In a previous post about Orson Welles's ill-fated Brazilian film It's All True I mentioned that Welles came to see the history of the samba as the key to Brazilian culture. I wondered if there might be a CD collection that showcased that history. Of course there was, and of course it was French -- the French having a knack for combining passion about American music with a logical approach to presenting it.
Fremeaux & Associates offers several historical surveys of Brazilian music which give a good idea of what Welles found when he visited the country in 1942. The one above surveys the samba alone, which originated around 1917 as music for the Carnival and eventually became a highly commercialized form of dance music throughout the Americas in the 1940s.
The great revelation of this set is Carmen Miranda in her pre-Hollywood days. Before she became a musical comedy star, famous for her tall fruit-basket hats ("Bananas is my business!"), she was one of the musical treasures of Rio -- a terrific and very sexy singer.
But samba, as it turns out, is just the rio into which all streams of Brazilian music flow. The oldest style it incorporates is choro, an instrumental form meant for listening, not dancing. It usually features ornate flute lines accompanied by various stringed instruments. It started out very European in sound, with African rhythms adding flavor, but later became a bit more rambunctious. Its evolutions are charted in the collection illustrated above.
Other subsets include brass marching-band compositions and various regional styles, many of which are charted in the Fremeaux & Associates collection above. Fremeaux offers a couple of other historical surveys, but these three will give you a comprehensive picture of Brazilian music in the first half of the 20th Century. The pleasures they deliver are not primarily scholarly, however. There's hardly a song on any of the two-disc sets which is less than marvelous, and all of them will set you either dreaming or dancing. (The imported sets can be found on Amazon, most cheaply through their Amazon Marketplace sellers.)
Listening to these CDs you'll see right away what so enchanted Welles back in 1942 and grieve anew that he never got a chance to finish his film about Brazil and the samba.