Orkestra Rumpilezz

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.

Conclusion: Lessons from Essentialism

This conclusive chapter compares and contrasts the ways in which the musicians and ensembles discussed in the book approach the tropes: sometimes emphasizing them, at others downplaying them, and at yet other times interrupting them. It presents the implications of this study for diaspora studies, Afro-diasporic religion, and the erudite/popular divide in Brazil. It closes by arguing that a conscious and disciplined study of African tropes enables researchers to discover that variety in African diasporic creation is limitless and enables musicians to access an expanded range of musical expression.

Orkestra Rumpilezz

Chapter 4 continues the discussion of Orkestra Rumpilezz, focusing on how it materializes Letieres Leite’s rhetoric about African rhythmic complexity. Two strategies for increasing rhythmic complexity are discussed: the transfer of drum patterns from Candomblé to the big band to form polyphonic textures; and the transformation of traditional timelines (clave-like patterns) borrowed from Candomblé and carnival music, including rotation (shifting the timeline’s reference point), truncation, and superimposing two versions of the same timeline, a phenomenon that is labeled staggered timeline alignment. The chapter theorizes unique cases of timeline usage, comparing and contrasting them with well-known studies of clave in other parts of the black Atlantic.

The Tuned Berimbaus of OBADX

Chapter 7 discusses a second berimbau orchestra: the Dainho Xequerê Orchestra of Tuned Berimbaus (OBADX), led by the capoeira Contramestre Dainho Xequerê. With a more eclectic and inclusive approach than the Nzinga orchestra, OBADX keeps a greater distance from capoeira aesthetics, fuses various genres, including pieces of the so-called common practice period (e.g., Ravel’s Bolero), and, crucially, tunes its berimbaus to create melodies in hocket, much in the same way as British and US American handbell choirs, the Central African Republic’s banda linda horn ensembles, or Indonesian angklung groups function. In doing so, OBADX challenges the themes of African rhythmicity and percussiveness, asserting the importance of African melody and harmony in diasporic creation.

The Nzinga Berimbau Orchestra

Chapter 6 discusses the Nzinga Berimbau Orchestra, a berimbau ensemble formed by members of a capoeira angola group headquartered in Bahia. Led by Mestra Janja and Mestre Poloca, this orchestra explores new repertoires beyond capoeira, and utilizes the berimbau in new contexts—dissociated from capoeira’s physical expression, in the concert hall. The chapter begins by discussing the role and perceptions of the berimbau in capoeira and Brazilian popular music and moves on to explain the various strands grounding the Bantu-centric rhetoric of the Nzinga orchestra. Remaining close to capoeira aesthetics, drawing on rhythms and songs from the Angola Candomblé tradition, treating the berimbau as a purely percussive instrument, and emphasizing the tropes of African spontaneity and collectivism, the Nzinga orchestra articulates the strongest Afrocentric discourse studied in the book.

Orquestra AfrosinfônicaThe Africanization of Erudite Music

Chapter 5 focuses on the Orquestra Afrosinfônica, a group led by Bira Marques that attempts to indigenize symphonic music in Bahia by drawing on Afro-Bahian genres such as Candomblé and carnival music. It discusses the problematic division between “erudite” and “popular” music in Brazil in relation with Marques’s rhetoric about rhythm, melody, and harmony. The analysis engages the director’s use of timelines, modal and tonal harmonies, lyrics in African languages, rhythms used by Brazilian nationalistic composers, Afro-Bahian and symphonic percussion, and black bodies. It demonstrates how and why the tropes of African rhythmicity and percussiveness are mainly hidden in discourse but become plain in practice. The director’s visit to Namibia and his collaboration with two Angolan musicians in Bahia are seen to clarify his position in regard to the relationship between Candomblé and Christianity and his view of Bahia as a hyperreal Africa.

Redeeming the Study of African Essentialism

Chapter 2 provides the book’s theoretical foundations by positioning tropes of Africanness as central to the analysis of musical constructions of diasporic identities. After introducing six well-known tropes—rhythmicity, percussiveness, embodiment, spirituality, spontaneity, and collectivism—with the baggage and symbolism attached to them, it presents their role in the debate of African survivals. By interpreting early writings on Africanisms, Paul Gilroy’s concept of anti-anti-essentialism, and Steven Feld’s notion of interpretive moves, this chapter argues for the importance of taking seriously musicians’ ideas and rhetoric about essentialisms as well as the ways in which they materialize them in sound, musical structure, and performance practices. This implies an analytical shift of focus from Africanisms as cultural imponderables to tropes of Africanness that are rhetorically asserted and overtly manifested, enabling better understandings of diasporic cultural creation and people’s agency.

Bahia as an Epicenter of African Diasporic Culture

Chapter 1 provides a background on Afro-Bahian history, religion, politics, and musical activism focusing on two questions: How did Bahia emerge as an epicenter of African diasporic culture in Brazil and the black Atlantic? And what are the implications of this image for the study of tropes of Africanness? The discussion touches upon the specific practices and realms from which perceived Africanness emanates, including carnival percussion ensembles linked to black consciousness and, especially, the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion, which agglutinates Brazil’s most evocative African symbols, images, and sounds. Additionally, racial relations and the complicated relationship between African-based identities and national consciousness are discussed.

Introduction

The introduction posits essentialisms associated with African culture as fundamental to an understanding of how black people imagine their African heritage in the diaspora. Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster Black Panther is used to illustrate how members of the diaspora select, reify, or challenge romanticized notions about Africa while portraying images and sounds of black empowerment. The introduction locates this book’s study within the fields of African, African diasporic, and Afro-Brazilian, and Bahian studies emphasizing that the approach here taken differs from that of most others in that it engages musical and discourse analysis, as opposed to discourse analysis only. The methods of data collection and the author’s subject position are also presented. Finally, the interlocutors, along with the criteria for their inclusion, are introduced.