Brazil Logs

I feel like it’s been ages since I wrote a log. But when you have visitors time flies, and my boy Nate and my great friend Betty have been visiting so while there has been lots to report, there has been little time to report it. I ended last log on April 9th, and April 10th was the day of the “big concert” with Hamilton de Holande and Yamand Costa playing at the famous old hall Canacao, near my apartment. I was going to skip it and just go to the jam at Trapiche, as it’s the last one for my friend Bonnie who is leaving for Vermont on Wednesday. But when will I ever see these two together in the US? – never. So I get tickets for Nate and me.

We decide to spend the afternoon walking around the Gloria neighborhood, but no sooner are we off the bus and walking up the first hill than Nate darts into a bar with soccer on the TV and comes back out to report that it’s a big game in Europe, Manchester vs an Italian team I think, so we plop down at the bar and order a quart of beer and 2 glasses. It seems like kindof a divey men’s bar, but there is a very properly-dressed older lady sitting at the bar having a cafezinho, so I don’t worry, it’s a neighborhood place. Nate’s team is losing badly when I have to leave to go meet my longtime email friend Sergio do Nascimento at the Carioca metro station. It’s the day after his birthday so I have a copy of my new CD for him. He walks me by the Wiskeria Gouveia, known as Pixinguinha’s office while he was alive, and I take Sergio’s pic with the famous statue of P. It’s P’s birthday on April 23, and is officially “choro day” in Brazil in his honor. Sergio is a cheerful man – a really good bandolimist and unofficial choro historian. We have coffee and talk and he gives me a CD of old choro recordings that he has in his collection, and some old movies of Joel playing. It’s great to finally meet him after so many years and we’ll get together again soon.

Back home to meet Nate for the concert, but he calls to say that he got held up buying LPs and will meet me at the hall. As I’m waiting I get handed a flyer for a Choro-fest next week-end with 10 bands, 8 of whom I have CDs by. Can’t wait for that! Canacao is very formal and unlike American halls in that the whole center is full of tables with tablecloths and waiters are serving drinks and food. The setting is kindof like I imagine a rock concert in Las Vegas would be, with a lightshow and big screens on either side of the stage showing the performers. It’s jaw-dropping virtuosity and fast unison runs for most of the night, interspersed with a few sentimental tunes written by the performers. It’s interesting to see what it takes to put choro – a small-bar informal music – into a big concert venue, and of course to see these two virtuosos live. I’m glad I came, but part of me wishes I was at Trapiche with Bonnie. Both players are performing individually in the Choro-fest next week; it’ll be interesting to see what they do in a less-stylized setting.

I get up early the next morning to meet Bonnie for coffee in the park by the Catete Palace to say good-bye. She says the session at Trapiche was great, and Beth Carvalo – her singing idol, was there just to listen and she got to talk to her. We promise to get together to play Brazilian music in the US. She was here for 3 months too, but started in January, and so is headed home with instruments for her samba band in Burlington. It’s Wednesday and lesson-day with Joel, so I head home and have breakfast with Nate. TaxiPaulo picks me up and surprises me with a CD of choro he’s copied from old LPs, including a play-back LP of Altimiro Carriliho. He’s signed the CD “Paulo, Seu Taxista Amigo”. The lesson goes well and afterwards Paulo drops me at Romulo’s for “regional” (choro band) “ensaio” (rehearsal). It’s a small group but we have a jolly time and afterwards guitarist Pablo and his friend Sandro drive me all the way home after much discussion amongst the boys debating the safely of me taking the metro home at that hour (~11:00 PM). On the drive Pablo says he’s been to my website and read it with his dictionary in hand. He says, in English, with a big smile, “Now I know all about your life.”

Thursday morning I meet Paulo Sa downtown to go again to his class at the Villa-Lobos Conservatory. He’s talking to the students about choro interpretation and styles of different players, and when I chime in in Portuguese he looks surprised and says, in English, “Your Portuguese is much better!” And it is, from weeks of practice. He is arranging for Betty and me to come to Petropolis to visit while she is here, but unfortunately probably after Nate leaves. And where is Nate in this narrative, you may ask? Well, he has some friends from school and from Germany living in Rio and has met others, so is happily occupied doing things with them, and we hang out some every day as well. But since he’s here for 2 weeks it’s good that he’s got his own world to explore as well as visiting mine.

There’s an early-evening concert at FINEP of Alvaro Carrilho, flutist brother of virtuoso flutist Altimiro, and uncle of Maurcio, backed by a band of Maurcio, Luciana Rabello, Maurcio’s wife Anna Paes, and his cousin Pedro Paes, a real choro family, playing all tunes written by Alvaro. Halfway through Alvaro’s grandson Pablo, who looks to be about 15, sits in on 6-string in Anna’s place. After the concert, Ray, Bonnie’s friend from Australia, comes over and introduces himself. He plays 7-string and is in my Rep class at Choro School, He’s here for 3 months too, and his stay ends in 2 weeks. He says he’s going to Carioca da Gema later, and I’d been thinking of it since Ronaldo said he was playing there, so I say I’ll meet him there in a couple of hours, around 9:30.

Due to a mis-communication with TaxiPaulo, however, I don’t arrive until around 11:00, but find the party just getting going. The band includes the three Sousa brothers, Ronaldo on bandolim, Rogerio (who plays in No Em Pingo D’Agua) on 7-string, and Roberto (who says he really doesn’t play) on cavaquinho, along with Selsinho and some others on percussion, and two women singers who alternate. When I walk in the door I don’t see Ray, but Ronaldo sees me and greets me with a theatrical hug, introduces me to his family – brothers, wives, band girlfriends, and finds a place for me at the musician’s table before they start the next set. To “sambando” – the participle of the non-verb samba – is a Carioca bohemian way of life and the club is jumping. Soon I’m getting dance lessons from the girls, finally find Ray, and before I know it it’s 2:00 AM. I call TaxiPaulo to pick me up and we drop Ray off on the way. TPaulo has brought some of his old choro scores for me to copy – what a guy! I arrive home later than Nate for a change, and TPaulo sends me an email the next day kidding me about my new bohemian Carioca lifestyle. Which is, of course, soon to change.

The next day Nate and I go to the beach at Ipanema, and then head off for various errands. When I get home Nate’s already there and says Henrique has called and his orchestra is playing at the Theatre Municipal – do I want to go? Of course! I have just enough time to call and confirm, change, and catch the bus/metro combo down to Centro, and meet Henrique to get the ticket. Nate has other plans so can’t come. The hall is gorgeous – a copy of the Paris Opera – and the concert is too. It’s Wagner and Tchaikovsky, and is a stunning contrast to my recent musical diet of choro and samba. Afterwards I take the metro with Henrique down to pick up his car in Copacabana and he gives me a personal story-filled tour of the Copacabana Palace Hotel, including the gallery of signed photos of movie stars and presidents on the 2nd floor. He’ll be staying in Rio for a couple of days because there’s another concert on Sunday, so he wants to pick Betty up at the airport when she arrives, so he’ll meet me at Choro School in the morning.

Saturday I go to Choro School for the first two classes – missing Bandolim 3 and Bandao – and, promising Romulo and the boys that I will return for regional practice, leave with Henrique for the airport. Betty arrives on time, and has met three other teachers on vacation on the plane, one of whom, she has discovered, is the wife of Dario Borim, my Portuguese teacher at UMass Dartmouth, and host of the great radio show “Braziliance” (also online now, so check it out!). And the fact that this is a small world is reinforced later on in the week when we run into them on a Rio bus. Back at the apartment Henrique gets to meet Nate, who is packing up to move to a hotel in Santa Teresa where some of his friends are staying. We have lunch – Betty’s first Açai – and I leave Betty and Nate to stroll home as I go back to Choro School for band practice. Later that night Betty and I take a cab up to Sta Teresa to meet Nate for dinner at a cool restaurant with orange walls and a choro CD playing in the background. So Betty hits the ground running for her week in Rio.

Sunday morning we go to my local market to buy fruit, including a lumpy green one that Nate has been told is delicious. It turns out to be filled with black seeds slightly larger than watermelon seeds each surrounded by a globe of delicious sweet pulp – kindof like an inside-out bunch of grapes. Robert says it’s called fruit of the gods. We then put on bathing suits and head to the Ipanema beach by way of the Feria de Hippie at Plaça General Osório. It turns out to be a really interesting craft fair so we stay longer than planned, cutting our beachtime short, but as it’s the week-end the beach is really crowded so it’s just as well to return mid-week.

We’re meeting my regional-amigo Jorge (he plays pandeiro) in Botofogo at 5:00 for a roda da samba that some of his friends play every Sunday. It turns out to be in a lovely outdoor bar, and by 6:00 the place is packed. The band is a singer/cavaquinho-player (who reminds me of Ralph, my AMGuSS co-director), a guitarist, a pandeiro-playing girl who looks about 16 but turns out to be 22, and two men, often more, playing various drums and rattles, eggs (several together in a plastic bag played at once), straw shakers. These aren’t professional musicians, they’re doctors, teachers, the girl writes romance novels, but most have played here every Sunday for years. There are some guest singers throughout the evening, including one who sings holding her year+ baby as he plays a shaker with impeccable rhythm. Jorge’s wife Miriam joins us and we chat cheerfully, as she lived in Washington for a few years so speaks English perfectly. The musical scene in the bar is one that I would so love to have in Providence. People of all sorts and ages sitting at tables, drinking beers or capirinhas, eating, sometimes the whole bar singing along, dancing breaking out in spots, people sitting in on percussion, the two young sons of one of the drummers sitting on stools at his side taking it all in. A great night.

Monday evening Betty and I are going to Petropolis to meet Paulo’s family and Henrique’s wife, so we spend some time in the morning buying presentes pra as crianças. Nate calls from Santa Teresa and we decide to meet up at the Jardim Botanico. It’s a huge expanse of greenery and brilliant tropical flowers and we stroll happily for a couple of hours. Roberto has told me about a shopping center of stores selling “old things,” including old LPs, near the Sigura Campo metro and Nate is curious, so we catch a cab down there and find them. Betty and I leave soon after to take the bus to Petropolis, about 1+ hours north of Rio in the mountains. Paulo picks us up at the bus stop when we arrive, and we go to Henrique’s for a party to meet the families. I’ve met as duas Patricias (both Paulo and Henrique’s wives are named Patricia) before, and Paulo’s daughter Marianna, but Betty meets them for the first time and also Paulo’s son Miguel, and the baby Vincenzo. In the morning Henrique takes us around Petropolis, one of “Henry’s Killing Tours” as he calls them, and we see the Imperial Palace and the crown jewels and other sights before catching the bus back to Rio.

Tuesday evening is the roda at Trapiche and I’m determined to get back there. TaxiPaulo picks us up, bringing me some LPs for Nate and a couple that he recorded for me. It’s his friends playing at Trapiche, so he gets out of the cab and chats with them and introduces Betty and me to Eduardo Neves who remembers me from a couple of weeks back when I was there with Sueli and Roberto. The session is smoking, as the musicians are egged on by the fact that Yamandu is sitting at a table near the band, drinking beer with his girlfriend. Also there to listen are my friend Ray, Rogerio Sousa, two jazz guys from Brooklyn that I’ve been trying to meet up with all week, and a guy from LA who has a choro group and is here to record in Brasilia, so we have lots of people to talk to at break. Yamandu, who is good friends with Rogerio Caetano, the 7-string player at the roda, sits in for the last 3 songs of the night. Alas, my recorder batteries had died, so I didn’t get it for posterity, but, trust me, it was muito legal.

Wednesday is Nate’s last day in Rio so he meets us to go up Pao de Açucar and have lunch at a restaurant Roberto recommended at Praia Vermelha. In the afternoon we go to the wonderful Edson Folk Museum and have coffee in the Catete Palace park, and then come back to Urca so Nate can pack up his LPs and take them back to Sta Teresa where he has a 4:30 AM cab to the airport arranged. Thursday is a beach day for Betty and me, and in the afternoon we meet Paulo in Centro for coffee so Betty can say good-bye. We take the metro straight down to Modern Sound where we drink capirinhas and listen to Mauricio Senise play jazz with a trio. Luiz Simas, a Brazilian pianist friend I’ve performed with who lives in NYC, has called and is in Rio with his wife, Maria. We’ll meet them tomorrow for dinner and then go to the Choro-fest.

I’m going to have to end this log before the Choro-fest because there are so many adventures and pictures already that I just need to send this off for Laura to post. Whew, nobody can accuse me of just sitting around in Rio, that’s for sure. I do have plans to get out of town, but there’s so much I want to do here that it never happens, so maybe Rio is all I’m meant to do this trip.

This log’s sonnet is about the frustrating stage of learning a language where you understand words but not enough context to get the meaning of the sentence. “mais numa bandeja pra mim,” the quote from Os Mutantes, means, literally, I think, “the rest on a lunch-tray for me” and it clicked in my mind as Henrique was explaining the word bandeja in a different context. Of course it’s tropicalismo, a music full of hidden political meanings, so there’s no telling what it really means. Palavras is words; esquina is corner, one of the first word I learned here from Roberto as I live around the corner from the restaurant Garota da Urca.

words splattering like raindrops palavras
em portugus with no context rush past
in fast traffic I grab onto the last
one trying to unlock its meaning as
it disappears around the esquina
wait I’m looking you up in my diction-
ary please can I nail down any one
phrase mais numa bandeja pra mim a
song by Os Mutantes replays incess-
antly and my brain waits for a word in
context to somehow arise from the din
of conversation half-understood guess
try solve this puzzle as a child would be-
gining to focus the world outside me

I hear tell that the weather back home has improved and spring is deigning to grace New England with its presense. I’ll send the next log soon, as I’m now behind, but right now life calls and I have to go out into it.

Return to Brazil Log page.

I have played for beer! As any musician knows that’s a rite of passage and now I’ve got there with my as-yet-unnamed Brazilian “regional” ( the name for a local band). It happened Friday in Santa Teresa. But that’s the end of this chapter. I ended my last log on March 27th with me having a chill day. But at 10:00 that night Roberto knocked on my door and said that Sueli was coming over to pick him up to go to hear a friend of their’s play choro – did I want to go? Porque nao?

We go to Trapiche de Gamboa and meet the band coming back in for the 2nd set. I recognize some of them as teachers at choro school. And the bandolimist is one of the hot-shot students from the Bandolim 3 class. Muito legal! There are no tables so we settle in at the bar. The band is smoking – mixing choro with jazz in a free approach that has them all laughing and enjoying what each other is doing. Sueli’s friend, Eduardo Neves, is a superb flute and sax player, and the clarinetist, Rui Alvim, is also great. The bandolimist, Luiz Barcelos looks to be in his early 20’s and is a really good player and interesting musician. Alas, my recorder arrives with dead batteries – I must have left it on accidentally. I do take a couple of tune-films and a couple of really blurry pics (and one good one that you see here). The bar is in a factory district – I am told many times not to come here alone unless I’m brought by TaxiPaulo. Sueli car is “guarded” by a funny loquacious fellow while we are in the club, and he gets a couple of $R for his effort.

Wednesday I meet Paulo Sa in Centro and he takes me to a good music bookstore where I buy a choro history book and the Jacob play-along book plus 2 CDs. We get some lunch and he calls TaxiPaulo to pick me up at the Central Bank instead of Urca for my lesson with Joel. The lesson is completely great – I start out with E Do Que Ha – a Luiz American tune that immediately has him giving me interpretation tips. All continues well and he has some interesting ideas for me to try in my playing. I feel that I’m making progress and he is understanding what it is that I’m trying to do here. It’s all good.

Thursday I pick up my copies of Henrique’s manuscripts at UniRio, and then meet Paulo again downtown, and he takes me by the club where Pixinguinha always hung out on our way to one of his bandolim classes at the Villa-Lobos Institute that he’s invited me to sit in on. It’s 4 college-age boys, one of whom is in my class at choro school. It’s interesting to hear Paulo work with them on improvisation. They get to go to the school for free, as long as they pass regular juries to be sure that they are progressing. Before they can start any instrument they have to learn solfege and some theory. They use the fixed-do method here, which caused me some confusion initially when Joel or Pedro would say the note names to me in class, as I’m used to “do” being the tonic (moveable-do), not always “C”. They never use letter names for notes or chords, always their scale names in the key of C.

That evening Sueli has invited Roberto and me to go hear her all-woman samba band “Orchestra Luna” play at the Rio Scenarium. “Invited” means we don’t have to pay the cover, I find out later. The club is very retro-cool and very red and the band is great. Sueli plays flute and baritone sax. The horn section also has alto sax and trombone and the women really rock. The rest of the band includes keyboards, electric bass, cavaquinho, a drummer and a percussionist, and a singer on about half of the tunes. The club is in Lapa – so I get to go there for the first time. Lapa looks like something out of a Fellini film. (Did I just imagine the mist or was it really there?) On the way to the club we pass a small bar where an older guitarist is playing and singing bossa nova. I peer in and note the familiar sounds kindof automatically and then the earth-shaking realization come crashing down on me – I am listening to bossa nova in Rio. Really it nearly knocks me over, like running into the huge wall of Brazilian music history and it’s real and not a made-for-TV movie. A big wow moment.

We talk to Sueli at both breaks. At the first one she is feverishly rearranging music in her folder for the new set lists as the band literally goes right from song to song without a pause. There’s all sorts of dancing, from gaufieri that goes back to Chiquinha Gonzaga in the late 19th-century, to the dread-locked rasta guy’s frenetic slam-dance. At the 2nd break Sueli tells me I must go up to look at the upper floors so, when the music ends, Roberto and I do. There’s a couple of pics here but it hardly conveys the surreal atmosphere. Cases crammed with dolls and glass knick-knacks, chairs nailed upside down on the ceiling, collections of old electric fans and metal chairs, pictures of 30s bathing beauties, band instruments nailed to the walls, Art Noveau sculptures of women hanging from the ceiling, and copies of greek sculptures beside 40’s red furniture and old record players with sound horns.

Sueli has gone by time we get back down but Roberto introduces me to Sheila, the keyboard player, who has just recorded a duo CD of choro/jazz with saxophonist Daniella Speilman. She says I have to meet Daniella because she knows everyone in choro, and it suddenly occurs to me to ask if she’s the pregnant woman playing with Paulo Moura on the Brasileirinho DVD. Yep, she is – amazing. Sheila takes my number and says I should call her to get Daniella’s number too. By now it’s after 3:00 AM, as the band didn’t start playing until 10:30, so we say good-bye to all and go back to Candida Gauffree.

Friday I go downtown to pick up a ticket for the Guinga show that’s on Saturday, as it’s reserved seating, and then head to the beach. In the evening I go to hear and meet bandolimist Rodrigo Lessa at what turns out to be a Cuban cigar bar. The music is cool – he’s playing with a 7-string and a drummer – but the smoke nearly kills me so I leave after the 1st set.

Saturday is Choro school. Rui Alvim (clarnetist at the Tuesday session) is teaching my repertory class and we work on Chorando Baixando. He organizes us like a regional, and I’m told to play the lead on the first B section, and improvise a counter line on the first C. I get to do 2 bandolim classes again this week. The girl from Bandolim 3 has opted to join us in level 2,and many others have not returned so level 3 is down to the 3 hottest of the hotshots. Luiz B is pleased when I compliment his performance on Tuesday. I film some of the level 3 class and record the all-school Bandao and takes some pics that you see here. I meet my whole regional for the first time, and we’ve picked up a flutist and a 3rd pandeiro player, who turns out to be from Burlington VT and plays in Will Patton’s Brazilian group. Small world. She’s only here for a couple more weeks so is just visiting choro school for today.

Those of you coming to Rio might be interested to know that foreigners who want to sit-in on choro school for one or two Saturdays can do so, for just $25R/Saturday, and you don’t have to audition. Our regional plays through some choro and Romulo, our self-appointed leader, collects email and phone numbers and arranges our next rehearsal for Friday in Santa Teresa. I walk out of rehearsal to find a very cool roda with lots of the teachers playing. There’s a pic here and I have a couple of films. Before I know it it’s 5:30 (we started at 9:00 AM) and I have to run home and change and get to my Guinga show, so can’t go out for a beer with Bonnie, Romulo, and some of the others.

I arrive at Rival Petroblas just in time for the show. The first row of tables is up against the stage and I find my ticket is for a seat at a table in the middle of the 2nd row, and there’s a guy sitting already there. “Oh I have a date!” I exclaim and he laughs, understanding English. He’s there mainly to see Tonhino Horta, who I don’t know, but is clearly a huge favorite of the crowd. A big jovial man, fabulous guitarist and writer of very interesting and sometimes edgy songs and instrumentals, he alternates sets with Guinga in one continuous show. He plays first, with his sister playing flute on some of the tunes. In addition to his own songs he also sings Pixinguinha’s “Carinhosa” and manages, as a great artist can, to make it new.

Then Guinga takes the stage. Although he’s low key guy, telling funny stories to the audience at the start of his set, he is a riveting performer, and his songs are intensely beautiful. He sings some, but also has a woman singer who sings in the same range that he does, and is an amazingly emotional and intense performer. Every time they finish a song it’s as if we have been physically released from a spell. The four all play together for a couple of songs at the end and then we are out on the street again, somehow transformed.

Sunday is market day and Henrique calls and is in town, and he takes me to the Folk Art Museum in Catete – I love this stuff! Then we tour the elegant Catete Palace and then, for a stark contrast, go and walk around Lapa. It’s an even stranger neighborhood by daylight than it was at night. None of the bars open until 8:00 at the earliest, most open at 10:00, so everything is shuttered and the place wears a deserted air with street people sleeping on cardboard and graffiti on every available wall. It reinforces my earlier impression, when I came to see Sueli, that Lapa is a kind of mirage that disappears with the light of day and arises in smoke every evening to weave mysterious strains of music.

While we are walking around, Romulo calls and says he and Bonnie are going to a quiosque in Lagoa to hear Daniella Speilman in an hour or so, do I want to go too? Henrique says he can drop me off there so, porque nao? We’re in the Arab quiosque – there are many of these outdoor bars grouped together by the edge of some water. The place has a Key-West feel to it. Daniella is playing soprano sax with a 7-string and “the best drummer in Rio,” according to Romulo. They are great, playing way outside the tunes.

I don’t have my recorder but take a couple of blurry pics and film (it’s really dark and I don’t ever like to intrude my flash into an event). I go talk to Daniella at break – Romulo says she studied at Berklee, so I speak to her in English. She is very excited about my project here (everyone is, they are so pleased that I’m interested in learning and documenting choro as it is played in Rio today) and says she will tell Ronaldo to call me. Ronaldo do Bandolim is a hugely important choro player who I really want to meet. We stay for another set and Romulo drops me off at home in his car. It’s amazing what a luxury a car seems.

Monday and Tuesday seem to have disappeared from my brain, but Wednesday is Paulo again – see a cavaquinho class he is teaching, and Joel again, where I finally have enough Portuguese to engage in a long conversation about the differences between classical technique and choro technique. He plays classical music with his technique, so can I play choro with mine? The answer is a firm “nao”. Because choro is mainly in first position, and many of the typical ornaments and glisses rely on frequently using a one-finger-per-fret left hand. I can see that, because the melodies definitely seem to come out of chord positions. Today I get my first compliment from Joel, when I play Sonorosa, and he says it’s amazing how much I have improved in 4 weeks. Yippee! I get home precisely at 7:30, because Igor has called Tuesday and said he would come for rehearsal in the evening for our concert Friday, but he doesn’t show. Maybe I misunderstood…

Thursday Nate arrives from Buenos Aires. I clean up, stock up, and go to the airport with TaxiPaulo who offers to wait with me – it’s over an hour while we talk to a retired soccer player who now drives a limo and is waiting for a client on the same flight. Nate appears – it’s great to see him and he is full of Argentinian adventures and ready for more in Brazil. With typical Nate luck he has discovered that he has a friend from Columbia living in Rio, so he’ll have pals to hang with as well as me. We return to Urca and Paulo only charges me for the driving part, not the wait. It occurs to me that I don’t have a picture of his cheerful smiling face so I will have to fix that before the next log. He is really a great help to me, besides driving, and always walks me to the club and makes sure the event is really happening and when I am finished and call he arrives within 15 minutes. He makes me feel very secure.

Nate calls his friend Lizza and they arrange to meet the next day. We eat a great dinner at Garota da Urca, and walk around my village by night. The next day, Friday, is a holiday (Good Friday) and most businesses are closed. I have the concert with Igor at 12:30 and we’re planning to arrive at 11:00 to practice. As Nate and I are on our way in a cab (just a regular cab from Urca) Marcia calls and says she and Igor are at the museum and it is closed and they will wait for me there. When we arrive Igor is pacing around yelling into the phone. It’s a misunderstanding between the music series – who thought the museum was open – and the museum. So there is no concert, but awhile later I get a call from Paulo who says they will pay us anyway and arrange another concert date and pay for that too. But for now we say good-bye to Igor and Marcia, and Nate and I walk to the metro and go home. I switch music, as there’s a regional rehearsal in Sta Teresa at 5:00, and we take the metro to Copacabana and walk and have lunch. Lizza is going to Sta Teresa too, for some of the holiday festivities, so Nate will meet her there. It’s brilliantly sunny – usual for me, but a treat for Nate who has had a week of rain in Buenos Aires.

We rendezvous with the band at the appointed corner and go in 3 cars to Sta Teresa, up steep cobblestone streets and drop Nate at a park. We continue on the Carlos’ house, stopped for a few minutes to let a religious parade go past. Drive by some street theater including a guy in a toga and a crown of thorns singing “Got a Whole Lotta Love” in highly-accented English. Our regional is all there, except the flutist, and with the addition of another guitarist. Bonnie has come too, although she leaves in a few days. One of the guitarists has brought his wife who obligingly takes pics and films of the rehearsal.

We are playing out on a rooftop terrace overlooking Rio. Most of the songs go well, some have issues, but everyone is really cheerful about it all. Carlos lives in a 3-story 2-rooms-per-floor house that’s really cool. Afterwards some people leave, including Romulo, but most of us stay and go to a bar to drink a beer and talk. We’re about the only ones there, so gradually the instruments come out and we’re playing along with the samba CDs. Then the bar owner stops the CDs and the guys want to play our choro. So we do, and I’m the only melody instrument, but manage to do pretty well. We are a big hit, get free beer, Bonnie and I get praised for being gringos with beautiful souls, I am told that I should record (!!), some big drums come out (from where?) and the owner joins in, some Afro-Brazilian dances are played and Bonnie dances with Carlos’ girlfriend. Big hugs as we part, until the next rehearsal on Wednesday. One of the guys takes Bonnie and me to our homes in a cab and won’t let us pay. Nate arrives home later having had fun too and met some cool people.

Saturday Nate goes off with Lizza to a music+feijoada event at one of the samba school up north. His pic here is with the samba-school shirt. I have an early show at the Rio Scenarium where Romulo has alerted me that Ronaldo do Bandolim is playing with some musicians. I arrive early without a reservation, but get in, ask a friendly waiter if I can sit at the one unreserved table, he checks and I can. The musicians are sitting on the edge of the stage talking and I ask the waiter if he knows which one is Ronaldo, as the band has been playing there all week. He doesn’t but goes right over and asks, so I introduce myself, and when I say I’m a friend of Paulo Sa, the handshake turns into a kiss on both cheeks and Ronaldo and I sit down and play his bandolim and talk. He’s a cheerful handsome man who loves classical music and tells everyone he talks to afterward what a great tremolo I have. So I’m invited to sit at the band table and talk to the flutist’s g’friend while they play. (Get a couple of thumbs-up from my waiter-friend during this whole process.)

Ronaldo invites me to everything – his next gigs, a roda at his brother’s house in Niteroi on Saturday – and gets my drink card stamped so I don’t have to pay the cover. Big hugs as I leave, and the place is filling up for the next band. It’s a much younger crowd, and the band is flute, lead cavaquinho, bass, drums, and percussion. I’m sorry I didn’t record a bit as it was so odd. But loud, and the club is packed with trendy young Cariocas, and as I exit it’s so loud I can’t even hear Paulo on my cellphone in the street. and there is a line stretching in either direction of hundreds of kids waiting to get in. As I’m waiting for my cab a man comes up to me and mimics mandolin playing – it’s one of the flutists from my repertory class at choro school who is waiting to see if his nephew gets into the club. TaxiPaulo arrives and I’m home by midnight – early for Rio.

Sunday is Easter and Nate and I go to Maracana – the largest soccer stadium in the world – to see a game. He found a tour online and said the guys seemed cool and they’d pick us up in Urca and it it seemed like a good idea after his experiences navigating Buenas Aires soccer solo. We arrive in a bus of 6 and meet up with about 40 others in other small buses. It’s the international youth brigade. But once inside we find we can sit anywhere in our section, so quickly ditch the gringos and go hang out with Brazilians. An earlier game is just ending, I think it’s a teen-age league. The whole stadium scene is amazing. Nearly everyone in our section is wearing black and red – the Flamengo team colors – and shirts and headbands reading “Mengao”. There’s a drum section and nearly continuous drumming and shouting of rhythmically complicated chants of support for Flamengo, “our team,” who is playing America, from up north (yes, really). Huge flags on long flagpoles are waved and twirled gymnastically in the less crowded sections. Wow – imagine trying to bring anything like that into Fenway! It starts to pour at halftime, so the 2nd half is pretty crazy on the field. Our team wins and will go on to whatever the next stage of the play-offs is. Nate is going back to a game on Wednesday to try to see Romario score “mil,” his 1000 goal. He’s now at 999, and only Pele in the 60’s has ever scored 1000, so it’s a big event here and there’s a lot of anticipation.

Today was a lazy beach day at Apoador. Nate has got me drinking Acai – a berry that makes a tasty health drink, and arrives as a dark brown icy slush – and so we are frequenting the many juice bars in Rio. He’s off with Lizza now and I’m finishing up this log and hoping to get a couple of hours of practice in tonight.

This log’s sonnet was written after the Guinga concert. I was really knocked out by his songs, and by his intense focus on the music as he was performing. The last piece he played was titled “Comendador Albuquerque,” and he exited the stage afterwards without fanfare, leaving us with just his music.

Comendador he leaves the room full of
the passion of his words his sounds stab through
the air not pausing nothing more to do
he decimates the bright facade of love
fall into his songs if you dare but this
is not a man who comes to entertain
with superficial beauty for his pain
as hope can purify as fire his
notes offer up redemption for the soul
nothing less if you’re not willing clap end
the radiance in this moment pretend
it’s just a song shut the door to the whole
universe placed carefully in your hand
a gift you still may come to understand

I hope the spring snowstorms in New England are finally through, and you are now enjoying warmer days. I’ll be back with more music and adventures to recount in a couple of weeks. My friend Betty arrives this weekend, so with 2 houseguests I may even venture out of town, although right now I feel like I never want to leave Rio ever.

Return to Brazil Log page.

A lot of firsts these 2 weeks – first lesson with Joel, first concert with Igor, first Choro School, first market, first (and 2nd) session at Espirito do Chopp, first rain, first recordings, first movie clips. I met up with Paulo on Friday the 9th & got a cellphone, a music stand, and went to see one of the places he teaches. Paulo thinks we should write a choro method together – how cool would that be! I hope there’s time to at least get started while I’m here.

The next day I go to Choro School. The first person I see there was Luciana Rabello – co-director of the school and Acari Records with Mauricio Carrilho, and cavaquinho-player extraordinaire. She remembers me from two years ago and greeted me with a kiss on each cheek – definitely the high point of the morning. She & I both thought I had told them I was coming, but the message hadn’t got through. So I was sent back down to the desk & got special permission to fill out the registration form late. And it was try-outs – something I hadn’t expected so I hadn’t brought any music. I noodled a bit for Pedro Amorim, the bandolim teacher, trying to remember some choro (I WILL learn some of these by heart while I’m here!)

And then I had to take the theory test in Portuguese. Well, I figured out that the first section wanted me to sort tunes by key and time signature. The 2nd section asked me to link each written melody with its name. Hah! – they were Brazilian folksongs that “all Brazilians know” according to Mr. Helpful-English-speaker. I imagine they were the equivalent of “Twinkle Twinkle” and “White Christmas,” but I didn’t recognize any of the names. I could solfege them, but you can’t put that in writing so that section was a bust. The last section involved sorting out & matching descriptions of chord sequences and my Portuguese does not yet include technical music terms. Luckily Pedro seemed to find me amusing as I went up & down stairs trying to do what they asked me to, and Marcia, the registrar, was a friend of Igor & figured out that I was the Marilynn he was playing with, so I got in on rep.

Sunday I went to the picturesque market at the end of my street where funny men and serious women sold me fruit & veggies for the week. In the evening I figured out how to get to Espirito do Chopp, worked up my courage, and grabbed the bus. The weekly choro session runs from 6:30 to 10:00, so I figured I could catch a set and get a bus home by 9:00, before they get scarce. I got off the bus on a pretty sketchy-looking street, hoping I had not made a big mistake. But walked bravely ahead, saw a somewhat familiar market complex, took a deep breath & turned in. After a couple of shaky minutes I was rewarded by the sound of choro and there were Deo Rian, Luiz Otavio Braga, and Sergio Prata playing bandolim, 7-string, and cavaquinho, respectively. I grabbed a table, ordered a beer, and started my recorder.

At the break I went up and talked to them. They all remembered me & I got names of places to hear choro sessions. Deo Rian is the other – besides Joel Nascimento – of Jacob do Bandolim’s disciples, and one of the revered elder statesmen of Brazilian bandolim. Luiz is an awesome 7-string player, and the head of the Music School at UniRio. Sergio Prata is the head of the Jacob do Bandolim Institute, and I think played cavaquinho with Jacob. As they were about to start the 2nd set, Deo offered me his bandolim & asked if I wanted to play. I said next time – I was way too intimidated at that moment. Caught a bit of the 2nd set & took a movie of them – kindof by accident, but it’s cool. I left a little after 9:00 and did catch the 511 home.

Monday I got the first calls on my cell phone. From Igor, to change our rehearsal time, from Marcia, to make sure I understood Igor, and from Alzi Platts in the USA, my Brazilian friend & concert organizer who is so excited that I am in Brazil! She promised to alert all her friends that I am here. It was nice to hear her speaking English – being limited by my lack of Portuguese is kindof isolating. But I am improving- at least my understanding. I still get odd looks when I speak. Wednesday 3/14 was my first lesson with Joel Nascimento – a main focus of my stay in Rio.

Got a cab to Penha– having been warned by my internet guy Handerson that it was “perigoso”. I know it, but that’s where he lives. (It was my 4th warning in 3 days though about the danger of Rio, so I’m paying attention and making sure that I don’t get into unplanned situations since I’m nearly always alone. I definitely need to find a choro-loving friend with lots of time to go around with.) Had to make the first call on my cell phone because the cabby couldn’t find the address in his book. The one hour lesson lasted for 7, and was both exhilarating and discouraging, as all good lessons are. Paulo had warned me that Joel wanted me to change my instrument, but he also wanted me to change my pick and my entire technique as well. Haven’t been in that position for a few years – not since my European teachers Vincenz Hladky, Takashi Ochi, and Hugo D’Alton.

The good news was that I could understand him pretty well, because he likes to talk at length on a subject. Many times he would shake his head and mumble that 3 months was too little time. I recorded the lesson/lecture – all 4 ½ hours of it- and then the after-session where he played for me – first solo and then backed by the Jacob play-along CD set that Sergio Prata had been telling me about. It was a master class in choro variation and improv. He also played a live recording with Luiz Octavio – awesome. I’m taking my computer next week to import that one, and maybe his out-of-print first LPs too, that had a limited re-release on CD. I took a couple of movies, but had memory card issues and hadn’t brought a spare. Next time…

Friday 3/16 was concert day – a noon-hour deal in the “Music no Museu” series. I woke surprisingly nervous, played everything slowly, ate breakfast, watered the plants, got dressed, and took a cab, rather than the bus-metro combo, because it was hot & I was nervous. The Palacio Itamaraty was imposing & old & a Musica-no-Museu staff guy was waiting to show me where to go. Igor was already there, wearing red & blue plaid pants, an orange T-shirt, brown hippie beads & sandels. I had to smile – why do I always get the sartorically-challenged ones? Why can’t I once have a partner who shows up in a suave outfit? He was really nervous- I think a combination of the formal hall and under-practicing, and I found out later – having a gig the previous night that lasted until 4 AM. He had also forgotten his music stand. But he had memorized “Leave Something Unexplained” – no mean feat! So we figured out how to share one music stand.

The program that they handed us was almost totally wrong. In addition to just listing the pieces from my last CD instead of the program, it also said that I wrote “Eats of Here,” (hmmm that with “Champagne” would be a good combo) but it looked good. Somehow I wasn’t nervous anymore. The hall filled up, I played really well. Igor, who was announcing, skipped Bachianas on purpose – he was having trouble with the part, but we had to do it for an encore, which made me really glad, and he got through OK – at least well enough given that there was a loud fan going so the acoustics weren’t the best. We got a standing ovation- 2 actually. And cheers for “Brasileirinho,” practically a national theme-song here. And long applause for “Iara,” which I was playing with some of Joel’s advice in mind. Igor walked me to the metro – bad idea to catch a cab downtown he said – and I was home.

Put on my new bathing suit & went to the Urca beach for a little. It was windy, and soon began to rain. I wanted to go to see Rodrigo Lessa play in Lapa, but I hadn’t been there yet, and it’s a dangerous place if you’re alone, according to my Rio advisees. I think it’s just a divey area where students live, but I wasn’t up for any iffy stuff, so I stayed home a noodled on choro. The secret, I think, is to get in touch with my inner teen-age boy and just obsess on the riffs until I internalize them. So I’m “learning” songs off my Nadando CD. Pretty funny to have me be the one playing it all right who I’m trying to keep up with playing by ear.

The next day was Choro School – 9:00 AM! There were hundreds of people all sitting or standing around outdoors – some kind of plumbing problem so we couldn’t go into the classrooms. There was an hour of Luciana & sometimes others talking. I understood some words, but had to ask about the things that were happening on Friday at 5:00 or next Saturday at 3:00. Luckily one of the bandolims spoke English. We were supposed to have some music – Marcia said she sent it to me yesterday, but I hadn’t checked my email– but a lot of us didn’t have it so we crowded around a music stand and played a piece by Mauricio Carrilho “Olaria”. Amazing sound with horns and percussion and flutes and us pluckies.

Since the building was closed today was just a 200-person roda under the trees. We played some pieces that everyone knew & a couple I kindof did too – Naquele Tempo & E do Que Ha, so I figured out how to play them or played chords. My ear seemed to be working well & I felt cool – some people didn’t read or comp so they just kindof stood around. Some funny teenage cavaquinho boys came over & hung out & I checked out the rhythms they were playing. Pedro hung out too & played with us. It was very informal. So next time I’ll bring the music & a music stand and hope I don’t get into trouble for not doing the things that were obligatory that I didn’t understand.

Saturday afternoon I decided to take a break and take myself to the mall & go to the movies. My choices were somewhat limited & the best bet was seeing “Music & Lyrics” that turned out to have sub-titles, so I had a whole two hours of English which, unexpectedly, made me homesick and I missed my movie-going friends. And when I got out it was raining again so I traipsed the mile home in the dark and damp. When I got to my house though, Roberto, my landlord, who had been away all week, had arrived home so I got into a wonderfully mangled portu-glish conversation with him that raised my spirits again.

Sunday was market again, and Espirito session again. As I was leaving for the session I told Roberto that I was tired of going everywhere alone and feeling unsafe, and I was going to get some friends to go to sessions with ASAP. Well my “ghosts” must have been listening, because arriving at Espirito do Chopp I recognized a guy from Choro School who waved to me & I went over to sit with him and his girlfriend. Gustavo, who is a dentist, and Raquel. He speaks English and said they’re always up for going to shows in Lapa, I just have to call. And they gave me a ride home in their car. Wow – luxury! Deo was playing again, along with Sergio Prata’s son Thiago, and an old 7-string player – Gustavo thought he was introduced as Walter – who played with Pixinguinha and Jacob. A good-but-somehow-annoying flute guy sat in in place of Deo for way too long in the 2nd set (I stopped recording), and a cool tall cavaquinho girl sat in for the appropriate 2 songs in the 3rd set. So I added some new live recordings to the stash.

Still writing lots of sonnets and dreams, in addition to studying music, and trying to keep up my Portuguese lessons. I’m beginning to be able to find my way around and I think they recognize me in the grocery store. Here’s another sonnet, written after my first trip to Espirito do Chopp.

Rio is ferociously beautiful
its mountains and sea cradling a mix
of joy and poverty too old to fix
and no one expects that to change the pull
of blue skies and sweet fruit lull but don’t cure
and brown bodies bellies bulging over
their bikinis seem content it’s no ver-
sion of hell you might read about in your
books but the look of paradise is a
thin veneer over violent favelas
and beautiful girls-from-Ipanemas
step back into their postcards at night stay
here awhile and you’ll see both sides of it
how inexplicably the pieces fit
3/11

In the next couple of weeks there will more of the same. I’ve found the weekly upcoming events mag – Rio Veja – so I know what’s going on in town now. I’m hoping to hear Epouca do Choro, Jacob’s old band, play at Bar do Tom next Sunday, and maybe get to the choro session in Lapa on Friday. And a friend of Roberto’s is playing sax at a show at Modern Sound on Tuesday & we’re going with Sueli, also a sax player – she apparently has an all-girl sax quartet that plays samba. It’s raining now and I’ve spent all day in, playing, writing. Now off for errands and to mail this. Sniff the spring flowers for me & I’ll write again in a couple of weeks.

Return to Brazil Log page.

It’s true – I’ve been here a week now. And I have friends and adventures to prove it. And pictures, as you can see. I left February 26, my departure put in doubt by a snowstorm. Boy, does that word look strange right now. My friends Henrique and Paulo, from the Rio Trio, picked me up at the airport when I arrived the next afternoon and took me to my new digs that their guitarist Marcus had found for me in Urca. Urca is sometimes called a village in the city of Rio, and it’s definitely a real neighborhood. It’s a peninsula off the side of Pão de Açucar, Sugar Loaf Mountain, between Rio Sul – with its famous beaches Copacabana and Ipanema, and Rio Central (downtown) and very near UniRio and the Federal University of Rio. I feel as safe here as I do at home, which is a big relief. For instance, during the lunar eclipse a few days ago, everyone hung out by the wall at the edge of the water (you can see it in my pics) chatting and taking pictures, some drinking beer from the local restaurant/bar – a friendly casual scene. My new friend Marilia was very impressed that I got a place here – she said everyone wants to live in Urca.

You can see pictures of some of my new friends. My landlord’s name is Roberto, and he’s funny and helpful, and speaks some English, so we have amusing translation sessions. He also cooks for me sometimes and gives me detailed directions, complete with hand-drawn maps, to everywhere I want to go. He took me to a great beach in Ipanema, Praia Apoadoar, within an hour of my arrival at his house, and recommended a good brand of flip-flops – the standard footwear everywhere. He just ran out the door to the opera – got a ticket at the last minute from a friend – and is the sort of sweet guy who seemed genuinely sorry that there was only 1 ticket left – it’s opening press night – so he couldn’t invite me along. (It’s a modern Brazilian opera, he promised to bring all the info so I can go later). His house, as you can see in the pictures, is beautiful, and I’m renting a bed-and-bath suite there, and get to use the living room and kitchen, and the little nook you see in the mandolin stilllife pic, where I practice with Igor. Igor is my new duo partner – a really good 7-string guitarist who plays choro like a whiz, and reads fairly well. We’ve got a couple of concerts coming up, so he’s learning some of my rep – “Leave Something Unexplained,” Will Ayton’s “Tregian” and “Carman,” “Bachianas,” Luiz Simas’ “Meu Bandolim” and of course we are playing choro. We’ve practiced twice and have our first concert the 16th. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Kinho and Handerson run the local internet café (about $1/20 minutes), so I have seen them nearly daily, and today I met Kinho’s wife Rosana. They seem to understand my Portuguese and are really fun to talk to. Today they set me up – on their own time – with a page on what I think is the Brazilian version of MySpace – www.orkut.com – it was a pretty amusing process and I learned lots of Portuguese. They were insistent that I fill out the whole form, even the stuff I didn’t quite understand. Kinho even corrected my Portuguese spelling (amazing how you get those little symbols over the letters on a Brazilian keyboard). If you go to my page you’ll be amused to see that my favorite foods are popcorn, yogurt, and feijõa (a Brazilian bean and rice dish that Roberto made for me on Sunday). So far I have 3 friends (Kinho, Handerson, and Rosana), have joined a choro newsgroup, and started a classical mandolin newsgroup that has 1 member – Kinho. All fun and pretty funny, but I just may meet some musicians there, we’ll see. Kinho also plays soccer – so will be a great source of info on getting to games, rides a motorcycle and started a fishing newsgroup. You can find out more about him by going to my orkut page and clicking on him. How goofy and cool is that! Muito legal! – in Portuguese.

My newest friend, Marilia, I met at the Bip Bip club last night when I went to hear the weekly choro session. Igor was supposed to meet me there, as Tuesday is choro night, but was a no-show (seems Brazilian men do that often). But since I had painstakingly figured out how to take the bus, and there was about to be music, I bought a beer from the wife of the owner, who asked where I was from. Marilia, who was standing next to her had lived in Boston for 8 years, so we talked some between numbers – she’s the first real English-speaker I’ve met. The music turned out not to be choro after all – no melody instruments showed up, just guitars, cavaquinos, and percussion, so they sang. It was a cool scene though, that I knew something about from having been there 2 years ago with Paulo. There’s the somewhat crotchety owner, who scowls at anyone who talks during the music and sometimes throws back his head and yowls out a line of whatever’s being sung. And there’s Mrs. Owner, who deals with the customers if needed.

The main focus of the club is the session. The musicians sit around a big table that takes up the whole room, and the rest of us, owners included, sit at small tables outside. You serve yourself a can of beer from the cooler and wave it at the owner and he marks it down on your account and you pay at the end of the night. There are the regulars who greet the owners with a kiss on each cheek. Marilia is one of those. I was sitting at their table because I was what? – interesting, alone, a musician, had a hand-drawn map of how to get there, whatever. I didn’t dare photograph the owners. I even asked Mrs. Owner if it would be OK for me to take a picture of the club, because I certainly didn’t want to be lumped in with the cute but clueless table of American college students checking out pics on their digital cameras who annoyingly would want to buy shots of cachacha instead of beer, and would expect Mrs. Owner to get up and go to the bar (you can see it at the back) and serve them, and then would expect to pay right away, so would have to have the system explained to them. Marilia left with me to catch the bus, as she lives near Urca, and I think just wanted to make sure I got home OK. She ultimately helped get me do that after waiting in vain for a ½ hour for the 511, my local bus. This involved catching a small bus that seemed more like a group cab, destination only ascertained by asking the guy with his head out the window if they could get us part way to Urca, jumping out before they veered off toward Central, Marilia walking me to UniRio where I got my bearings, and then me walking toward Urca until, surprisingly, I saw my bus, flagged it down and rode right to my front door. Yes, next time I will take a cab home.

My old friends, Paulo, Henrique and Marcus, from the Rio Trio, are so far absent from my daily Rio life, though I have called Paulo once and will meet him Friday. The academic year just started on Monday so everyone is pretty busy. Paulo’s arranged for me to study with my hero, bandolimists Joel Nascimento, and I’ll start lessons next week. I’m continuing my recorded Pimsleur Portuguese lessons, have finished the 30 lessons of Portuguese I, and am on lesson 4 of Portuguese II. There are 3×30, or 90 lessons in all so it’ll keep me busy for awhile. The Saturday Choro School at UniRio starts this week or next – I’ll find out from Paulo – and I’m planning to attend. So music and Portuguese are happening.

It’s late summer here, the temperature varies between 85 and 95 degrees, and it’s humid. The days have been clear and bright so far, with blue skies and transparent water. I took the cable car up Pão de Açucar one afternoon a couple of days ago and took the big-vista pics you can see here. I’ve been to the beach a couple of times but, being alone, what to do with stuff or how to go without stuff makes it somewhat of a logistical problem. I really have everything I need on a daily basis close at hand. I can walk to UniRio in about 15 minutes, and to a big shopping center in a half hour. The bus stops at the end of my street, and actually in front of my house on its return trip. There’s a beach at the end of the block, although you apparently can’t always swim there, and a better one a few blocks away, Praia Vermelha, near a walking path that goes around Pão de Açucar, with beautiful plants and sometimes monkeys (see pics). There’s a grocery store a few blocks away, near the internet café, and a good informal restaurant, and a drugstore on the corner. I can use the washing machine in the house, and I am in love with my new electronc toys – laptop Mac, digital camera, digital recorder, Ipod Nano, back-up hard-drive the size of 4 passports stacked up, and a tiny peanut drive that I’ll put this newsletter and these pics on to take to send at the internet café.

Besides all the external goings-on, I’m aware that this time is a rare break from my too-busy life, my over-crammed brain, and my house full of stuff and responsibilities, and I’m taking advantage of that to step back from normal and think about it. I’m keeping a so-far daily journal, in addition to writing this log, and am writing down my dreams and poems too. Since this is a music page you probably don’t know, but my first art form was poetry, and for the past few years I find I’m writing again, what I call “blank-verse sonnets”. It’s an interesting subjective way to explore situations from a different perspective. I use the 14-line iambic-pentameter sonnet form with its strict and defining rhyme scheme, but write the lines to scan as if unrhymed, on somewhat irreverent topics, and use language more freely than is absolutely correct. My inspiration is the work of some American poets of the 1920’s, especially Edna St. Vincent Millay, and e. e. cummings. If you don’t know their stuff, check out “I shall forget you presently, my dear,” or “Only until this cigarette is ended” and “Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!” by the former, and “next of course to god America I” by the latter, and many more. You’ll find them online, just google the titles.

So while I’m here I’m writing my Rio Sonnets. Here’s the current version of the first one (still messing with the last couplet). It was initially inspired by the thick cloud cover as I flew the first leg of my trip from Providence to Newark at twilight, having left in a whirl of last minute to-do’s. It seemed unreal, something from a storybook scene covered in snow, and like I was truly leaving behind the world as I knew it.

the clouds below create their own landscape
thickly wrapped in cotton batting the sun
is a golden strip on the horizon
beckoning me as I make my escape
physical the Princess of Narnia
bids farewell and lights golden too along
the runway dance to a Brazilian song
on my Ipod as I smile bom dia
to Rio 5,000 miles away in
a morning yet to come usually
I’m driving down the Jersey Turnpike see-
ing planes and clouds above but that time’s been
and this is now and a Brazilian day
waits up ahead and I have songs to play.
2/26-28

So bom dia to y’all, and I’ll check back in in a couple of weeks to let you know how music and life in Rio are playing out.

Return to Brazil Log page.

Friday, March 4
Arrive, Rio Trio concert

I flew out of Providence on Thursday, March 3rd, and after an overnight flight and two changes of planes, was picked up at the Rio airport by a driver who whisked me to an afternoon performance by the Rio Trio. The Trio – Paulo Sa, bandolim (the Brazilian mandolin), Marcus Ferrer, guitar, and Henrique Drach, cello – had come to play at Roger Williams University a year ago, at my invitation, and here I was in Brazil to perform with them. As I listened to them play, through exhaustion, I remembered how good they are. Our concert together would be the next day and I was definitely looking forward to it.

Saturday, March 5
Concert with the Rio Trio at the Palacio de Cristal in Petropolis

We rehearsed all day, and performed a concert in the exquisite Palacio de Cristal, built in Paris in the 19th century, shipped to Brazil and assembled. Our concert included choro, of course, two pieces by my Roger Williams University colleague Will Ayton, and a piece written for me by NYC-based Brazilian pianist/composer, Luiz Simas. I played duets with all three and we played together as a quartet. The concert was an artistic success, and the large and enthusiastic audience gave us a standing ovation. To play Brazilian music in Brazil with Brazilian musicians for a Brazilian audience, and to succeed so completely was a highlight of my career so far.

Sunday, March 6
Performances of traditional Brazilian music

In the afternoon I went with guitarist Marcus Ferrer and family to hear Messias, a traditional viola caipira player who was visiting from the north, play and sing traditional music – sounding much like our blues – at a house concert. I also played a couple of choro with Marcus, at Messias’ request. In the evening the Trio, with family and friends, took me to a roda da choro (traditional choro “jam” session) hosted by bandolimist Bruno Rian’s group, Conjunto Saurau. It was an all-star event, featuring guest performances by legendary bandolimist, Deo Rian – Bruno’s father; Sergio Prata, head of the Jacob do Bandolim Institute; and Luiz Otavio Braga, 7-string guitarist and professor at the University of Rio, an email contact of mine. Paulo introduced me to everyone who seemed pleased that I, a classical mandolinist and professor of music, played choro. When Deo sat in, he gave a little speech to the crowd dedicating his first piece to me, to my surprise and the delight of my tablemates.

Monday, March 7 & Saturday, March 12
Visit to the University of Rio de Janeiro

Fresh papaya for breakfast, a walk on the Copacabana beach, and then I headed for the UniRio. I had been invited by Luiz Otavio Braga, head of the String Department of the Villa-Lobos Institute, to visit the University, just starting its academic year. Professor Braga gave me a tour of the Institute and its facilities and introduced me to several professors. We also discussed our parallel research into connections between the popular music styles of the USA and Brazil in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I met with Dr. Silvio Mehry, Director of the Villa-Lobos Institute, who had provided me with a letter of invitation for an earlier grant application. He and several of the professors urged me to apply to return for a semester, as they would love to have me teach an American music course there. I went back to UniRio again at the end of the week to see the first session of the 9-5 weekly Saturday choro school, and was introduced by the director, Rick Ventura, who I had met on Monday, to Luciana Rabello, Mauricio Carrilho, and Anna Paes, of Acari Records, some of the main proponents of the revival of traditional choro performance in Brazil.

Tuesday, March 8
Research at DIMAS, class for bandolimists, and roda at Bip Bip

Henique showed me how to use the subway, and we visited the Division of Music at the National Library, and met Suzana Martins, who had helped me with my online choro research during my sabbatical in 1999. I got an on-site overview of their holdings, and was able to research and order copies of several band arrangements of choro by 19th-century composers that are useful in arranging choro lead-sheets for my ensemble Enigmatica. In the afternoon I gave a class on “Classical Mandolin Technique for the Chorista,” discussing the differences in performing techniques for Paulo Sa’s students who, like Paulo and me, are trying to play both styles. One student rode a bus 8 hours to come to the class, and cheerfully declared that it was worth it. Then in the evening I went with Paulo and the students to an informal weekly roda da choro – no host band – at the club Bip Bip.

Wednesday, March 9
Finding choro books and CDs and visiting Museu do Indio

In the morning Paulo took me to the Funarte store, that specializes in traditional Brazilian arts and music, and two CD stores, where I bought several books of choro and many CDs that are difficult to find in the United States. In the afternoon I took myself to the Indian Museum for a look at indigenous Brazilian culture.

Thursday, March 10
Pick up music at DIMAS and walking tour of historic central Rio

On my own I explored central Rio, near DIMAS, and the Copacabana area, where I was staying. The picture is the famous aqueduct that now carries the track for the “Bonde” the street car that runs from Centro up to Santa Teresa.

Friday, March 11
A day with Joel Nascimento

Although both Paulo and his student, who were supposed to accompany me, are unable to do so, I took a cab to the northern outskirts of Rio and the house of Joel Nascimento, the elder statesman of the Brazilian bandolim. Joel is a long-time hero of mine, the most famous student of the illustrious Jacob do Bandolim, and a beautifully expressive player. I spend an amazing 7 hours at his house – listening to him play, playing for and with him, listening to CDs, talking – somehow through language barriers – about music, his career, getting pointers on how to make my playing more Brazilian by making it more personal – a startling and very freeing concept, meeting his family, and trading CDs, his signed “Para a Marilynn, elustre companiera dos cordas…nova amiga…, um abraco.” It was an amazing experience, and taught me more about choro performance practice than all the CDs and books combined.

Saturday, March 12
Choro School, another roda, and fly home

I took a cab to UniRio for the Choro School (reported above) and Marcus picked me up there to go to a famous afternoon open-air roda da choro that has been held weekly for 17 years. The group that hosted it featured flute instead of bandolim, and the flutist was an incredible innovative interpreter of the traditional melodies. I should point out here that it was 95 and sunny, and I was a day away from shoveling snow in Rhode Island. My flight home went smoothly and I landed back in my regular life wiser, happier, with new friends, tons of new music and ideas, and a gorgeous tan. Fabulous and amazing – when can I go back?

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