Brazilian Music
Some of the rhythmic training I do draws on my experience with Brazilian music. For me, the best of this tradition has everything you could ever want: strong lyrics, great melodies, beautiful chord progressions, and of course the percussion stuff. I started getting involved in this music a few years back, and ended up smashing a surdo for 2 or 3 so-loud-I-can't-remember successive Caribana parades.
But my first love has never been at the skull-shattering volume end of the Brazilian music spectrum. What interested me more, and continues to, is the quiet part of this music's life. Especially from the musicianship point of view, the real challenge for me was to learn to sing the tunes, mainly bossa novas, and play guitar at the same time. (My Joao Gilberto fantasies, revealed!). Even though I hadn't touched a guitar for years, the Brazilian thing reawakened my interest in this beautiful instrument.
At the moment, I am the proud owner of a couple of guitars, a bunch of percussion things (a bag of egg-shakers, three cuicas, two tam tams, four six-inch carbon-steel frying pans, etc. etc.), plus a small collection of cd's. A recent acquisition is the five-volume set "Bossa Nova Songbook", edited by Almir Chediak and published by Lumiar Editora in Sao Paulo, which contains over three hundred tunes. I'll be working on that for a while.
My work with bossa nova and samba goes back to what I said in the section "Rhythm" about the difference between working in breadth -- the usual focus for rhythmically undernourished European-biased musicians -- and depth, which is what its all about for just about everyone else. Since I don't really teach Brazilian stuff per se, the only thing I can offer here is a 3-page blurb which includes some neat agogo patterns. I have about twenty-five of these all together, plus some other cool Brazilian-type things.
