Gabriel--Spreading the Joy of Brasilian Music!

Season’s greetings, friends!

As we creep up on Thanksgiving, I can’t help but reflect on the past few months and how incredibly grateful I am for the opportunities I have had.  It’s been absolutely louco, that’s for sure! Since my return from Brasil, I’ve been caught in a whirlwind of teaching and performing.  The day after getting back, I launched GGH and The People of Earth with whom I scrambled to put together a music video for a grant.  Take that project, add a strong dose of different gigs, and well, you can imagine...pretty busy.  

The highlight of the last two months has no doubt been the ample opportunities I’ve had to share the music and culture we immersed ourselves in during DSC:Salvador 2013.  The music of Bahia that we spent 6 weeks exploring is rapidly becoming the cornerstone of my teaching and the opportunities to share that I’ve had since returning have affirmed for me how important our work has been.

In Salvador, it was often difficult to find the practice time needed to internalize the 45 hours or so of lesson material, while still having time to explore the community, attend concerts, interview people, and practice speaking Portuguese.  Now, at home, I am slowly piecing together and reviewing the material, and the curriculum we are building has provided a terrific framework for my studies.  The rhythms of Candomblé (Afro-Brasilian religion) and the rhythms of Samba-Reggae have proved to be potent teaching tools.  I’ve watched children from the ages of 1 (literally) to 21, as well as adults of all ages, get excited about Brasil and it’s music.  In this post, I’d like to share three different contexts in which I’ve shared our discoveries from Brasil with different communities.

First of all, the music of Brasil has been a staple in my weekly sessions at the Gesu School.   As many of you know, I work for The Philadelphia Orchestra as a teaching artist in their School Partnership Program. Every week I head to the North Philly independent Catholic school where I co-teach (with classroom teachers) children ages 7-10, leading a variety of music related classes.  This is my fourth year at Gesu, and I love the students, teachers, and staff.  This year, we’ve been going hard on Brasil and its music since day one.  My secret goal is that my students will be able to speak better Portuguese by the end of the year...we’ll see.  I use Portuguese in order to teach rhythms, and the kids are soaking it up.  As all my students can tell you (most likely with a bit of irritation from me drilling into their brains) if you say it you can play it.  So if I want to teach an Ijexa rhythm, instead of notating it, or just having them copy me as I do it, I teach them: “Ola, tudo-bem, claro, legal”. It fits perfectly over the Ijexa rhythm and teaches some basic Portuguese conversation (the connection between language and music is tried and true). It's been a joy returning week after week to Gesu and hearing how little things about Brasil are popping up in the students' lives.  Sometimes a student will tell me: “I saw a commercial and the man talked about calling Brasil.” Or, “Look in this book we are reading. The main character is from the Amazon in Brasil.” Now that Brasil is on their radar, my students can’t help but see it everywhere and get excited by it.  The same thing started for me about a year ago when I got turned on to Brasilian music, and I’m so glad this is starting with the students at such a young age.  I have big plans for Gesu and Brasilian music.  I’d like us to do another big bucket bash (we had a very successful show last year) and this time use Bahian rhythms as a foundation for the show.  I’d also like to bring in some other other Brasilian music specialists from the community to present to my students.  It’s going to be an exciting year!

Our journey in Brasil brought me another fantastic opportunity to give back and share this past fall during a week I spent as the Musician-In-Residence at Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum.  I’m grateful to the Presser Foundation and the Museum for hosting me.  Part of what the museum was looking for during the audition and interview process was a musician who could incorporate music from another culture.  Being fresh off the plane, I was super enthused to create a Brasil-heavy curriculum for my week of workshops. After spending three days observing and learning about the PTM, I developed a series of activities centered around Brasilian rhythms, Portuguese, and Brasilian culture. Everyday I gave three half-hour workshops to whoever happened to be milling around the main hall of the museum.   Having never worked with kids younger than six, I was really excited (and nervous) to get the opportunity to hang with the kiddies.  Some days I had school groups of 27 four-year-olds.  Other days there might only be a three year old and her six year old brother.  Whatever the combination of ages and personalties was, I tried my best to be engaging and flexible.  We covered a myriad of topics: We looked at the Brasilian flag and discussed the colors and shapes we saw.  We tried to find low and high sounds by using Brasilian Agogó bells.  We read about Papagoya, the mischievous Amezonian parrot, and made our own soundtrack.  We used claves to play the Congo (Candomblé) clave.  We played follow the leader call and response, in which I would say some Portuguese words and the students would copy while playing their drums in rhythm with the words. No two of my fifteen workshops were alike.  It was a fantastic exercise in learning how to read when the audience isn’t digging what you’re doing and then being able to adjust accordingly.  Not all workshops went as well as others but I enjoyed every last minute of the residency. Finally, I had the pleasure of presenting three friends of mine in concert on the last day of the residency.   I brought in vocalist Alexa Barchini, steel drummer/trumpeter Chris Aschman, and my brother-in-groove bassist/quatro player Bam Bam Rodriguez to join me.  Together, we paraded around the museum playing a rhythm from Salvador’s Olodum, sang Bossa nova and samba, explored Venezuelan joropo music, and ended with a Soca jam from Trinidad.  We had our young audience on its feet, shaking shakers, playing drums, and having a ball. 

After being in front of an audience far younger than my comfort zone, I found myself in front of a group far older.  One of my high school mentors, virtuoso percussionist Jon Singer, brought me in to present at his Music from Around the World class at Queensborough Community College in NYC.  I didn’t know what to expect; these students are practically my age, and I was afraid that they’d just be texting or tuned out the whole time.  Luckily, one of the traits of Brasilian drumming is that it tends to be on the louder sound (so that the thousands of people marching around you during Carnaval can hear you, no doubt) so anyone trying to do anything other than play the drums and focus on me was going to have a hard time doing so.  Combined with my tendency to be annoyingly enthusiastic about whatever I’m talking about, it turned out to be a recipe for success.  Rather than lecture about our trip, I decided to engage the students by having them on the drums from the get go.  I was curious about my “say it while you play” methodology for teaching rhythms, because adults tend to less comfortable going out of their comfort zone.  However, I kept the pace of the class moving quick, jumping between drumming, some history, personal stories, and more drumming. There was no time for any student to feel embarrassed, and I was delighted to see how into it they got.  We talked a lot about Brad and my experiences watching Candomblé ceremonies.  The students were intrigued about the Orixa-possession process (as am I) and were enthralled by our video of the street ceremony (see early posting).  Of course I made it very clear that I'm hardly an authority on the music and culture of Candomblé or Brasil, and I encouraged the students to explore more on their own.  My presentation lasted two hours, and by the end of it I had more energy than when I had started.  It felt really good to be sharing this music with members of my generation, burnt out by school, homework and end-of-semester pressures.  Watching them open up and get excited trying to follow the drum-break the repiques were playing on our Samba-Reggae Merengue groove was very special for me.

This is just the beginning.  Less than a year ago we proposed that we should be sent, by our community, to Brasil in order to train ourselves in Brasilian music and learn from Salvador’s social programs.  We had a hunch that the information we would find would prove valuable back home.  I have seen joy on the faces of children and adults of all ages, and we’ve only been back for two months (I got home on  September 19).  We are not the first people to do this, and we aren't doing anything more than putting our own spin on a rich tradition that we will always be struggling to master.  I feel more inspired than ever about the power of the music of Brasil and beyond and can’t wait to share it with more and more people.  

As always, if you have suggestions, comments, or (gulp) critiques, please don’t hesitate to send them our way.