Folk Music

Music - Popular Music

The earliest music in what is now Brazil must have been that of the native people of the area. Little is known about their music, since no written records exist of this era. With the arrival of Europeans, Brazilian culture began to take shape as a combination of native musical styles with European elements (especially Portuguese music) and African music.

Indigenous music

The native people of the Brazilian rainforest play instruments including whistles, flutes, horns, drums and rattles. Much of the area's folk music imitates the sound of the Amazon Rainforest. When the Portuguese arrived in Brazil, the first natives they met played an array of reed flutes and other wind and percussion instruments. The Jesuit missionaries introduced songs which used the Tupi language with Christian lyrics, in an attempt to convert the people to Christianity and also introduced Gregorian chant and the flute, bow, and the clavichord.

Eastern Amazônia

Eastern Amazônia has long been dominated by carimbó music, which is centered around Belém. Carimbó is an African drum. It is made of a hollow trunk and covered with a deerskin.

This name is also used for an exotic Brazilian dance to the beat of this drum. This dance is originally from the Brazilian region of Pará, around the marajó island and the capital city of Belém. In this dance, a woman throws her handkerchief on the floor and her male partner must attempt to retrieve the handkerchief using solely his mouth.

In the 1960s, carimbó was electrified and, in the next decade, DJs added elements from reggae, salsa and merengue. This new form became known as lambada and soon moved to Bahia, Salvador by the mid- 1980s. Bahian lambada was synthesizer-based and light pop music. French record producers discovered the music there, and brought it back with them to France, where a Bolivian group called Los K'jarkas saw their own composition launch an international dance craze. Soon, lambada had spread throughout the world and the term soon became meaninglessly attached to multiple varieties of unrelated Brazilian music, leading to purist scorn from Belém and also Bahia.

Another form of regional folk music, bumba-meu-boi, was popularized by the Carnival celebrations of Parintins and is now a major part of the Brazilian national scene.

Weather

Brasilia

Rio de Janeiro

Salvador da Bahia

São Paulo

Recife

Belém

Curitiba

Manaus