Times
May 7, 2006
Cultured Traveler
Forró in Brazil: Under a Full Moon, Dancing to the Beat of the Zabumba
By SETH KUGEL
ABOUT a mile down a cobblestone road from the Vitória gas station, on a moonlit ranch outside São José de Mipibu, a town of negligible importance in northeast Brazil, three men in shiny blue and silver cowboy outfits made music with an accordion, a jangling triangle and a deep-throated zabumba drum.
They were hardly alone. Hundreds of blue-jeans clad young people, mostly from the nearby city of Natal, drank beer, held hands, laughed and made out in a corral-inspired courtyard. Hundreds more couples jammed a dance floor under a thatched roof, locking right thighs to perform a dance that is at once sensual and herky-jerky, a combination that could have emerged only from Brazilian cowboy culture.
The group, Os 3 do Nordeste, was playing forró, Brazilian country music born in the northeastern sertão — dry, cactus-filled, backwoods cattle country — and spread far and wide in the late 1940's by Luiz Gonzaga, the singer, songwriter and accordion master who moved to Rio de Janeiro and made the song "Asa Branca" an international hit.
Since then, it has come in and out of fashion, but after a revival in the 90's it has settled into a hip-to-be-square-dancing mainstream acceptance (in fact, Brazil celebrated its first National Forró Day on Dec. 13). Samba and bossa nova are the international face of Brazilian music, and funk from the favelas may be all the rage in Rio, but even fashionable clubs cannot resist putting on a forró or two as the evening winds down.
In the northeast, though, forró is king. There, the accordion, triangle and zabumba fill nightclubs in the major cities every day of the week, and every June during the festival of São João, transform towns that are usually just dots on the map into musical epicenters that draw thousands of visitors into an accordion-inspired frenzy.
If you're planning a trip to Brazil to hear forró, there are a few things you should know. First is the pronunciation: it's faw-HAW. Next, although you can find forró clubs in most Brazilian cities, the northeast is really the place to go. The two biggest cities in the region, Recife and Fortaleza, are both forró hubs; I chose Recife so I could squeeze in a visit to Caruaru and Campina Grande, two small cities also known for their forró traditions. Then there is the definition. It's a slippery term, and can mean different things depending on who your source is. Mine was Sérgio Gonzaga, nephew of the famous Luiz.
Sérgio, a 51-year-old forró purist with curly salt-and-pepper hair, broke it down for me. On the side of good is traditional forró, known as pé-de-serra, or foot-of-the-mountain. Based around the trio of accordion, triangle and zabumba, it is old-fashioned, good ol' boy forró, what Bo and Luke Duke would have listened to had they been Brazilian. On the tacky side is forró estilizado, the stylized pop music version played by groups like Calcinha Preta, full of electronic sounds with the accordion relegated to a secondary role. It's "not part of the sertão culture, not part of its history," Sérgio said. And Calcinha Preta, after all, means "Black Panties," not exactly evocative of country roots.
A bit more acceptable, he said, is forró universitário, generally associated with college kids and groups like Rastapé and Falamansa that still focuses on traditional instruments but with a smoother sound.
Around midnight at Sala de Reboco, in Recife, I knew from the buzz of activity — the line of taxis outside, the vendors roasting meat and selling beer — that I had come to a forró hot spot. At the door, there was no pretense of snobbery, no line to enter or to get one of the tickets that bartenders mark to keep track of your tab. There was just a wave of heat radiating from the dance floor.
Inside, I found something like an artsy barn-in-the-city with a slightly self-conscious touch of cool. It was a cavernous space full of old wood beams, white plastic tables and chairs, and a sizable dance floor and stage on the far side. The young people in jeans were unintimidating, far different from the tanner-than-thou skin-baring set at clubs in Rio.
Marking everyone's ticket as they ordered, bartenders tossed out Antarctica beers and the occasional whiskey, and a slushy orange-colored frozen drink from a machine. It turned out to be vodka with what a helpful local explained was "a fruit we have around here that's called a tangerine."
Couples who could not penetrate the densely packed dance floor danced around tables covered in empty beer cans, drink glasses and cigarette butts, frat-party style. The volume of the sound system was completely bearable, halfway between department store Musak and a rave. You could converse without shouting, which was a good thing, because my dancing ability alone wasn't going to win me many friends.
Sala de Reboco attracts live performances from big names in forró, and that night the performer was Geraldinho Lins, who resembled a frumpy Garth Brooks. I was soon thrilled to find myself moving (and singing along) to a song I miraculously recognized: "Amor de São João." A quick dance tip I soon picked up: remove your cellphone from your front right pocket; they don't call this dance style bate-coxa (or thigh-banging) for nothing.
The friendly vibe, the laid-back not-so-cool crowd, the faux rural feel — I was charmed. Charmed, that is, until it came time to leave and face the Brazilian club-exiting system, which has to be one of the biggest mood spoilers in global night life. Instead of the American pay-as-you-go method — which at the end of the night allows you to be dancing one minute and escaping into the night, ears ringing, the next — getting out of most clubs in Brazil requires a wait in a painfully slow line to settle the tab.
SÉRGIO GONZAGA had moved back to Brazil to help out his 80-year-old mother, Chiquinha, but not as you might expect. Still an active forrozeira herself (she recently put out an album), she was performing the Friday I was in Recife. One of Sérgio's filial duties was to play zabumba in her band.
That night, at the Pátio of São Pedro in downtown Recife, a restored cobblestone plaza around a church, I found Sérgio and Chiquinha sipping Antarctica and sitting with friends, including the prominent forró composer Xico Bezerra. Both he and Sérgio urged me to make the long trip up to the Fazenda Bom Fim, a ranch in São José de Mipibu, for Forró de Lua, or Forró of the Moon, which takes place once a month, on the Saturday closest to the full moon, which just happened to be the next day.
But first, there was Friday evening to contend with. Chiquinha, slim and elegant in a red patterned blouse, pants to match, a white vest and a white leather chapéu, sat quietly at the table. She was the first act of the night, and despite a sparse crowd she gave a spirited performance, her rough-edged voice cracking with age, booming through the square and seeping out into the colonial streets. The crowd started growing, as bikers and passers-by stopped to listen.
I left after her performance — some non-forró acts were to follow — to check out another spot, Azulzinho, a friendly, informal little place that attracted a 30-plus crowd, where I danced with a woman in a black cowboy hat and a tank top adorned with a silver star. "I was born here," said the woman, whose name was Josane. "I'm a northeasterner, and I have forró in my blood."
The next morning, I began what was supposed to be a four-hour drive north. With plenty of time to spare (Forró of the Moon ran from 5 p.m. to midnight), I took a non-forró-related detour into Olinda, the colonial town just north of Recife that is a Unesco World Heritage site. But in these parts, it turned out, forró was not that easy to escape. At Olinda's well-regarded Oficina do Sabor restaurant, the daily special was camarões no forró (shrimp a la forró) described as "shrimp with mango and passion fruit sauce perfumed with coconut milk." What that had to do with forró was unclear. But the mystery was solved as the dish arrived, shrimp pairs hooked together around the plate, a perfect crustacean copy of interlocking thighs on the dance floor.
From there it was on to the road north toward Natal, the city just beyond São José de Mipibu, and Forró of the Moon.
The festival was started in 2002 by Marcos Fernandes Lopes, a wealthy agricultural engineer, now 47, who decided to construct a forró site on his ranch. Mr. Lopes is also planning a cowboy museum there to complement the forró events.
You could tell that the event was a success just from the crowded parking lot, and festive, from the massive bonfire near the entrance. Mr. Lopes later told me that the event regularly attracts 2,000 people a month without formal advertising.
Over in one corner, a few people watched a documentary on Luiz Gonzaga; others sat on concrete-topped, brick-legged tables sipping beer and soda, taking in the full moon. Around the outer walls, couples kissed under flickering open gas lamps. As the night went on, the beer line grew shorter and the churrasco (meat-on-a-stick) line grew longer. But the dance floor, kept animated by a string of well-known forró bands, like Os 3 do Nordeste and Waldonys, was the main attraction.
The best dancers were stuck together at the thighs, moving in such unison that they looked like marionettes controlled by a single set of strings. A small crowd gathered around one young couple, named Giunelly and Luciana, who looked as though they had been practicing together for years. Inspired, I put in a few steps with Claudia, yet another Brazilian woman foolhardy enough to dance with a visiting American. We danced a few songs, and then she gave me my report card. I had the steps down, she said, but my hips were simply not feeling the zabumba. I've been called worse.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Classic review of Brazilian Film "Orfeu"
New York Times
August 20, 2000
An Orpheus, Rising From Caricature
By CAETANO VELOSO
Zeca Guimaraes/ New Yorker Films (top), Lopert Films (center), The Associated Press (bottom)
Toni Garrido and Patricia Franca in the Brazilian film "Orfeu," which has its American theatrical premiere on Friday, top. Marpressa Dawn and Bruno Mello in Marcel Camus's 1959 film "Black Orpheus," center. Caetano Veloso, bottom.
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RIO DE JANEIRO -- In 1956, Vinicius de Moraes's play "Orfeu da Conceição" opened here, and the enthusiastic audiences that filled every theater in the country in which the play was staged reflected perfectly the significance and implications of the event.
At that moment, de Moraes and Antonio Carlos Jobim were coming together in a first, decisive step toward bringing about the quiet revolution in samba that became known as bossa nova; for the first time in Brazil, a stage play had an all-black cast; and the play itself, by transposing to Rio's slums at Carnival time the Orpheus myth of a musician who loses his great love, was a defining moment in the very Brazilian project of making samba the medium of choice for expressing national identity.
Three years later, "Black Orpheus," the film by the French director Marcel Camus that was based on the play, enthralled non-Brazilians and went on to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Oscar for best foreign film. To say that the film was received without enthusiasm in Brazil is an understatement. The contrast between the fascination that "Black Orpheus" generated abroad and the contempt with which it was treated by Brazilians, who saw themselves depicted as exotics, invites thoughts on the loneliness of Brazil. Now there is a new film, "Orfeu," inspired by the play. That it was produced and directed by Brazilians only breathes new life into the discussion. ("Orfeu" will have its American premiere on Friday in the New York area and will open in other cities in the United States over the next few months.)
Last October, the musician and record producer David Byrne wrote in The New York Times of his disdain for the term "world music." His essay warned of the dangers of those in rich countries feeling entitled to judge the authenticity of art from poor countries. In that sense, "Black Orpheus" is almost a caricature. We Brazilians are frequently accused of being inauthentic because we don't look enough like whatever foreigners saw in that film. The fact that Brazilians thoroughly reject the Camus film has been hard for foreigners to accept. The huge popular success that the new "Orfeu," directed by Carlos Diegues, met in Brazil last year brings the debate to a deeper level.
I don't intend to judge the two films. In my youth I was a film critic for a small provincial paper, and to resume this activity now would be doubly inopportune: it would force me to narrow my focus to these two films when a broader discussion is called for; and furthermore, as I have composed the score for "Orfeu" and my wife, Paula Lavigne, is its producer, I've become an interested party.
Rather, I believe there is much to gain from a comparison of the two films, not as works of art but from the point of view of the different reactions they have produced.
Watching "Orfeu" and "Black Orpheus" again, I was moved by how right de Moraes had been in conceiving his play. Indeed, he unveiled Brazil as an Orphean country, a country that expresses its soul's sweetly tragic aspects through music.
Almost unconsciously, Camus's film, with its unreality and naïveté, manages to connect with this essential truth. Beyond what had initially struck me as remarkable in that film -- the actresses Lourdes de Oliveira and Lea Garcia, not to mention the songs, the outrageously fanciful colors (so different from Rio's real ones) and the general "voodoo for tourists" ambiance -- seemed to me now to give the film the dreamlike quality of popular religious iconography, and that touched me.
Yet since the days of tropicália, that brief, rebellious and self-analytical movement of music and visual arts in Brazil that I was part of in the late 60's, I've learned to greet with a mixture of gratitude and concern the way foreigners see us.
In that respect, "Black Orpheus" wasn't much different from Carmen Miranda's phony fruit headdress. It is from this perspective that one can understand why "Black Orpheus" was rejected in Brazil and why I stress the importance for non-Brazilian audiences to open themselves up to the realism of the new film.
A critic from the French newspaper Libération, commenting on "Orfeu," laments that Arto Lindsay (who was co-producer of the soundtrack) had introduced rap music in some sequences. "Diegues doesn't need that," the critic wrote. "He knows how to get melodious music to flow from one scene to another as if it were pouring from the slum's very alleyways." Well, rap is exactly the music that nowadays pours from the alleyways of Rio's slums. Rap is in the film as a documentary element, purposely put there by the director. Melodious music is exactly what would represent the artificial and fictional.
The slums in Rio have changed dramatically since the Camus film opened in 1959. Life there has improved materially, with brick and mortar replacing zinc and cardboard, and cement covering up the alleys' mud. Outlaws who used to break into houses have switched to the more profitable drug trade, building a power base that is fiercely independent of the law, in part because the criminals possess military-style firearms that are vastly superior to those used by the police.
Rap groups made up of slum dwellers have created a style that reflects this atmosphere, with an emphasis on racial confrontation that has no precedent in our popular culture.
This Movement (which is what Brazilian hip-hop artists call the phenomenon) has become a strong advocate of the idea that Brazil is moving toward biracialism while the United States moves toward multiracialism. One rap group, Racionais MC's, is led by a singer who emphasizes being black, and its lyrics are racially radical. It has sold nearly a million copies of its most recent record, supporting sales mainly through live appearances in the slums while refusing to go on the large television networks.
Clearly "Orfeu" was conceived with these very real elements as its background. Is it not possible, then, to see the French critic's complaint about rap in the slums as the same kind of paternalistic distortion described by Mr. Byrne? But the Libération article was only a brief review written by a film critic who doesn't know much about Brazil.
There is, however, something not entirely different in a long article by the historian Kenneth Maxwell, published last year with great fanfare in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. This respected Brazilianist, author of several books about our colonial history, says that he became interested in Brazil after seeing "Black Orpheus" in the early 60's while a student at Cambridge Univeristy.
After seeing "Orfeu" in São Paulo recently, he proclaimed his astonishment at a scene in which a "middle-class white man" is executed by a group of "predominantly black" drug traffickers; then he adds his disappointment in seeing Orfeu sporting his hair in dreadlocks; and finally he is skeptical about the woolen cap worn by the film's drug lord, something, he says, is "more appropriate to the Chicago cold than to Rio's warm weather."
Well, the guy the drug traffickers execute is a slum dweller just like them, a point made abundantly clear in the scene's dialogue; dreadlocks are almost as common in Brazil as they are in Jamaica, and they have been worn for a long time by Toni Garrido, the singer-actor who portrays Orfeu in the film; and finally everybody who lives in Rio knows that it is rare to find a slum drug lord who doesn't wear a woolen cap.
To what should we credit this willful show of ignorance of daily life in Brazil by a scholar dedicated to a country he frequently visits? Mr. Maxwell himself offers an answer when he says that, being a fan of "Black Orpheus," he had to accept that Brazilians might brush aside Camus's film as "exotica for tourists." As time went by, however, he came to the conclusion that this reaction against the film by "Brazil's middle class" was similar to that of Bahia's police in the 30's, arresting tourists who were caught photographing "nonwhite children" in Salvador's streets and confiscating their film.
In both cases, he argued, one could see the horror that Brazilians experienced in being perceived as blacks by foreigners.
While mistaken, Mr. Maxwell's reading of Brazil's reaction to the film as an effort to conceal our blackness isn't a fantasy hatched in a vacuum. Consider the press release, written by Brazilians, that accompanied the opening of the film in Rio. "In a country like Brazil," it says, "with a population of 65 million people, of which 20 million are black, the idea of making this film was deemed strange by many of its 45 million whites."
Mr. Maxwell, however, seems to ignore that, first, the play, staged by an all-black cast, wasn't met with such aversion. Quite the opposite. Second, de Moraes, who had insisted on the all-black cast, hated the film so much that he left the theater halfway through the screening, shouting that his Orpheus had been "disfigured." It would be illogical to attribute his reaction to negrophobia. And, third, the play's enormous success created a positive expectation for the film, one of optimism and excitement. The fact that "Black Orpheus" had been crowned in glory in Europe filled Brazilians with pride and hope. And, of course, everybody knew that the film had an all-black cast. How can we attribute the disappointment to racial prejudice?
An anecdote about Mr. Diegues, however, sheds light on the issue. In the mid-70's he made a film about the legendary Chica da Silva, a black slave who in the 18th century became a powerful lady in central Brazil's diamond industry.
While negotiating the film's release with a major Brazilian distributor, Mr. Diegues heard him say that, although he had loved the film, he planned to show it only in a very small theater because "Brazilian audiences don't like films with blacks." But Mr. Diegues convinced him to give the film wider distribution.
"Xica da Silva" became one of the biggest commercial successes in the history of Brazilian cinema.
The distributor's reservations about the tastes of Brazilian audiences echoed the concerns about "Black Orpheus" expressed in the press release.
Both reflect a prejudice that neither seems willing to admit but instead attributes to the audience. It's not absurd to imagine that the distributor had vivid memories of the resounding failure of "Black Orpheus" in Brazil and interpreted that failure along the lines of Mr. Maxwell's point of view.
The box office proved the distributor wrong. But that success did not prove that there is no racism in Brazil, then or now, contrary to the popularly held belief that it is a racial democracy. Instead, the contradiction between such success and the distributor's expectations exposes the anxieties of foreigners and Brazilians alike when it comes to dealing with the problem of race in Brazil. This anxiety is, in fact, a theme crucial to any sort of self-knowledge throughout the Americas.
I frequently see surprise -- and sometimes a strange pleasure -- in the eyes of people who find evidence of racism among Brazilians. But I'm always astonished that these flashes can provoke such naïve surprise.
Is it possible that anybody would really believe that there was someplace in the New World where the sins of the brutal enslavement of Africans would have miraculously vanished?
Everywhere in the Americas, however, our basic humanity has found ways to assert itself, precariously but insistently, over the racist theories that supported these brutal practices.
And none of us have the right to throw away what has been achieved in the process. The Brazilian experience must be enriched by the criticism of the racial democracy myth, not invalidated by it.
At the dawn of the 20th century, Europeans were afraid to invest in Brazil for fear of "the tropics' insalubrity." In his book "Black Into White," Thomas Skidmore, an American who has written extensively on Brazilian history, tells of a Brazilian author who wrote a book in 1891 in French to be published in Europe as a propaganda effort. In it, the author complains bitterly that until then his French friends "knew only that there were apes and Negros in Brazil -- and half a dozen whites of dubious color." The Brazilian dream of "whitening" European immigration would then be an effort to create an acceptable nation.
When the noted Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre published his book, "The Masters and the Slaves," in the 30's, the judgment of people of mixed color went from negative to positive, helping create a euphoric self-image for Brazilians.
The term racial democracy became an appropriate label for this euphoria. It also became the obsessive target for acerbic criticism from social scientists and political militants.
In his 1994 book "Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988," an interpretation of the relatively unsuccessful Brazilian black consciousness movement, the black American political scientist Michael Hanchard, not surprisingly, condemns the idea of racial democracy.
He wants us to believe that our supposed multiracialism has hindered the effort by Brazilian blacks to solve their problems. Many black militants here agree with him. These militants seem to advocate the old American "one drop of blood" principle as a way to unravel the black issue in Brazil.
But the "whitening" process can, quite frankly, be thought of as an inevitable dream of all the Americas.
Witness Ella Fitzgerald's blond wigs, Tina Turner's and Whitney Houston's bleached hair and the sphinxlike Michael Jackson.
Freyre's book, on the other hand, rejected the colonial presumptions of whitening while praising miscegenation. To say, as Mr. Hanchard and others do, that such praise is but a veiled form of whitening is to give way to a simplification that leads to racial intolerance.
Critics like Mr. Maxwell used race to explain the negative reaction to "Black Orpheus." To me, however, that reaction was more a result of a national anguish over cinema than over race. In the 50's, the multiracial middle class to which I belong was much more ashamed of our cinema than of our blacks: to hear Brazilians in the movie utter dialogue that was unconvincing and irrelevant to the narrative was a torment.
There were other inconsistencies: voices with Southern accents dubbed for those of Rio rogues, samba school divisions dancing four times faster than the music being played (which, by the way, is comprised of careless montages of assorted drumming patterns that jump crudely from one time signature to another), the procession of a parade to the sound of a samba entirely different from real "sambas-enredo," or theme sambas.
In the end we realized that all of this was an artificial device with the sole intention of astonishing those who knew nothing about the city and its people.
Cinema, which could have been a potent symbol of modernity for Brazilians, became instead a source of bitter frustration.
In his article Mr. Maxwell, the historian, accuses us of both fearing to seem archaic and adoring progress. "They have not learned the lesson," he says, without explaining what that lesson is. Maybe what he's saying is that all progress is the perogative of 19th-century Britain and 20th-century United tates.
When "Black Orpheus" was released, the French director Jean-Luc Godard complained that Orpheus was a tramway conductor instead of a fare collector on one of the new mini-buses in Rio; he also protested that Euridice didn't arrive in Rio by plane "in the beautiful Santos Dumont airport, between the ocean and the skyscrapers." I have always thought of that review by Godard as something Brazilians could subscribe to.
It was a reaction against Camus's ways of choosing backward elements to make his film look "poetic." The review also represented Godard's imagining of a movie he might make about Orpheus in Rio, one in which the city's real urban life would provide genuine poetry.
Mr. Diegues's "Orfeu" is a real, realist, very un-Godardian film (although Euridice does arrive in Rio by plane) and maybe, as Mr. Maxwell says, it will not attract the youth of the First World to Brazil.
One might argue that would be all to the good. I don't think so. I'd rather have this discussion between Brazilians and foreigners concerning race, backwardness and national identity go on.
The American scholar Robert Stam, author of the book "Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparitive History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture," wrote in a recent article: "It would be a serious mistake to see Carlos Diegues's 'Orfeu' as a remake of Marcel Camus's 'Black Orpheus.' The slums, for Diegues, are a place of creativity and injustice." For filmmakers and audiences alike, it is hard to equate injustice and creativity. Brazil, as a place where both co-exist, tries to prove that the effort is worthwhile.
Caetano Veloso is a Brazilian singer and songwriter. This article was translated from the Portuguese by Ana Maria Bahiana.
August 20, 2000
An Orpheus, Rising From Caricature
By CAETANO VELOSO
Zeca Guimaraes/ New Yorker Films (top), Lopert Films (center), The Associated Press (bottom)
Toni Garrido and Patricia Franca in the Brazilian film "Orfeu," which has its American theatrical premiere on Friday, top. Marpressa Dawn and Bruno Mello in Marcel Camus's 1959 film "Black Orpheus," center. Caetano Veloso, bottom.
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RIO DE JANEIRO -- In 1956, Vinicius de Moraes's play "Orfeu da Conceição" opened here, and the enthusiastic audiences that filled every theater in the country in which the play was staged reflected perfectly the significance and implications of the event.
At that moment, de Moraes and Antonio Carlos Jobim were coming together in a first, decisive step toward bringing about the quiet revolution in samba that became known as bossa nova; for the first time in Brazil, a stage play had an all-black cast; and the play itself, by transposing to Rio's slums at Carnival time the Orpheus myth of a musician who loses his great love, was a defining moment in the very Brazilian project of making samba the medium of choice for expressing national identity.
Three years later, "Black Orpheus," the film by the French director Marcel Camus that was based on the play, enthralled non-Brazilians and went on to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Oscar for best foreign film. To say that the film was received without enthusiasm in Brazil is an understatement. The contrast between the fascination that "Black Orpheus" generated abroad and the contempt with which it was treated by Brazilians, who saw themselves depicted as exotics, invites thoughts on the loneliness of Brazil. Now there is a new film, "Orfeu," inspired by the play. That it was produced and directed by Brazilians only breathes new life into the discussion. ("Orfeu" will have its American premiere on Friday in the New York area and will open in other cities in the United States over the next few months.)
Last October, the musician and record producer David Byrne wrote in The New York Times of his disdain for the term "world music." His essay warned of the dangers of those in rich countries feeling entitled to judge the authenticity of art from poor countries. In that sense, "Black Orpheus" is almost a caricature. We Brazilians are frequently accused of being inauthentic because we don't look enough like whatever foreigners saw in that film. The fact that Brazilians thoroughly reject the Camus film has been hard for foreigners to accept. The huge popular success that the new "Orfeu," directed by Carlos Diegues, met in Brazil last year brings the debate to a deeper level.
I don't intend to judge the two films. In my youth I was a film critic for a small provincial paper, and to resume this activity now would be doubly inopportune: it would force me to narrow my focus to these two films when a broader discussion is called for; and furthermore, as I have composed the score for "Orfeu" and my wife, Paula Lavigne, is its producer, I've become an interested party.
Rather, I believe there is much to gain from a comparison of the two films, not as works of art but from the point of view of the different reactions they have produced.
Watching "Orfeu" and "Black Orpheus" again, I was moved by how right de Moraes had been in conceiving his play. Indeed, he unveiled Brazil as an Orphean country, a country that expresses its soul's sweetly tragic aspects through music.
Almost unconsciously, Camus's film, with its unreality and naïveté, manages to connect with this essential truth. Beyond what had initially struck me as remarkable in that film -- the actresses Lourdes de Oliveira and Lea Garcia, not to mention the songs, the outrageously fanciful colors (so different from Rio's real ones) and the general "voodoo for tourists" ambiance -- seemed to me now to give the film the dreamlike quality of popular religious iconography, and that touched me.
Yet since the days of tropicália, that brief, rebellious and self-analytical movement of music and visual arts in Brazil that I was part of in the late 60's, I've learned to greet with a mixture of gratitude and concern the way foreigners see us.
In that respect, "Black Orpheus" wasn't much different from Carmen Miranda's phony fruit headdress. It is from this perspective that one can understand why "Black Orpheus" was rejected in Brazil and why I stress the importance for non-Brazilian audiences to open themselves up to the realism of the new film.
A critic from the French newspaper Libération, commenting on "Orfeu," laments that Arto Lindsay (who was co-producer of the soundtrack) had introduced rap music in some sequences. "Diegues doesn't need that," the critic wrote. "He knows how to get melodious music to flow from one scene to another as if it were pouring from the slum's very alleyways." Well, rap is exactly the music that nowadays pours from the alleyways of Rio's slums. Rap is in the film as a documentary element, purposely put there by the director. Melodious music is exactly what would represent the artificial and fictional.
The slums in Rio have changed dramatically since the Camus film opened in 1959. Life there has improved materially, with brick and mortar replacing zinc and cardboard, and cement covering up the alleys' mud. Outlaws who used to break into houses have switched to the more profitable drug trade, building a power base that is fiercely independent of the law, in part because the criminals possess military-style firearms that are vastly superior to those used by the police.
Rap groups made up of slum dwellers have created a style that reflects this atmosphere, with an emphasis on racial confrontation that has no precedent in our popular culture.
This Movement (which is what Brazilian hip-hop artists call the phenomenon) has become a strong advocate of the idea that Brazil is moving toward biracialism while the United States moves toward multiracialism. One rap group, Racionais MC's, is led by a singer who emphasizes being black, and its lyrics are racially radical. It has sold nearly a million copies of its most recent record, supporting sales mainly through live appearances in the slums while refusing to go on the large television networks.
Clearly "Orfeu" was conceived with these very real elements as its background. Is it not possible, then, to see the French critic's complaint about rap in the slums as the same kind of paternalistic distortion described by Mr. Byrne? But the Libération article was only a brief review written by a film critic who doesn't know much about Brazil.
There is, however, something not entirely different in a long article by the historian Kenneth Maxwell, published last year with great fanfare in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. This respected Brazilianist, author of several books about our colonial history, says that he became interested in Brazil after seeing "Black Orpheus" in the early 60's while a student at Cambridge Univeristy.
After seeing "Orfeu" in São Paulo recently, he proclaimed his astonishment at a scene in which a "middle-class white man" is executed by a group of "predominantly black" drug traffickers; then he adds his disappointment in seeing Orfeu sporting his hair in dreadlocks; and finally he is skeptical about the woolen cap worn by the film's drug lord, something, he says, is "more appropriate to the Chicago cold than to Rio's warm weather."
Well, the guy the drug traffickers execute is a slum dweller just like them, a point made abundantly clear in the scene's dialogue; dreadlocks are almost as common in Brazil as they are in Jamaica, and they have been worn for a long time by Toni Garrido, the singer-actor who portrays Orfeu in the film; and finally everybody who lives in Rio knows that it is rare to find a slum drug lord who doesn't wear a woolen cap.
To what should we credit this willful show of ignorance of daily life in Brazil by a scholar dedicated to a country he frequently visits? Mr. Maxwell himself offers an answer when he says that, being a fan of "Black Orpheus," he had to accept that Brazilians might brush aside Camus's film as "exotica for tourists." As time went by, however, he came to the conclusion that this reaction against the film by "Brazil's middle class" was similar to that of Bahia's police in the 30's, arresting tourists who were caught photographing "nonwhite children" in Salvador's streets and confiscating their film.
In both cases, he argued, one could see the horror that Brazilians experienced in being perceived as blacks by foreigners.
While mistaken, Mr. Maxwell's reading of Brazil's reaction to the film as an effort to conceal our blackness isn't a fantasy hatched in a vacuum. Consider the press release, written by Brazilians, that accompanied the opening of the film in Rio. "In a country like Brazil," it says, "with a population of 65 million people, of which 20 million are black, the idea of making this film was deemed strange by many of its 45 million whites."
Mr. Maxwell, however, seems to ignore that, first, the play, staged by an all-black cast, wasn't met with such aversion. Quite the opposite. Second, de Moraes, who had insisted on the all-black cast, hated the film so much that he left the theater halfway through the screening, shouting that his Orpheus had been "disfigured." It would be illogical to attribute his reaction to negrophobia. And, third, the play's enormous success created a positive expectation for the film, one of optimism and excitement. The fact that "Black Orpheus" had been crowned in glory in Europe filled Brazilians with pride and hope. And, of course, everybody knew that the film had an all-black cast. How can we attribute the disappointment to racial prejudice?
An anecdote about Mr. Diegues, however, sheds light on the issue. In the mid-70's he made a film about the legendary Chica da Silva, a black slave who in the 18th century became a powerful lady in central Brazil's diamond industry.
While negotiating the film's release with a major Brazilian distributor, Mr. Diegues heard him say that, although he had loved the film, he planned to show it only in a very small theater because "Brazilian audiences don't like films with blacks." But Mr. Diegues convinced him to give the film wider distribution.
"Xica da Silva" became one of the biggest commercial successes in the history of Brazilian cinema.
The distributor's reservations about the tastes of Brazilian audiences echoed the concerns about "Black Orpheus" expressed in the press release.
Both reflect a prejudice that neither seems willing to admit but instead attributes to the audience. It's not absurd to imagine that the distributor had vivid memories of the resounding failure of "Black Orpheus" in Brazil and interpreted that failure along the lines of Mr. Maxwell's point of view.
The box office proved the distributor wrong. But that success did not prove that there is no racism in Brazil, then or now, contrary to the popularly held belief that it is a racial democracy. Instead, the contradiction between such success and the distributor's expectations exposes the anxieties of foreigners and Brazilians alike when it comes to dealing with the problem of race in Brazil. This anxiety is, in fact, a theme crucial to any sort of self-knowledge throughout the Americas.
I frequently see surprise -- and sometimes a strange pleasure -- in the eyes of people who find evidence of racism among Brazilians. But I'm always astonished that these flashes can provoke such naïve surprise.
Is it possible that anybody would really believe that there was someplace in the New World where the sins of the brutal enslavement of Africans would have miraculously vanished?
Everywhere in the Americas, however, our basic humanity has found ways to assert itself, precariously but insistently, over the racist theories that supported these brutal practices.
And none of us have the right to throw away what has been achieved in the process. The Brazilian experience must be enriched by the criticism of the racial democracy myth, not invalidated by it.
At the dawn of the 20th century, Europeans were afraid to invest in Brazil for fear of "the tropics' insalubrity." In his book "Black Into White," Thomas Skidmore, an American who has written extensively on Brazilian history, tells of a Brazilian author who wrote a book in 1891 in French to be published in Europe as a propaganda effort. In it, the author complains bitterly that until then his French friends "knew only that there were apes and Negros in Brazil -- and half a dozen whites of dubious color." The Brazilian dream of "whitening" European immigration would then be an effort to create an acceptable nation.
When the noted Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre published his book, "The Masters and the Slaves," in the 30's, the judgment of people of mixed color went from negative to positive, helping create a euphoric self-image for Brazilians.
The term racial democracy became an appropriate label for this euphoria. It also became the obsessive target for acerbic criticism from social scientists and political militants.
In his 1994 book "Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988," an interpretation of the relatively unsuccessful Brazilian black consciousness movement, the black American political scientist Michael Hanchard, not surprisingly, condemns the idea of racial democracy.
He wants us to believe that our supposed multiracialism has hindered the effort by Brazilian blacks to solve their problems. Many black militants here agree with him. These militants seem to advocate the old American "one drop of blood" principle as a way to unravel the black issue in Brazil.
But the "whitening" process can, quite frankly, be thought of as an inevitable dream of all the Americas.
Witness Ella Fitzgerald's blond wigs, Tina Turner's and Whitney Houston's bleached hair and the sphinxlike Michael Jackson.
Freyre's book, on the other hand, rejected the colonial presumptions of whitening while praising miscegenation. To say, as Mr. Hanchard and others do, that such praise is but a veiled form of whitening is to give way to a simplification that leads to racial intolerance.
Critics like Mr. Maxwell used race to explain the negative reaction to "Black Orpheus." To me, however, that reaction was more a result of a national anguish over cinema than over race. In the 50's, the multiracial middle class to which I belong was much more ashamed of our cinema than of our blacks: to hear Brazilians in the movie utter dialogue that was unconvincing and irrelevant to the narrative was a torment.
There were other inconsistencies: voices with Southern accents dubbed for those of Rio rogues, samba school divisions dancing four times faster than the music being played (which, by the way, is comprised of careless montages of assorted drumming patterns that jump crudely from one time signature to another), the procession of a parade to the sound of a samba entirely different from real "sambas-enredo," or theme sambas.
In the end we realized that all of this was an artificial device with the sole intention of astonishing those who knew nothing about the city and its people.
Cinema, which could have been a potent symbol of modernity for Brazilians, became instead a source of bitter frustration.
In his article Mr. Maxwell, the historian, accuses us of both fearing to seem archaic and adoring progress. "They have not learned the lesson," he says, without explaining what that lesson is. Maybe what he's saying is that all progress is the perogative of 19th-century Britain and 20th-century United tates.
When "Black Orpheus" was released, the French director Jean-Luc Godard complained that Orpheus was a tramway conductor instead of a fare collector on one of the new mini-buses in Rio; he also protested that Euridice didn't arrive in Rio by plane "in the beautiful Santos Dumont airport, between the ocean and the skyscrapers." I have always thought of that review by Godard as something Brazilians could subscribe to.
It was a reaction against Camus's ways of choosing backward elements to make his film look "poetic." The review also represented Godard's imagining of a movie he might make about Orpheus in Rio, one in which the city's real urban life would provide genuine poetry.
Mr. Diegues's "Orfeu" is a real, realist, very un-Godardian film (although Euridice does arrive in Rio by plane) and maybe, as Mr. Maxwell says, it will not attract the youth of the First World to Brazil.
One might argue that would be all to the good. I don't think so. I'd rather have this discussion between Brazilians and foreigners concerning race, backwardness and national identity go on.
The American scholar Robert Stam, author of the book "Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparitive History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture," wrote in a recent article: "It would be a serious mistake to see Carlos Diegues's 'Orfeu' as a remake of Marcel Camus's 'Black Orpheus.' The slums, for Diegues, are a place of creativity and injustice." For filmmakers and audiences alike, it is hard to equate injustice and creativity. Brazil, as a place where both co-exist, tries to prove that the effort is worthwhile.
Caetano Veloso is a Brazilian singer and songwriter. This article was translated from the Portuguese by Ana Maria Bahiana.
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