The lundu has been called the ‘fundamental link’ in the transition from batuque to modern samba.1 And, as we saw in the previous chapter, it was the lundu which pioneered the assimilation of black music into Brazil’s towns and cities and therefore made a major contribution to the formation of the Brazilian musical tradition.2 But between lundu and modern samba there was an important intermediate stage: the maxixe.
In1845, at the peak of the Europeanpolka craze, the polka arrived in Brazil.3 By the 1870s – danced by Brazilians brought up on the lundu for two
or three generations, and drawing on the rhythm of the Cuban habanera, popular in Brazil from the 1860s – the polka evolved into a dance at first called tango (or tango brasileiro). It is oftenclaimed that the first Brazilian composer to use the word ‘tango’ for a composition was Ernesto Nazaré or Nazareth (1863–1934). The same claim is made for Chiquinha Gonzaga (Francisca Edwiges Neves Gonzaga, 1847–1935). In fact the first Brazilian composer to do so was Henrique Alves de Mesquita (1830–1906). In 1871, eight years before Nazaré, he described as a ‘tango’ his ‘Olhos Matadores’, an adaptationof two habaneras that incorporated also elements of polka and schottische.4In1879 Nazaré published his ownfirst ‘tango’, the polka ‘Cruz,
Perigo!!’, and in the following year Chiquinha Gonzaga followed suit with her ‘Tango Brasileiro’.
Soon, however, this hybrid but essentially Brazilian couple dance had been renamed maxixe.5 That word had at first denoted a way of dancing polka, habanera, or tango, with a dragging of the feet and a rippling movement of the hips.6 Before long the maxixe had superseded the lundu as the most popular
social dance in Brazil’s cities, and was often seen on the stage – although, like the Argentinian tango, it was assailed for its sensuality by guardians of public morality.7That was no doubt because the dance ‘involved very close contact
between the bodies of the dancers, who sometimes pressed their foreheads together’ as well as interlacing their legs as in the later lambada8(a dance which developed in the north of Brazil from a mixture of the carimbó dance of Pará and the merengue borrowed from the Dominican Republic).9 Satirists lost no
time in holding the moralists up to ridicule, as in this squib a Brazilian theatrical journal published in 1903:
So tasty is maxixe That if he only knew
The Holy Father’d come from Rome To dance maxixe too.10
It would be another ten years before the maxixe reached Europe, about a year after the tango. The Brazilian dance caused rather less consternation on this side of the Atlantic than the Argentinian dance had caused. The Dancing Times hailed it as ‘a restful change to the Grizzly Bear and Turkey Trot’ and advised its readers: ‘The body must be kept very flexible, and the movement throughout is very undulating. It is an easy and graceful dance, and its languourous simplicity makes it a delightful change from the acrobatic gyrations of our American importations.’11
The maxixe constitutes ‘a second missing link in the prehistory of samba’:12 it paved the way for the emergence of the urban samba. And not only as a couple dance: ‘as a style of body movement to accompany polyrhythmic percussion, maxixe eventually became a main attraction of street carnival and in that sense, as well, the antecedent of modern samba’.13 Mário de Andrade
MAXIXE AND MODERN SAMBA 155
Figure 14 The maxixe, successor to the lundu and forerunner of the urban samba, as portrayed in 1907. Guardians of public morality in Brazil attacked the dance for its sensuality, but the Dancing Times in
sees what he calls the maxixe-samba as evidence of re-Africanisation, though he does not use that word:
The evolution of the maxixe into the present-day samba appears to be ... a reaction of Brazilian black ethnicity [negrismo étnico do brasileiro] against the undue whiteness [branquismo] of the maxixe. ... The present-day samba ... is a black reaction against the maxixe, a return to purer sources, and a return to the roots [reprimitivização] of our urban dance, under direct black influence ....
The ... composers of maxixes began to use the word [samba] again, to denote not the old Afro-Brazilian choreography but a regional kind of maxixe, ‘maxixe’ referring to pieces of specifically Rio de Janeiro feeling and movement, ‘samba’ to the maxixe of rural, especially north-eastern, origin and style.14
Before 1917 the word ‘samba’ was not used to designate a kind of music. It meant a kind of dance step and a social event.15In Rio de Janeiro it was a dance step and social event enjoyed primarily by the black inhabitants of the morros, the hills on which the favelas or shanty-towns stand. ‘The samba was our family, our Sunday stroll, our movies, our theater’, said one old-timer in the 1970s. ‘It was all we really knew of happiness there on the morro.’16It was the 1917 carnival hit ‘Pelo Telefone’ by ‘Donga’ (Ernesto Woaquim Maria dos Santos, 1889–1974) and Mauro de Almeida (1882–1956) which put samba on the map.17It has stayed there ever since. ‘Pelo Telefone’, with its catchy melody and
syncopated march-like rhythm of two beats to the bar, contained in its original version a sly dig at police corruption: the practice of warning the owners of gambling dens that they could shortly expect a police raid. This, however, was prudently toned down in the recorded version.18
‘Pelo Telefone’ was a pivotal recording. But it was not, as has often been claimed, the first music to be recorded under the name of samba, for a dozen or so others had used the term previously, including a piece called ‘Brasilianas’ (c. 1910), played on the piano by João Gualdo Ribeiro, and ‘Urubu Malandro’ (c. 1914), ‘arranged from popular motifs’ for clarinet, cavaquinho (ukelele) and guitar. ‘Pelo Telefone’ was simply the first piece of music to gain national success under the name ‘samba’.19Danced originally by Brazilians of African
descent, many of them recent settlers from Bahia living on the morros of Rio de Janeiro, the new urban samba brought one of the principal African dance rhythms into the heart of Brazilian popular music and made it an immediately recognisable musical symbol of Brazil. ‘The most typical samba rhythm,’ writes Kazadi wa Mukuna, ‘can be met with in a general manner in many parts of Africa and occupies animportant positioninsome cultures’.20 To pound out
these rhythms, a series of African musical instruments entered Brazilian popular music for the first time: atabaque drums; agogô clapperless double bell; and, adding an inimitable, often humorous, flavour, the friction drum known inBahia as cuíca, inSão Paulo as puita – and throughout a wide area of Angola as pwita21– and capable of emitting animal-like sounds ranging from a squeak
to a roar.22 The first samba ‘schools’ were formed inthe 1920s, and inthe
following decade these dance groups, whose purpose is to prepare for public display in the annual carnival, ‘became the prime exponents of ... samba as it rose rapidly to become the universally recognised cultural symbol of Brazilianidentity’.23
This new musical form … was developed by the descendants of slaves, meeting in the so-called samba schools, for whom the word samba continued to signify ring dance, belly-blow, a rhythm similar to the macumba religious ceremonies. For them samba constituted a rhythm, a choreography, a genre very close to that of the invocations of the Afro-Brazilian cults.24
However, as José Jorge de Carvalho makes clear,
it is only in appearance that Brazilian popular music has incorporated these cult rhythms. As a matter of fact, all the incursions we have seen so far show the adaptation of drum rhythms used in the more syncretic kinds of cult (such as
candomblé de caboclo, umbanda, macumba, and so on), which are more compatible
with the song structures used in popular music.25
The process of re-Africanisation that turned maxixe into urban samba was not widely recognised at the time for what it was, and the problem of assigning a correct label to ‘Pelo Telefone’ led to a celebrated exchange some years later between its creator and a rival composer. When Ismael Silva (b. 1905) said of ‘Pelo Telefone’, ‘That’s a maxixe’, ‘Donga’ asked: ‘Then what’s a samba?’ ‘“Se Você Jurar”’, replied Silva, pointing to a 1931 hit of his own, written in col- laboration with Francisco Alves (1898–1952) and Nilton Bastos (1899–1931). To which ‘Donga’ retorted: ‘That’s a marcha.’26 It is now recognised that the
celebrated ‘sambas’ written by the prolific and highly satirical composer Sinhô (José Barbosa da Silva, 1888–1930) – the catchy ‘Não Quero Saber Mais Dela’ (1927), for instance – were in fact maxixes.27
There is a certain irony in the fact that samba, a creation of the poorest of the poor, has become a tourist attraction. But, given the powerful wave of energy that sweeps over Brazil at carnival time, the spectacular nature of the groups’ costumes and displays, and the irresistible pull of the music, it is hard to see how it could be otherwise. Every attempt to co-opt or marginalise samba comes up against the endlessly creative and innovative response of the samba schools and their composers, artists, and supporters.28So nowhere in Brazil is samba, or the annual carnival, only or even mainly a tourist attraction. After 500 years Brazil’s heart still beats to powerful rhythms of resistance, and its people prove this afresh each year as they dance joyfully through their streets.