BBC Music Documentary: Brasil, Brasil; How Colonialism, Slavery, History and Art converged into One

The music of Brazil has had an indelible influence on modern musicians in ways that are still being properly tallied by music scholars and the public. Every style of music from the jazz work of Stan Getz in the early 60′s, the Brazilian fusion of Airto Moreira in the 70′s, to the New York No-Wave skronk of DNA, on up to the avant-pop leanings of David Byrne, has had the stamp of Brazilian influence. In the last decade, popular music artists as diverse as Beck, Devendra Banhart and the underground electronic music coming out of Tokyo and London have taken Brazilian styles and engaged them on modern terms.

For a country that has suffered a tornado of political upheaval, slavery, and civil unrest, Brazil has created some of the most beautiful and innovative music that the world has known to date. One can trace back the origins of their music to the indigenous native traditions that were already in place and the encounter with a European classical education that was brought forth in 1549 by two Jesuit priests. From that meeting we saw two lines of Brazilian music develop, on one side the spectrum of the Portuguese-European tradition and on the other side the indigenous-African one. These lineages cross-pollinated to some degree as all music does, but there had always been a strict line of demarcation due to racial and classist boundaries that dominated up to the mid 20th century. This cross-pollination has an intricate tapestry of layers that spans from religious Amazonian rituals and the ingestion of psychedelic substances, to the advent of modern technology and its concomitant effects on labor, national identity, politics and the suppression of artistic discourse.

The BBC has a long history of doing incisive music documentaries as evinced by this post and in the case of Brasil, Brasil this continues to be the case. This documentary covers the birth of Samba, and all the related styles that came as a result of it right on up to the Tropicalia movement. A movement which I think speaks to our own age more clearly than perhaps many of the others in this documentary due to the fact that it came out of a political and social situation that was fraught with many of the fears and anxieties over the future direction of the State that mirror our own. What came out of the Tropicalia consciousness was some of the most innovative and forward thinking music to come out of the 60′s and early 70′s. However, Tropicalia was not just a music movement but a historical artistic rupture that included the appropriation of avant garde poetry, specifically “concrete poetry”, the re-invention of theatrical forms, along with innovations in the plastic arts.

Without further ado, I invite you to take an auditory and visual voyage to the land of Brazil.