June 20th, 2006
06.20.06
Sao Paulo is a sea of flickering lights. Low-lying fog hugs rolling hills. Traffic winds its way into an overcrowded city center. Our plane ducks beneath the peach colored strip of sky and we descend upon the Los Angelesque sprawl of 15 million people.
We have decided to film a video documentary in Brazil to capture the beauty of Brazil’s music, culture, and people. Our ultimate goal is to show our work to students in the United States upon our return in mid-July.
We launch our project by interviewing the renowned jazz producer and bassist named Rodolfo Stroeter. He runs a label called “Pau Brasil”. His recent productions showcase the the fine talents of Carlinhos Brown, Gilberto Gil, and Antonio Nobrega. Within five minutes of speaking to Mr. Stroeter, his insights reconfirm our motivations for coming; “Brazil has a rich musical history. The spontaneity and the love of the Brazilian people lies on the inside- in their souls- and it comes out through improvisation. Music in Brazil is life. It gets passed on from generation to generation, so it’s important that we find more ways of spreading it around the world, especially in a place like the United States where music education doesn’t exist in many schools.”
Contrary to the United States, everyone in Brazil seems to be a musician. One taxi driver plays American country music on his guitar and sings for us in Portuguese while driving stick-shift. He grins and says, “Country music….yeah!!!!!” A handful of college students at a street-side bar take percussion instruments out of their bags and improvise on a simplified samba form called Pagode. Street kids ask for money while singing choruses from the Brazilian martial art called Capoeira.
Sao Paulo is not necessarily the Brazil we expect to find. With beaches romanticized on album covers and travel magazines, we anticipate hordes of golden-brown bodies playing volleyball and soccer everywhere we go. Instead, Sao Paulo is more than an hour from the beach.
The traffic and pollution in Sao Paulo is gritty like Mexico City, and tree-lined side streets remind of you Alicante, Spain. Sao Paulo also has the largest concentration of Japenese people outside of Japan. In a part of town called Libertade, you find exotic sushi restaurants and samba bars. Surprising our palettes, we tried strawberry sushi (rolled in rice and covered in chocolate sauce). Amazing.
We finish up our first weekend in Brazil at the home of a recent student of the New England Conservatory named Quincas Moreira. Quincas calls himself a die-hard improviser. His most recent project is called sambapunk.com, a promising concoction of samba music and punk rock. He explains that being a free-lance producer in Sao Paulo is hard, but the demand for work is higher than in other Brazilian cities, which explains the constant migration to Sao Paulo and the inevitable competition between musicians (for example, Quincas’ guitarist Guilherme plays in fifteen bands).
Quincas also explains that street crime and day-to-day violence are a harsh reality in Sao Paulo. Locals get kidnapped and mugged at gunpoint. Earlier this Spring, gang warfare resulted in the murders of over 70 police officers. Not surprisingly, Brazil has one of the biggest markets for bullet-proofed automobiles. It is often rumored that executives escape the streets by taking helicopters from building to building.
We haven’t encountered any problems with crime or theft because we’re making an effort not to dress like tourists. Everyone says, “don’t carry many bags. Act discreet. Watch your surroundings.” What do we do if we’re carrying around cameras and guitars for our documentary? Throwing caution to the wind, we continue with our journey.
Entry Filed under: Brazil
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