“Na Cadência Bonita do Samba”: Accomplishing Suingue in Toronto

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Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol 7, No 1 (2011)

“Na Cadência Bonita do Samba”: Accomplishing Suingue in Toronto1 Natasha Pravaz My friend Layah Davis, a Torontonian tamborim player who is a member of local samba bands Batucada Carioca and Samba Squad, once told the following story: [. . .] For me, in terms of the uplifted quality, mostly that’s my own creation. I think the music does it, but it’s because I allow myself to experience, to go there. And sometimes it feels like drudgery, you know. You’re in this gig, it’s cold, it’s rainy. Or nobody’s [. . .] for instance we go to do a wedding and everybody’s standing there like this [arms crossed] and watching us. We’re like “What the hell are we doing here? What a waste of time.” But interestingly enough, even at the end of gigs like that, we feel great. We walk out. They’re all still standing there going . . . Sourpussing. Although, truth be told, it’s very hard to be like that at the end of the show. Most of them, they have to let loose in some way. Foot tapping, shoulders moving. Even when they don’t really want to because they think they’re above it or whatever. The truth is most of the time people do free up themselves, as they’d say. Even we, we have a joke for instance in the Squad we often say: “We just did that gig for ourselves.” We don’t play for anybody but ourselves, really. What happens when Afro-Brazilian sounds such as samba are lifted from their contexts of origin and performed by and/or for non-Brazilians in Canada? In particular, what happens to the samba groove—cadência or suingue as Brazilians call it—and what does this suingue do, or not do, to those performing? I am interested here in exploring these questions by focusing on two interrelated matters pertaining to Brazilian improvisative consciousness: the pedagogical dynamics of samba transmission, and the dialectics of freedom and restraint in samba’s creation 2 processes, particularly within Canadian samba. This essay analyzes Canadian expressions of cultural practices of Brazilian origin, highlighting how local bodies at times resist the call of samba, generating social tensions. In particular, I look at (a) the corporeal dimensions of music instruction; (b) the distinction between improvisation-driven backyard jams and increasingly market-driven escolas de samba; and (c) the manifestation of Brazilian modes of being-in-the-world such as the ethos of malandragem (mischief). My argument is based on ongoing fieldwork and research with Toronto-based performers of Afro-Brazilian music who play in large, amateur ensembles such as Batucada Carioca, of which I am a member. While Afro-Brazilian culture became a symbol of mestiço (mixed) national identity at the hand of early 20th century populist leaders, the appropriation of subaltern cultural practices by those in positions of privilege is evidently not unique to Brazil.3 The transnational dimensions of this cultural circulation, in particular, deserve further attention. I am interested here in exploring the ways in which samba is transmitted, learned, and performed outside of Brazil at a time when Afro-Brazilian practices have become thoroughly embedded in global understandings of Brazilianness. The racialized dimensions of this process shift in meaning as the qualities associated with Afro-Brazilians back home (e.g. sensuality, tropical abandonment, cheerfulness) become markers of Brazilian migrants in general. Yet, in their exchanges with host-land nationals, Brazilians are not the strawparrot of a Walt Disney cartoon.4 It is indeed crucial to differentiate appropriating impulses in Euro-American relationships to black culture from forms of cross-cultural identification that serve emancipatory ends and that encourage taking stock of one’s experiences and responsibilities (Lipsitz 56). In terms of the consumption practices of Afro-Brazilian culture abroad, not only are migrants often active in setting the terms of intercultural encounters, they also choose to build relationships with non-Brazilians who “take stock” of their experiences and responsibilities vis-à-vis their engagement with Afro-Brazilian culture. In more than one way, it is Brazilians who have the upper hand in such exchanges: they have something Canadians want, but can only get if they make themselves vulnerable, allowing themselves to be transformed. Surreptitiously insinuating themselves in the bodies and minds of the locals, Afro-Brazilian modes of being in the world assert their power the malandro (trickster) way: exercising a rather oblique seduction. The pedagogical dynamics of intercultural samba transmission are rife with misunderstandings based mostly on divergent proxemic and kinesthetic worlds. They may also be thought of as transnational manifestations of historical tensions between two competing paradigms at the heart of the samba world: the highly-structured, market driven style of escolas de samba (the large samba groups who parade during carnaval celebrations); and the slower-paced, 5 improvisation-driven backyard jams or pagodes characteristic of neighborhood life in Rio’s poor suburbs. This distinction is not meant to be taken as a sharp rift clearly observable to the “naked eye,” but as a heuristic methodological device that allows us to highlight differences which occur mostly on a continuum. As documented by Nei Lopes, the Centro Cultural Cartola (see Brazil), and others, pagodes were the breeding ground of escolas de samba: “Certainly, the first moments of the first Carioca samba entities [i.e., escolas] were marked by pagodes 6 dominated by partido-alto [an improvisation-based style of samba characterized by verbal duels]” (Lopes 177). Such

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