Jack McDonald dot Org

Day three of Carnival, or day four, I don’t know, there have been blocos for a couple of days running into the weekend and they haven’t stopped. I spend the day chilling on Ipanema beach while a smallish float and Samba band crawls along the road. The sound is jacked up way too loud on the float and the speakers keep feeding back. This creates two bubbles of empty space in the party as no-one other than the deaf can stand to be right next the side speakers.

As it gets dark I head back to Copacobana and run right into the back of a massive Samba band wending it’s way down Avenida Nossa Senhora Copacabana. I stop ahead of the party and eat some dinner while the parade crawls past me. I think at this point I am pretty worn out on Samba, which makes the next discovery quite delightful. A few streets down is a stage set up in a tight alley, in fact the one I was in on Friday. Actually getting onto the street itself is incredibly hard as the crowd is packed like a rush hour train. Some incerdibly thoughtful crowd management leaves room widthways for one or two people at a time to enter and leave the area. Of course there are in fact two queues of people trying to walk through each other in a good natured fashion. The band are playing laid back big band jazz and ‘deckchair music’. It’s got quite obvious Brazilian influences, but still it is relaxing all the same. I think there are about four thousand people rammed onto this street watching them.

After five minutes of watching the band I make the snap decision to stay here for the rest of the evening. The band is made up of twenty odd musicians plus five singers. The chap conducting the orchestra is quite laid back about the whole event and only seems to really interject to pinch a particular song to a close. The band’s first set was pretty decent, they would play three or four numbers that required singing and then settle into another thre or four songs that didn’t. During the instrumental songs the singers relaxed at the front of the stage, with the two guys occasionally monkeying around with members of the band trying to embarass them.

It begins to rain lightly, but there is a largish awning in front of the stage to cover the PA and orchestra. People further away from the stage simply resign themselves to
getting wet and carry on enjoying themselves. Even if they had wanted to seek shelter, exiting the road itself would have taken twenty minutes or so from the centre. Umbrellas pop up in the crowd and form something of a roman legionaires tortoise shell to shield sections of the crowd from the rain. I am perched on the edge of the awning and end up crushed beneath it. Everyone dances with their arms crushed to their chests, but the mood is still good despite the lack of space to breathe.

The band finishes their first set which leads to a small exodus of people from the street as laid back Samba gets piped over the PA. Thankfully my portuguese is now good enough to pick up that they’ll be playing a second set in 45 minutes so I hang around. Whilst standing there taking in the sights I spot a guy with a Black Flag badge on his cap. Normally I wouldn’t really think twice about such things, but this (apart from a Ramones shirt I spotted) is the first punk related thing I have seen in Brazil so far. It is odd being so seperate from the music seeing as I’ve seen an average of a gig a week for ten years. I say hello and thankfully he speaks a little English. We end up talking about Black Flag for a bit as best we can, which is basically singing along to lyrics from Damaged, saying ‘Yes!’ and little else. The guy is from Belo Horizonte, but kindly gives me the names of three venues that occasionally put punk bands on in Rio. The hunt is officially afoot.

Just as this conversation gets into full swing, the band starts up again. The conductor uses a long broom pole to move a volume of rainfall that is causing the awning to sag. The water rolls sideways creating a bump in the awning as it goes, until it hits a hole near to the edge and soaks some unfortunate woman. The band kick in on full swing and everyone starts dancing again. Of course it is nearer the witching hour, so there are even more people on the streets and somehow more people on this particular road. The crowd surges left and right, occasionally allowing people the freedom to move, but more often than not leaving me imprinted on the persons surrounding me. The band revel in the electricity bubbling off the crowd, indulging in some solos and improvisations. On top of this the conductor seems to have woken up by this point and takes the time to mix up some of the songs. In this fashion the balmy music is at points tranformed by quadrupling the tempo at which point the crowd begins rhythmically pogoing along to the new beat. I am left with little opporunity not join in because the motion of the two people either side up me carries me upwards regardless. In the end, I cut out five or ten minutes before the band is due to finish to miss the ultimate crush. I say bye to the punk guy and head home, pretty much everything else would have been an anti-climax.