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Showing posts with label carnaval. Show all posts
Showing posts with label carnaval. Show all posts
Monday, June 10, 2013
Thursday, February 22, 2007
The "boneca" is demonstrating a typical Frevo dance move, complete with little umberella.
Frevo is one of the big musical styles of Recife - a kind of weird high-energy, big-band jazz.
In the streets it's a rag-tag mixture of batteries of African drums and a few delinquent trombones and trumpets playing the same few riffs over and over.
On record, its stylings and texture could be anyone from Louis Armstrong to "trad" fakesters like Chris Barber. But listen more closely and you notice how frenetic the whole thing is. The riffs and stabs continuously remind you of the last 50 years of "latin" dance and "jazz" and yet there's something strange about it. The rhythm section rattles along at around 170 bpm. The melodies are unexpected - infected by same Brazilian melancholy that touches Chorinho and early samba - then lurching into something like German cabaret with the singers theatrically whooping and putting on funny voices. But there's no "blues" as you would expect from North American music.
Frevo de Bloco is more leisurely with a stronger melodic connection to olders styles. A chorus of women sing sentamentaly about Recife and that life without Frevo is mere pain and suffering.
Frevo is one of the big musical styles of Recife - a kind of weird high-energy, big-band jazz.
In the streets it's a rag-tag mixture of batteries of African drums and a few delinquent trombones and trumpets playing the same few riffs over and over.
On record, its stylings and texture could be anyone from Louis Armstrong to "trad" fakesters like Chris Barber. But listen more closely and you notice how frenetic the whole thing is. The riffs and stabs continuously remind you of the last 50 years of "latin" dance and "jazz" and yet there's something strange about it. The rhythm section rattles along at around 170 bpm. The melodies are unexpected - infected by same Brazilian melancholy that touches Chorinho and early samba - then lurching into something like German cabaret with the singers theatrically whooping and putting on funny voices. But there's no "blues" as you would expect from North American music.
Frevo de Bloco is more leisurely with a stronger melodic connection to olders styles. A chorus of women sing sentamentaly about Recife and that life without Frevo is mere pain and suffering.
Recife claims to have the best carnival in the world. That's probably a hotly contested claim, but it's certainly the biggest popular street carnival in Brazil.
Obviously Rio's schools of Samba are even more stunningly spectacular, but these are highly planned and formalized parades in a competition which takes place over two nights.
Of course, Rio has its popular street carnival as well, but I've seen nothing like Recife - which claims to have something like a million people in the streets. Carnival begins informally on Thursday night, opens formally on Friday, and was still going strong when we left late afternoon Tuesday.
Obviously Rio's schools of Samba are even more stunningly spectacular, but these are highly planned and formalized parades in a competition which takes place over two nights.
Of course, Rio has its popular street carnival as well, but I've seen nothing like Recife - which claims to have something like a million people in the streets. Carnival begins informally on Thursday night, opens formally on Friday, and was still going strong when we left late afternoon Tuesday.
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