Samba

Samba, the most famous Brazilian musical form and dance. Musically, samba is characterized by a 2/4 meter with the heaviest accent on the second beat and features pronounced syncopation, a stanza-and-refrain structure, responsorial singing, and many interlocking rhythmic parts. Samba has African roots, but its exact origins are unknown. Samba's true parent may have been the lundu song and circle dance, featuring the umbigada navel-touching movement, which came to Brazil from Angola. A primitive type of samba may have developed in Bahia from African musical elements and then brought to Rio de Janeiro by slaves and former slaves in the late 1800s.

Samba began to crystallize into its modern form in the early 1900s at the homes of Bahian matriarchs such as Tia Ciata, who lived near Rio's Praça Onze. There, musicians like Pixinguinha, Donga, João da Baiana, and Sinhô developed the budding form and added influences from the maxixe and marcha styles. The first recorded samba was "Pelo telefone" (On the Phone), composed by several musicians (but registered to Donga) and performed by the Banda Odeon in 1917.

Near Praça Onze was Estácio, the neighborhood of the sambistas Ismael Silva, Nilton Bastos, and Armando Marçal, who added longer notes, two-bar phrasing, and a slower tempo to samba, and solidified what would be samba's standard form for decades (later called, in the 1950s, samba de morro). It was they who also founded Deixa Falar, the first escola de samba (samba school), in 1928. Later important samba composers include: Noel Rosa, Caninha, Heitor dos Prazeres, Ataulfo Alves, Assis Valente, Geraldo Pereira, Lamartine Babo, Ary Barroso, Braguinha, Dorival Caymmi, Martinho da Vila, and Paulinho da Viola.

Samba's primary rhythm and its cross-rhythms can be carried by drum and percussion playing (the batucada) involving numerous instruments such as surdo (three different sizes), caixa, repique, tamborim, pandeiro, prato, cuíca, frigideira, agogô, reco-reco, and chocalho. Samba is also typically accompanied by guitar, four-string cavaquinho, and—less frequently—brass instruments.

Different styles of samba include samba-canção (a slower, more sophisticated style with more emphasis on melody and harmony than on the rhythm); samba de breque (a samba that features a "break" in which the singer dramatizes the story told in the lyrics); samba de gafieira (a dance-hall type of samba, usually instrumental, with horn arrangements influenced by American big-band jazz); samba de roda (a circle-dance samba, accompanied by hand clapping and batucada); samba-enredo (a "theme" samba, performed by samba schools during Carnaval in Rio); pagode samba (a "street"-type of samba popularized in the 1980s by composers from Rio's Ramos neighborhood, who added tan-tan and banjo to the instrumentation); and samba-reggae. In addition, bossa nova mixed simplified samba rhythms with harmonies influenced by American West Coast "cool" jazz and classical music.

See alsoBossa Nova; Samba Schools.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sergio Cabral, As escolas de samba (1974).

Rita Caurio, ed., Brasil musical (1988).

João Maximo and Carlos Didier, Noel Rosa: Uma biografia (1990).

Chris Mc Gowan and Ricardo Pessanha, The Brazilian Sound: Samba, Bossa Nova, and the Popular Music of Brazil (1991).

Additional Bibliography

Chasteen, John Charles. National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American Popular Dance. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004.

Guillermoprieto, Alma. Samba. New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1990.

McCann, Bryan. Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Naves, Santuza Cambraia. O violão azul: Modernismo e música popular. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getulio Vargas Editora, 1998.

Shaw, Lisa. The Social History of the Brazilian Samba. Brookfield: Ashgate, 1999.

Vianna, Hermano. The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music & National Identity in Brazil. Trans. John Charles Chasteen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

                                       Chris McGowan