Chapter 3 presents the book’s first case study, Orkestra Rumpilezz, a big band mixing jazz with emblematic Afro-Bahian genres such as Candomblé, carnival music (ijexá and samba reggae), samba de roda, and capoeira. It opens with a discussion of composer-director Letieres Leite’s trajectory in Brazil and Europe and his views on Africa and the liminal status of jazz in Bahia, as an African diasporic genre and, simultaneously, US America’s classical music. This is followed by an analysis of how the orchestra spotlights percussion and percussionists in its performances and links them to the polemic notion of racial democracy in Brazil. A number of performance practices (layout of musicians on stage, colors and styles of costumes, visual symbols, instrumentation, physical movement, speech between pieces) are connected with the tropes of embodiment, spirituality, and spontaneity.
A blend of Traditional Visual Symbols in BIPV application; any Prospects?
