Oi Pessoal!

So, slowly but surely making contacts here. Talked to many people about forró, northeastern music in general, and life in Brasil over the weekend. Also had my first formal sitdown interview that I had planned would be about 30 minutes but ended up being about 90 minutes, and I only asked about five questions! I also marked an interview for this Saturday with one of the most popular musicians of the area, Mestre Salustiano, who plays the rabeca fiddle and is a kind of legend here, everyone I talked to so far about forró has mentioned his name.
So, Saturday night I met a local woman whose brothers play in a local samba de roda band (yeah, not forró, but I thought it could be interesting). I went with a French anthropologist to her house at the entrance to a favela to have lunch and see the band practice. It was quite interesting in that we kept getting apologies for everything which was a bit embarrassing. Anyway, the band was supposed to start at 2 PM, but by 5 Pm they cancelled after consuming a large amount of rum and beer. Interestingly enough two of the group were military police and so we got some outrageous and sad stories. One of them went inside after several hours of drinking, put on his uniform and went off to work. The other one was telling stories about how he would get really drunk and pull out his gun and start shooting in the air to scare people. The family pulled out old photos from the 60´s and everyone was laughing at the old fashions. It was kind of sad though because several of the people in the photos had been murdered, raped, or had "disappeared". The unfortunate and sad stories of life here. I was also talking with a woman today at the bakery who after a few minutes of conversation casually mentioned that her husband had been killed by bandits a couple years ago in a robbery. "A vida é assim" "That´s life." was her fatalistic response and I didn´t probe any further.

About the forró... went to a couple of dances this past weekend and had a great interview with a percussionist who is involved in a couple of groups here, one Serra Veía, which I listened to their cd and enjoyed quite a bit. I taped most of the interview, which we had in a plaza in front of one of the old churches here. I´ll have to transcibe it because he gave me some great quotes, but in general he was quite critical of the help of the city government to promote forró, but also very optomistic about the future of the music.

One great quote from someone I met at a forró the other night I have here beside me in my notebook.

"Traditional music in Brazil is not something dead, stopped in time like in Europe. It is something alive that changes and adapts through time, grabbing influences from around itself and re-inventing constantly."


Um Abraço!!