For this week's City Scenes twe’ve landed in a city that is a goldmine when it comes to amazing music. This is a city that lives and breathes music, located in south America, with a population of more than 6 million people, famous for its beaches, its carnival and of course its music. This week we are in Rio De Janeiro
The breathtaking city of Rio De Janeiro or Cidade Maravilhoso as it is known, is the 2nd biggest city in Brazil after Sao Paulo and a cultural and artistic hub. It is also a popular tourist spot and for many people when they think of Rio De Janeiro they think of one thing - And that is Carnival. Every year millions of people take to the streets in Rio De Janeiro for the spectacle of the carnival parades, a huge celebration of brazillian culture soundtracked by the sound of a music style known as samba.
Samba is a form of brazilian music that brings together a wide variety of percussion instruments and portuguese brazilian singing. The origins of samba has routes in the traditional music of African slaves that were forcibly transported to brazil dating back to the 16th century. These days samba is a national symbol for brazil and is recognised as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity by UNESCO.
Brazil’s Colonial past is in fact directly linked to the sounds that have been created in the country over the years. This melding of cultures, traditions and music from portuguese settlers, african slaves that were brought to brazil, indigenous people of brazil as well as the influence of american and european popular music throughout the ages is what has given Brazil such a unique cultural and musical identity. These conditions have led to the birth of innovative genres of music that are totally unique to Brasil such as samba, Bossa nova, Tropicalia and MPB or musica popular brasileira.
In the late 1950s and early 60s a pioneering guitarist and recording artist called Joao Gilberto, introduced Brazil to a new sound. Using a nylon string guitar played with the fingers rather than a pick, introducing unconventional chords, accompanied by some subtle familiar samba rhythms and using two microphones at once to record guitar and vocals separately, meaning that the vocals could be sung softly and still have the same presence on a recording, Gilberto began to call this new style of music Bossa Nova.
Bossa nova went on to become hugely popular all over the world and that is in no small part thanks to a track that Gilberto recorded along with his wife Astrud and a famous American Jazz musician called Stan Getz. The Girl From Ipanema is a song named after the famous Ipanema beach in Rio that would immortalise the legend of Rio Janeiro and Bossa Nova in music.
Moving on From Bossa Nova, we look at another genre that was invented in Brasil in the 1960s and which like Bossa Nova built up on the foundation of Samba that already has such a huge place in Brazilian culture by this point. In the 1960s, an artist from Rio De Janeiro called Jorge Ben rose to fame with the release of a Bossa Nova song called Mas Que Nada. Jorge Ben would continue to innovate Brazilian music though and is known as the godfather of a genre called Samba Rock which took the rhythmic elements of samba and combined them with elements of american rock and soul that were also popular in Brazil at the time.
In the 1970s Brasil had a thriving soul, funk and boogie scene and there’s been a huge resurgence in popularity for music from that period in nightclubs around the world in recent years.
In the 90s another pioneering musician called Fernanda Abreu was one of the first brazilian artists to use sampling and digital recording to create her own brand of downtempo Funk and R&B which gained her the title of “Brazil’s first lady of funk”.