This past Halloween, the samba band I play with, Samba du Soleil, got to take part in the annual Parade of Lost Souls event in Vancouver. We were stationed at the entrance gate to open the festivities, playing for half an hour before the city’s own Carnival Band came marching up with horns blaring and drums pounding, to lead the crowd off into the night.
Our band had a captive audience to begin, though it was still daylight and they hung back, only a few of the usual brave souls dancing to break the ice. Our usual opening number, Baion, was lively enough, but the next tune, a more mellow Bollywood jam, was less practiced and failed to energize. So we switched it back up to our rocking Samba Reggae, to get everyone up and moving as the Carnival Band arrived.
First they played over top of our tune, then gave signals to follow their musical lead. It was all pretty chaotic and loud and fun as it should be, with the costumed crowd fully engaged now and ready to amble out of the square on the Carnival Band’s coattails. Samba du Soleil held our positions beside the exit passage where the crowd column, five or six wide, continued streaming past.
In the transition as the other band faded from the scene, our band kept the pulse going with a steady trance pulse. The surdo and percussion were supporting the groove as I improvised a funky two-bar walking beat on the timbau:
My choice of beats wasn’t premeditated or decided consciously, it just arose out of the energetic of the moment, the pace of the crowd walking past, the bounce of the vibe. Once locked in, I had to keep it going, until finally the flow of people dwindled after twenty minutes.
Needless to say, that rhythm stayed with me for the next two days and nights, hammered into my bones and humming in my cells. Then on the third day, when thinking about the band’s work in progress, Candomble, it hit me: that was the essential feel I was channeling in Vancouver. A closer look at the notation confirmed the unconscious link to the rhythm I was working on the week before.
I had thought I found a new mine shaft to the mother lode of ritual music, but it proved to be an avenue well traveled before, even a familiar one, only obscured by other itineraries, agendas, and maps of the mountain.
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For more rhythms to play with a samba or batucada band, be sure to see my latest books in the Roots Jam series, Roots Jam 4: World Beats – Rhythms Wild! and Best of Roots Jam: African & World Drum Rhythms (available from Amazon in print, or the DjembeRhythms.com order page for PDF versions and optional audio files).
