Despite Brazil's inclusion in the hall of ‘developing nations’ following the end of the country's civil-military dictatorship in 1985, as statistics indicate, democracy still seems to be a long way off for at least the low-income, Afro-descendent residents of the country's urban periphery and favelas. How, though, can the country's popular music tradition unveil the tensions carried through Brazil's transition from its colonial past to post-modernity, fed by the racial fracture that institutional policies and official discourses have long worked hard to conceal? This is what Brazilian Jive by David Treece offers us – an insightful and original analysis of song-writing practice in Brazil and its transformations throughout the 20th century as a proficuous, alternative, way to understand Brazil's social fabric and its contentions.
Treece looks into Brazilian song-writing tradition from the beginning of the 20th century, when the word samba had not yet been fully associated with a defined musical genre, through the boom of rap in the 1990s. His analysis focuses on the concomitant material and symbolic spheres of the musical experience affirmed in the present every time we play and listen to music. Through its effects on our body and mind, music reassures us of our own physicality, as existing beings in the world. By socially sharing its symbolic meaning we also feel connected to our fellow beings, from the past to the present. Music thus bridges the subjective and objective realms, and during such moments we undergo an ‘extraordinary and transient mode of living in space-time’ (p. 11). It is this distinctive character of the musical experience, a new dimension rendered by the unlimited capacity of organised sound to connote, that sets music apart from language, as also previously argued by Shepherd and Wicke, Leonard Meyer, Suzanne Langer and Victor Zuckerkandl, which provides the theoretical foundation for Treece's debate.
Treece's analysis of Brazilian song-writing tradition takes into consideration the diverse aspects of the phenomenon: musical, semantic and performative. Via this approach, Treece argues that the virtual space-time of this tradition, actualised in the performance, has been the ground for Brazilians, especially its Afro-descendants, to negotiate an identity and a place in society. In the roda, the ring space wherein the African holistic practices of singing, playing, dancing and reciting were re-enacted, slaves and their descendants reclaimed their cultural patrimony. Home to the post-Abolition generations of black Brazilians, the changing urban scenario of early 20th-century Rio de Janeiro became the new site for the emergence of an urban black culture. The elusive choreography of capoeira, suggested by the author as representing the distancing of the body from speech as a consequence of the language rupture imposed by colonisation, was aestheticised in the figure of the malandro (‘hustler’) with his ‘swinging lateral stride’ (p. 38) and depicted in early sambas as dissenting from traditional white middle-class values. Malandragem, ‘hurtling’ or ‘jive’, thus provided the ethos for this emerging early 20th-century urban black and popular culture.
The hesitant, ambivalent body posture of the roda, insinuating the silencing of discourse, corresponds musically to syncopation. Claiming music to be the ‘dramatisation of our experience of time’, for Treece the encounter of European and African musical traditions is sustained in bossa nova through the sophisticated interaction between rhythm, melody, harmony and language. The coexistence of tonality and modality, the repetitive rhythmic figures and cyclical melodic motives, the postponement of resolution, the semantic content, all define, according to Treece, bossa's aesthetic of ‘suspended animation’. As hypothesised by the author, in bossa's rationality the traditional and the modern, or rather, circular and linear temporality coexist, paralleling Brazil's antagonisms provoked by its rapid and late industrialisation. In the new rodas of Rio's zona sul apartments, the young, middle-class, bossa nova precursors and their followers looked for an alternative to Getulismo and the populism of samba exaltação and the sentimentalism of samba canção as well as to the developmentalist rhetoric of the Kubitschek era. Treece backs his argument offering a thorough analysis of compositions by Tom Jobim, Vinícios de Morais and João Gilberto, in an accessible language for non-musically literate readers intertwined with well-informed commentaries about the political and economic contexts.
Following its international success especially among American cool jazz artists and the onset of the heated political scenario after the 1964 coup, the perception of bossa as an alternative identity started being questioned by some in the movement. As Treece comments, they saw bossa's sophistication and innovations as bearing foreign influences and sought in their protest songs to revive the traditions and experiences of the popular classes dispossessed by the country's uneven industrialisation and, at that moment, oppressed by the developmentalist policies of the dictatorial regime. Besides breaking with bossa's intricate aesthetics in favour of traditional popular sounds, which inflicted everlasting consequences on the bossa movement, the protest song artists also stood against the modernisation and internationalisation of Brazilian culture in the promotion of American rock, already a fierce competitor to bossa and seen by the civil-military dictatorship as a strategy to divert attention from politically engaged messages. Another or perhaps even more radical break was also imposed on the political engagement of protest song by Tropicalia's ‘guerrilla warfare’ aesthetics – an attempt to establish new relations between the artist and the public in the face of a hardening of the civil-military dictatorship. In the virtual roda of modern mass communication, and in the absence of articulate popular support, all that was left for the protest artists, as Treece puts it, was to voice their ‘own frustrated idealism and that of its middle-class audience’ (p. 158).
Treece points out that ambivalence and duality is also present in the Orpheus myth and its cinematic adaptation to the city-space of Rio de Janeiro in the Franco-Brazilian film Black Orpheus by Marcel Camus from 1959. Like bossa nova's aesthetics, the traditional and the modern coexist on screen; the ritual time of samba and carnival on the hillside slums of Rio and the urban experience of bossa and its reinterpretation of the traditional. Comparing Camus’ film with Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ Rio, Zona Norte, from 1957, Treece argues that both renegotiate the Orpheus myth, presenting music as a force capable of regenerating and reconciling society. However, in Cacá Diegues’ 1998 Orfeu, music is not imbued with mythical powers. Nor is samba the soundtrack for the post-1980s ‘lost decade’ Rio favela. As in other recent productions such as City of God (2002) by Fernando Meirelles, for Treece the move away from samba and Afro-Brazilian musical traditions in favour of contemporary ‘harder’ sounds, rather than a shift to a more realistic aesthetic, implies that these traditional popular idioms might no longer represent the experience of the black urban population.
Concomitant to the demythologisation of music as a reconciling force suggested in Diegues’ movie, in contemporary Brazilian culture the ethos of malandragem has been pervaded by the crudity of violence and chaos of the current urban scenario. In the deromanticised territory of cities’ slums and peripheries, the African-inherited artistry of sophisticated language and music integration nurtured in samba, bossa and other popular genres has been reappropriated in the proliferation of rap and funk of recent decades, especially among the black youth. The phenomenon, as put by Treece, suggests the ‘reformulation of the lyrical and musical dialect in the new context of class and race relations in contemporary Brazil’ (p. 187). Symbolically, it stands against the idea of racial consensus in Brazilian society shedding light on a historical fracture widened in the last decades of the 20th century.
Brazilian Jive offers a well-argued hypothesis in a stylistic yet accessible flowing narrative that looks into song writing as being an important space for social, economic and political dispute in Brazil. It is founded on solid research as the varied and selective list of sources, in English as well as in Portuguese, indicates. Treece's accurate translations and glossary of terms provide an important aid to non-Portuguese readers. Despite the book's careful overview of Brazil's song-writing movements and the social dynamic of the times, I am curious though if the rock-pop movement of the transitioning political scene of the 1980s would perhaps have a place in the context of Treece's analysis. Beyond being a significant scholarly contribution, I would say that Brazilian Jive's materialist analysis of song-writing tradition in Brazil presents a timely social critique for all of us Brazilians.
