Here's One Yule Like

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year ! It's been a strange and musical one this year. Mercifully, there was an almost total abscence of Christmas buildup in our part of the world. Owed in no small part to the fact that we were in a tent in the middle of Perú for most of it. Upon arrival in Santiago it was discovered that there was basically nothing in the way of any celebration going on, and not even very many people around. Ordinarily this might have been slightly depressing, so we did the only sensible thing in this instance ... bought some guitars. It's an old trick but a good 'un - when life starts to get you down, just buy another musical instrument and a load of beer. This is how we spent Christmas day ... wandering down the deserted streets of Bellavista with guitars on backs, a hot dry wind blowing the dust up and making a good thirst. Printing off masses of guitar tab and annoying everyone else with some unpracticed singing (which eventually attracted the attention of the carabineros on motorbikes, eyed our opened beers, looked uninterested and then buggered off). It was a blazing hot day where children rode their tricycles into each other and we played to other drunks until the booze ran out. In addition to this, Roberto was good enough to once again meet up with us and take us to a decent gig and be generally helpful and rad - thank you so much !

A word about the sad state of affairs with respect to online guitar tablature at the moment. This is where one person listens to a song, works out how to play it and writes it down ... when I was starting off you had to pay twenty odd quid for a book (costing nearly double the actual album), whereas (for the time being) you can get amateur transcriptions on the internet. In my mind this is not very different from just asking someone at school how a song goes, and obviously the accuracy varies just as much - if you really feel like it you can pay through the nose for the "official" transcriptions. This statement on the Guitar Tab Universe forums pretty much sums it up. Basically a great many tab sites are being forced to take their transcriptions of songs by the bullies at the record companies, who in addition to treating a lot of their paying customers like criminals in recent years are now of the opinion that telling another person how to play a song on an instrument constitutes copyright infringement. I must be some sort of criminal mastermind then, as I bought Dan a chord book for Christmas, which means ... he'll be able to play just about any song ever recorded ! And what's this in the photo ? Playing a C7 chord in public, heaven forbid someone should remember the sound of this and hum it back to themselves later. It's piracy all around ! What a dastardly plan, I regret nothing. In all seriousness, I cannot see how this is anything other than a very bad thing for anyone trying to learn an instrument. Quite clearly a free resource for improving one's own capabilities helps each new generation of musicians and feeds back into the industry itself. And in the words of my future brother in law "how can it be copyright infringement if it's mostly wrong ?". Very good point.


Ah, but this is what it's all about. We flew into Rio de Janeiro just before New Years Eve - this is our mate from school, Nathan (with girlfriend Lia and her mate Tatiana), impressing everyone with his Bossa Nova guitar skills. Outside our hostal in Urca, on the sea wall where the fishermen make very half arsed attempts to actually catch anything. I've not actually seen any fish around here ... perhaps they were scared off by the sound of the insects in the trees, who make a sound that wouldn't be out of place in the H.P. Lovecraft book I'm reading. Bossa Nova is a musical style that developed out of Samba and influenced by American Jazz. The compositions of Antonio Carlos Jobim were key, often performed by João Gilberto. The term Bossa means a natural adeptness and flair at something, with a certain charisma. I'm having a stab at learning some of this myself, and it's a real joy trying something which is a proper challenge again. The chord sequences are like nothing I've ever seen before, and while I can quite easily pop out the odd minor seventh or suspended second without looking them up or thinking too much, having a continuous stream of thirteenths and random add notes is well beyond my skill. This with a rhythm that I've not used properly before means that I'm basically lost ... fortunately Nathan is quite patient ! If you saw some of these sequences written down, you could be forgiven for thinking that it's complication for the sake of it ... but the results really do sound quite lovely.

People aren't afraid to just let go around here. There's no seeming chasm to overcome if you feel like playing some music or dancing in the street at any hour. These guys are playing in a style called Pagode, a variant on Samba - just outside a sidestreet bar. Everyone else drank down their beers and sung along. I saw this happen all over the place, a song would be playing in a reception and people would just start dancing with each other. Thanks to Lia we got to go to a few Samba clubs, which turned into some of the best nights out we've had on the whole trip (and certainly beat the shit out of going down The After Dark in Reading for the 300th time). Here's the setup : a Samba group on the stage with guitars and various percussion, and loads of people turn up to dance by themselves, with partners or to ask total strangers. There's no aggression or aggravation, people of all ages, and nobody really cares if you can dance or not. Best night out ever. Favourite tipple around here is the Caipirinha, pretty much the national drink. Take a load of Cachaça, dump it on loads of ice and whole crushed limes and sip vastly. Tangy, sweet and very, very strong - we sat around and drank whilst increasing the drowning humidity with our own sweat. It was like something from The Rum Diaries.



New Years Eve in Rio was always going to be something special ... between 2 and 3 million people gather on the beach, second only to Carnival (in which the madness goes on for several days) in terms of local importance. Offerings such as roses and floating boats to Yemaja, the sea goddess, are an integral part of the celebrations here. Of course this goes on all over the place - that's the beach at Urca on the left a few days before the big night. The mood was slightly nervous in the city, due to the fact that some buses had been burnt by some members of the local gangs coming from some of the nearby favelas (areas that are similar to slums, but created due to the mass displacement of a large population from elsewhere, usually rural areas). These areas were given a grim portrayal in the 2002 film City Of God, but it is thought that the earliest example dates back to around 1897 (though some sources cite it later at around 1920). The areas are characterized by extreme poverty, lack of amenities and utilities (only 50% of faveladors have access to an in-house toilet) and rampant crime associated with the drug trading that proliferates within and around the areas. Most of the infamy that surrounds the favelas comes from the fact that the drug trade that runs through the areas largely takes over the function of the state itself. Police generally only enter the favelas in large scale operations, and it's debatable who carries more firepower (I suspect it's the gangs) - it's disconcerting to say the least to see an officer on a street corner carrying an assault rifle capable of instantly cutting a man in half. A good deal of them are situated on the hills that dot the city, with the earliest settlers at the bottom (near water mains etc.) and later arrivals moving further towards the peak. So, anyone who is unfortunate enough to be at the top has the unenviable task of making several trips a day just to get water from the tapped water mains. Rio is an interesting case, in that the abject poverty and danger associated with the favelas nestles alongside some of the richest tourist areas in the city. There do exist tours for people who might feel like driving into these areas for a quick gawp at the poor sods who live there, but I have no idea how this might operate ... whether the drug lords themselves are paid off by the tour companies, or they agree to it as a way to keep the authorities off their backs. Either way, I didn't feel like participating in this ... not so much through any moral decisions, more it just seemed like a very dumb thing to do. The closest I personally came to seeing anything like this was on a regular bus journey that went around the outskirts, Dan and I sitting there with a 'whats all this' expression on our mugs.


The big night itself was spent whooping it up around the beaches. Highlights include watching Sergio Mendes perform his best known hit Mais Que Nada, while everyone on Ipanema went completely nuts and ran around in the sea. Deliberately missed The Black Eyed Peas, but instead went over to Copacabana to see a zestful firework display. Then we joined this drumming procession, 'helped' them out with some added percussion and danced around in a fashion that stretched the idea of playing around the beat to it's very limit i.e. not keeping to it at all. Then I eat a corn on the cob smothered with unwise amounts of salt and butter (Brazil is definitely the place for street food, you can survive on this alone). Obviously this tomfoolery couldn't last and I did my ankle in again, so we went home to play Oasis covers on the guitars with random pissheads in the pouring rain. Success all round !




"Take me out tonight ... because I want to see people and I want to see life" - you know it's going to be a good evening when you bundle into a taxi that's playing There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. New Year's Eve in Rio takes some beating. And beaten it is, by a typical Friday night in the Lapa district. Mini street parties abound everywhere, dancing, laughing, sometimes forming a roda (circle), around a Capoeira demonstration. This is one of countless examples of the African influences that were brought over, and developed during the 16-19th centuries when slaves were taken from Africa by the Portuguese. The modern day form is a martial art combining gymnastic skills, dance and a sort of (mostly) non-contact kickboxing. The crappy photo on the left doesn't do it justice really ... the action was characterized with exceedingly quick, improvised yet graceful roundhouse kicks, sweeps and feints. There's a lot of groundwork with the odd roll and jump, and even handstand-splits. The best example I can give is that it was used on one of the BBC's interludes they were using a couple of years ago. You can see the tops of the Berimbau on the right - a kind of musical bow that provides the buzzing, percussive tones that the dancers move to (in addition to drunken clapping from the other revellers). Rio gets a bad reputation in terms of safety etc., but I am beginning to think that the most dangerous thing I will see in twelve months of world travel will be Reading High Street next time I'm there on a weekend. It always strikes me as sad that some people have to cause violence to establish/re-affirm their status, instead of getting over their insecurities and enjoying/expressing themselves without caring what other people think.