Samba

node · earth · Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The Brazilian form that crystallised in Rio de Janeiro in the first years of the twentieth century, in and around the houses of Bahian women who had moved south, and which within thirty years was being promoted as a national music by a state that had until recently been arresting its practitioners. Its ingredients came from Bahia — the Recôncavo's samba de roda, Candomblé drumming and religious practice, capoeira — and travelled with people: a large migration of Afro-Brazilians from the northeast to Rio from the 1870s onward produced the district known as Little Africa around Praça Onze, whose Bahian matriarchs, the tias, hosted the gatherings where the music took shape. "Pelo Telefone", registered on 27 November 1916 in the name of Donga and later also of Mauro de Almeida, is conventionally called the first recorded samba; its authorship is disputed precisely because it emerged from collective improvisation in one of those houses rather than from a composer's desk. Samba is the third of this Journey's parallel American outcomes — permitted drums, dense percussion, a timeline on the surface — and the closest to the West African ensemble model of the three.