Tom Jobim wrote many of his songs here in the countryside outside Rio. Jobim lived and worked in the house that his son and grandson are now restoring. He studied a lot Chopin, Debussy, Brahms also. He liked to wake up very early. And hes in this hou...
It is a true story, you know, he used to play his to, to study his guitar and he would study the part of the thumb like this, ting, ting, he would go like that. The thing is there was a cat watching that. And poor cat was justand he would look at the...
I would say bossa nova is a kind of soft samba, maybe played a little bit slower, just with the guitars, simpler, and very light singing, soft singing, and soft guitars doing the rhythm. Not a lot of drums like the big samba schools, maybe just a few...
President Vargas gave Rio the Carnival for which the city became world-famous, but less than two years after his death, a new form of samba emerged that reflected a new political era in Brazil and would bring Rio even more international exposure and...
The unlikely duo of Carmen Miranda and President Vargas had not always found favor within Brazil for their music ideas. But between them, they transformed the international image of Brazil and the Rio music scene by promoting samba and carnival. Duri...
After Luiz Gonzaga died in 1989, a statue was erected just outside Recife, the capital of his home state, Pernambuco. It marks the start of the Luiz Gonzaga Highway. Gonzaga had reminded Brazils city dwellers of the depth of music that exists out in...
Luiz Gonzaga you can compare him with Bob Marley in reggae, because he really did the melting of the style, you know. And it became very well known because he recorded it, he played it on the radio in the 40s, / 50s, so he came up with the new rhythm...
Carmen Miranda came to symbolize Brazil for the outside world, though she had been criticized at home for becoming too westernized. Her sophisticated light-hearted songs had little to do with the everyday struggles of many ordinary Brazilians. They f...
Some said she wasn't a true Brazilian, because she was born in Portugal. But Carmen Miranda conquered Brazil during the 30s and then moved on to the States. Her songs came from the finest writers of the days, including Dorival Caymmi and Ary Barroso,...
Dorival Caymmi, who was photographed with Vargas, became sambas first celebrated solo singer-songwriter. He played guitar in a very peculiar way and he was the first one to be a singer-composer, guitarist like, you know, Bob Dylan. He was a very good...
Samba, of course, was mixed race music, with its roots in both Africa and Europe, and promoting samba suited / the Vargas policy of encouraging Brazilian unity by celebrating ethnic integration. And yet throughout the 1930s, Vargas continued to devel...
The man who transformed Samba was President Getlio Vargas, who seized power with military help in 1930. Vargas controlled Brazil for 18 years, first as a dictator and later as a democratically elected president. He was both an authoritarian and a pop...
Samba and Choro both started out as the homegrown musical styles of the black workers and migrants whod moved to Rio. The songs of the early Samba singers dealt with the realities of everyday life in the city. In the early days, musicians faced not o...
Racial discrimination was now banned in Brazil, but prejudice and the belief in white supremacy was still widespread. So there was outrage in the press that black musicians like Pixinguinha should be allowed to represent Brazil when he and his band O...
In Rio, African rhythms began to mix with European styles. And it was at the house of a Candomble practitioner, a priestess named Tia Ciata, Auntie Ciata, that the first song widely recognized as Carioca samba, samba from Rio, was performed in 1916....
