Samba's musical style

Samba is a mixture of music and dance. Music is mainly composed of strings, percussion and singers, and dancers are responsible for the dance part. Samba is one of the most representative national symbols in Brazil.

If samba is described in one sentence, samba is the product of the fusion of European white music and African black music. In fact, most Brazilian music is produced under this background, such as Bossa Nova, which we are familiar with, and its predecessors, Gioro and Brazilian jazz. On the one hand, it is black music accompanied by African slaves landing in Brazil, on the other hand, it is European music of immigrants from Germany and Italy. When these two kinds of music merged in Rio de Janeiro, the samba as we know it was born.

The samba clips that we often see in TV news are actually only one style of samba and the most famous one, namely Rio de Janeiro samba. For most Brazilians, Rio is synonymous with samba, while for foreigners, because of the famous Rio Carnival, they often know Rio. From Rio to Bahia on the northeast coast of Brazil, El Salvador, the capital of Brazil, is another city famous for its carnival. This was the first stop for slaves to reach America, the center of slave trade and the capital of Brazil at that time, so black culture took root here. The samba style here is usually called Samba Afro and SambaReggae. Because R is sometimes pronounced as H in Portuguese, samba reggae is more commonly called Samba Japan.

The annual carnival is the best stage for samba music display. From February to March every year, tourists from Europe, other parts of the world and Brazil will crowd Rio de Janeiro and El Salvador, the two ancient capitals of Brazil and the two most important birthplaces of Brazilian music. The parade of famous drum teams or samba schools is the essence of carnival. Carnival in Rio is actually an annual competition between samba schools. Every school will write and promote its own theme song (Enredo, R is H), conduct a lot of dance and percussion rehearsals, and make gorgeous costumes for this competition, all for a perfect performance on the famous Carnival Avenue, which is about 1 km long. Rio Carnival is famous for its gorgeous, passionate, bright and super-fast rhythm. At the Rio Carnival in 2008, a samba school performed more than 140 beats per minute, which is almost the limit speed of dancers. In El Salvador, the northeastern state of Bahia, the samba festival has become a little slower, and the extremely bright instrument like tambourine has been removed to enrich its black rhythm. The parade here is not a competition, it is completely entertainment. Moreover, this is the real birthplace of samba. By refusing to commercialize, the carnival has retained a more traditional appearance. Therefore, after the carnival in Rio, many people prefer to go to El Salvador to feel the culture and rhythm there, or go to Pelourinho, the oldest neighborhood, to find traces of MJ performing with the famous drum group Olodum when shooting the Brazilian version of "They Don't Care about Us" MV. In fact, until now, Olodum still gives free public performances there before and after the carnival every year.