This posting is a doozy. We have had a truly incredible last couple of days. We'll try as hard as we can to sum it up, but it'll be tough to adequately express our recent experiences. On Tuesday, we caught a very early bus (well, ok, to be honest, we missed the bus and had to cab it over to the main theater in Salvador in order to catch another bus that ended up leaving one hour late anyway...nothing here happens on time, but you get used to it, sigh, good bye east coast up-tightness...). The theater here in Salvador is home to an organization called NEOJIBA. NEOJIBA is a Bahian-wide youth orchestra founded by native son Ricardo Castro in 2007. Based off of Venezuelan's El Sistema, NEOJIBA now boasts a central youth orchestra comprised of young adults who rehearse for 3 hours every night after spending their days teaching in various nucleos around the city. Lucky for us, NEOJIBA was hosting a statewide pedagogical seminar throughout last week giving us a unique insider look at how the organization uses music for social change.
One of our questions throughout this project is how popular and folkloric music can be used alongside classical music to promote social change. In the percussion lessons at NEOJIBA, the co-existense of folkloric music and classical music is always present. The first lessons we observed were led by veteran teachers Everton Isidore and David Martins, both percussionists in NEOJIBA's top orchestra. On Tuesday, they were working with percussionists who have only been learning orchestral percussion for 5 months. The first hour consisted of some basic sticking pattern warmups and then a lesson on reading rhythms in 6/8 time--standard stuff that we teach to our students back home. Things got really interesting in the second hour when Everton led all the students through a Maracatu jam. Maracatu is a famous style of Carnival music that comes from Recife, a city about 15 hours northeast of Salvador. Maracatu, while lesser known internationally then samba grooves from Salvador and Rio is one of the most fun and powerful rhythms this country has produced. We'll be putting up more videos related to Maracatu in the coming weeks (Soiane, our land lady is a veteran Maracatu dancer, so lessons will ensue, we promise). The following video is a clip of Everton teaching some Maracatu basics:
After having our minds blown by these rhythms (believe it or not, we were learning these rhythms too, along side of the students) Brad gave a little demo of some possibilities on the snare (or caixa as its known here). Hopefully we'll start to see some Broomfield-isms popping up in the playing of the future generations of Salvadorian drummers :))))
Then we broke for lunch. Well, at least some of us did, because the students refused to leave. Rather they jumped on the drums and starting playing some samba-reggae (pronounced hay-gee). Just when we thought we couldn't be more impressed by the percussionists in this city, things came to a new level. These kids have supposedly only been playing for 5 months and yet they sound completely fluent in the percussion language of this city. We started learning these rhythms this week with our teacher Mario, but have nowhere near the knowledge of the repertoire that these kids demonstrate. They know all the individual parts of the samba groove and can also play together like pros. We hope to be at their level one day :))))
Our time at NEOJIBA ended with an open rehearsal that the nucleo's orchestra was preparing. They played a variety of pieces including overture to the Barber of Seville, marches, a salsa song and then this song-a standard Brazilian tune. One of our goals on this journey has been to uncover how popular music can coexist with classical music and part of why we chose Salvador was because we knew it had such a ubiquitous popular music presence. Here's a little clip of the orchestra doin' it's thing.
We returned to NEOJIBA two more times. We heard the top group perform a killer Mahler 1 and then returned to Sesi for a final observation, in which we demonstrated some timpani and percussion fundamentals.
Watching the youth orchestra (youth in this case goes until 28) was a deeply moving experience. The NEOJIBA group in action brought to mind many of the things people have said about El Sistema in Venezuela. For our colleagues in NEOJIBA, the orchestra is a living, breathing community. It is a chance to grow together and overcome obstacles as one. The musicians play with passion and skill and remain engaged and focused throughout the three hour rehearsals they have each day. Musicians here don't hold orchestral music above the popular music that surrounds them. Last week we posted about seeing the cello section perform at a jazz jam session. We spoke with many musicians in the orchestra and all of them are well versed in classical music as well as Brazilian music. For us, this is the ultimate goal...a community of musicians who can tackle all music with equal ferocity. This is what's happening here and this is what we want to import home :)))))
Ate logo galera!
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