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Carnival is the most important festival in Brazil. The most notable events are in Olinda near Recife (mainly dancing Frevo), in Salvador where different rhythms are played on the musical carnival floats known as Trio Eletricos and people come together to form the biggest street parade in the world, plus of course the spectacular carnival parades in Rio de Janeiro. The jungle carnival of Parintins is still relatively unknown but deserves to be included in this group of famous celebrations.
The best-known carnival music, the samba, began in the early years of the twentieth century in the poorer quarters of Rio, and over the decades it has developed several variations. The deafening "samba de enredo" is the set piece of Carnival, with one or two singers declaiming a verse joined by hundreds, even thousands, of voices and drums for the chorus, as the bloco, the full samba school, backs up the lead singers. A bloco in action during carnival is the loudest music you're ever likely to come across, and it's all done without the aid of amplifiers: if you stand up close, the massed noise of the drums makes every part of your body vibrate.
No technology yet devised can come close to conveying this sound, and on recordings the songs and music often seem repetitive. Still, every year the main Rio samba schools make a compilation record of the music they selected for the parade, and any record with the words Samba de Enredo or Escola de Samba will contain this mass carnival music. |
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