November 23, 2003

The Beat Goes On and On;
Drumming and Dancing from Rio to Salvador Da Bahia

By Shankar Vedantam

Fifteen minutes before the match begins, the samba drums start up. The drummers are on the opposite side of the largest soccer stadium in the world, but they are loud enough that I must lean over to speak to the person beside me. The drumming continues without pause for the next two hours, as fans scream songs and curses, celebrating and excoriating the local Flamengo team. It's Rio de Janeiro's Maracana Stadium -- and a side of Brazil few tourists see.

Brazil, of course, is known for Carnaval in February or March, where endless processions of musicians and dancers flaunt flowers and jewels. But visit during the rest of the year and you can still enjoy great music, the national obsession with soccer, the Amazon rain forest and the world's widest waterfall -- without hefty markups or tropical summer heat.

My wife and I have long had a love affair with Brazil. For her, Brazil means the complex rhythms of the samba, the moody bossa nova and the high, twirling kicks of capoeira dancers.

For me, Brazil has meant the Beautiful Game, a fluid, attacking style of soccer. When I was 15, I hid an ankle fracture because my parents would have taken me to a doctor instead of to a film about Brazil's soccer stars. Only after watching "Giants of Brazil" did I confess the injury, whereupon an orthopedist put my foot in a cast for three weeks.

Visiting Brazil in August was a way for both of us to understand how the country has produced so much great music and soccer. The samba drummers at Maracana boomed answers to both of us. Beneath them, a giant banner exhorted the team to play for the love of the game, not for money: "Mercenaries, honor the shirt and respect the fans." Leandro Weissman, a local translator and guide, told us that soccer fans in Rio were angry with the local teams because they were horse-trading players.

The game was wonderful. For 90 minutes, neither Flamengo nor the opposing Sao Caetano team showed the slightest interest in playing defense. The 10,000-strong crowd, mostly wearing the red and black Flamengo colors, viciously cursed whenever their team passed the ball backward. They even cursed when the other side played defensively, and I realized why Brazilian soccer has become synonymous with attacking play.

Sitting on hard plastic seats -- the original stadium was built in 1950 without seats and could pack in 200,000 people on concrete steps -- I picked up several Portuguese curses, which Weissman reluctantly translated. Fans screamed advice to the players, and one man in the next row dislodged a plastic seat with a mighty kick after Flamengo missed a goal.

When Flamengo finally scored, the Cariocas -- the name for Rio's locals -- broke into spontaneous song. Weissman joyously sang along with everyone else, then translated: "Oh my Flamengo, I love you / I want to sing to the whole world / The joy of being a red and black."

And the samba drums boomed on. Normally, the drumming would have been part of the background for me, but I took particular pleasure in them now, as my ear had been trained two days earlier in a percussion class in the city of Salvador da Bahia.

Salvador da Bahia is about 1,000 miles northeast of Rio, and the old part of the city called Pelourinho is packed with music and dance schools. The schools spend much of the year rehearsing for Carnaval, and visiting during the off-season is a great way to watch artists develop their work.

Early one evening, as my wife and I walked along one of many cobbled streets in Pelourinho, we passed the Brazilian Association of Capoeira Angola. Half a dozen drums boomed from third-floor windows. Impulsively, we walked inside. The drums grew deafening as we climbed the steps. In a small room, we found a circle of people clustered around Professor Macambira, a wiry man with protruding front teeth and a mop of frizzy hair who was sitting before a conga drum with a broad grin on his face. We immediately signed up for a class.

Like almost all Brazilians we met outside the hotels and tourist centers, Macambira spoke only Portuguese -- but his drumming needed no translation. He led us through some warm-up rhythms, including one beat called the Ijexa. Then he showed us the basic beat of the samba, the same rhythm I would later hear in a much more layered and syncopated version at Maracana Stadium. Macambira's lithe fingers flew over the drum. I was certain I could never reproduce it, but he showed us how to break up the beat into smaller segments. In moments, the three of us were pounding the unmistakable rhythm of the samba.

I found that I would lose the beat whenever I paid attention to my fingers. So I closed my eyes. Our drumming floated into the night through the open windows. Faster and faster we went, and I realized that although my fingers were flying, I was not only playing but listening.

In Brazil, we were never far from drums and soccer. It soon became obvious that the country produces great musicians and great soccer players because these are more than pastimes, they are practiced with something approaching religiosity. They are a part of being Brazilian. For many, excellence in these skills can be tickets out of poverty.

The day after Macambira's class, for example, my wife and I were in a taxi headed from our hotel in Barra to Pelourinho when the driver swerved and hit the brakes. I looked up to see if there had been an accident, but no, it was just two men crossing the busy street, carrying a soccer goal. No one honked.

The taxi dropped us off at a nondescript building, Mestre Bimba's Capoeira Association. Delighted with the percussion class, we had decided to take a capoeira lesson, too. This is a martial art disguised as a dance that was developed by African slaves. The kicks and twirls are set to a pulsing rhythm played on drums and the berimbau, a bow-shaped instrument brought over by slaves from Angola. The beat was similar to the Ijexa rhythm Macambira had taught us the previous evening.

Our instructor, Fuisco (like Macambira, many Brazilian artists use only a single stage name), wore a loose blue tunic and a sleeveless T-shirt. He showed us the basic capoeira step -- the right and left feet moving back alternately, with a forearm coming up to guard the face -- and quickly progressed to crouches, twirls and somersaults.

After 40 minutes I was exhausted, but Fuisco was not done. He brought out orange traffic cones and taught us to move around the cone in time with the beat, adding feints and twirling kicks. Around us, more advanced students -- some of them visitors who were spending the summer in Salvador learning various arts -- practiced a rapid series of handstands and kicks that kept time with the beat.

My thighs ached after the class, and I lodged myself in a cafe on the nearby square of Praca Anchieta. Music and dance festivals are regularly held on Tuesday and Sunday evenings in Pelourinho and we had timed our visit to be there on a Tuesday. We ate lunch at a nearby comida a kilo (meals by the kilo) restaurant, where patrons pile salads and hot food on plates and pay by weight, an especially good option for vegetarians. The range of fresh fruits and juices was astounding: Many meals included melon, guava, mango, passion fruit, pineapple and several indigenous Brazilian fruits.

From the Coliseu restaurant on Praca Anchieta, I saw flocks of tourists visit the nearby Sao Francisco church, where slaves once carried their masters to Sunday prayers. Luiz Jungblut, a local guide, showed us the plain crucifix in one corner of the church where slaves could worship, in sharp contrast to the main sanctuary, which is gilded in gold. During much of the church's heyday, Jungblut told us, religious leaders had insisted that black people did not have souls.

The scars of slavery are still visible in Brazil, especially in the distribution of wealth and power. Still, in Salvador, I saw many groups of people with different skin tones collegially huddled together in restaurants and on the squares. Locals at the music festival that evening came in groups of mixed ethnicity, and everyone danced with everyone else. Close to midnight, my wife and I walked down a cobbled street, drawn to a pounding beat. A dozen drummers marched in a procession, arms and hands moving in trancelike rhythm. Some hurled their drums aloft and pounded them overhead. A crowd formed around the performers and soon a welter of torsos pressed against us. A pair of hips rhythmically bumped against me in the dark, keeping time with the drums.

I found the same lack of self-consciousness in Rio. At Carioca da Gema, a popular nightclub in a neighborhood called Lapa, I met Nilton Nasser, a dermatologist from southern Brazil. Through a range of samba favorites, Nasser, his wife and the rest of the crowd danced and loudly sang along. At another club, Vinicius, in Ipanema, an elderly patron stopped at my table and moved my plate to one side to clear space to write a check. When she was done, she absent-mindedly touched me on the cheek and muttered thanks in Portuguese.

The lack of inhibitions spilled into language, too. TAM airlines, which we took from Miami to Brazil and on several internal flights, had an in-flight magazine that tackled English with the same gusto Brazilians play soccer with. A review of Richard Gere's performance in "Chicago" said the movie offered "an unusable opportunity of watching Gere showing he is a talent as a tape dancer." I felt liberated after reading that and, everywhere I went, I pushed the boundaries of my limited Portuguese. No one laughed at my contortions.

There weren't many inhibitions at the regular tourist spots, either. Crowds 10 deep at Christ the Redeemer, the famous statue atop Rio's Corcovado Mountain, posed for pictures before the statue with their arms outstretched. Tanned bodies in scanty swimwear were everywhere along the magnificent beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema. At a cafe called the Girl from Ipanema, where musicians Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes were said to have spotted the teenager who inspired them to write the famous song, an entire franchise has been built around the tune, with T-shirts and memorabilia hawked along with average food.

Visiting Brazil during the non-Carnaval season makes it easier to free up time for nature. Although we decided to save the Amazon rain forest for another trip, we did visit Rio's Tijuca National Park, the largest urban forest park in the world. And on the last two days of our 11-day adventure, we went south to Iguacu Falls, the world's widest waterfall. Here, at the border with Argentina, the Iguacu River cascades over a 200-foot gorge, a spectacle 1.6 miles wide. A short hike leads to a roiling section of the falls called the Devil's Throat. A boat tour organized by Macuco Safari took us upriver into the heart of the waterfall, soaking us with spray and allowing us to hear the roar of the falls up close.

And then our trip was over. Flying home over Sao Paulo and other cities, I saw dozens of soccer fields from the air. In my mind, I could hear the beat of the samba drums.

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