Frank Cherry;Saturday Morning Music in a Bad Part of Town

While cleaning up some old papers, I came across a scribbling I made maybe years ago about a jam session of Choro(*) players which was taking place on Saturday mornings in a music instruments store on the rua General Osório in São Paulo’s old, squalid, downtown area. This zone, adjacent to the Luz Central Station, is in an area popularly known as the Garbage Pit because of the lowlife and cheap whore houses which thrive there practically around the clock.

With a classic misnomer, because its name implies crying or blues, Choro is bright, sparkling, spirited music which shines even more when given a jazz (Hermeto Paschoal) or classical interpretation (Villa-Lobos). Choro concerts are given somewhere in São Paulo every week of the year, and Choro music is played by serious musicians like Marcelo Bratke and Paula Robison, and especially by enthusiastic amateurs throughout the country.

On a chilly, drizzly, Saturday morning in winter I decided to take a chance that a) I would find the store, A Contemporanea, and b) there would in fact be music there. I found my way to São Paulo's very practical, impeccably clean, subway and took it to the Luz train station, which looks like one of those Italian stations seen in the old war movies—a half barrel with some tracks running through it. A major restoration project, now under way, aims to bring the station back to its former glory.

The Garbage Pit area recalls Dresden after the bombing--sidewalks and streets flooded with water and muck, which gather where the pavement chipped away many years ago; no building has seen paint in 50 years; low-class people set up stands to sell contraband goods, like $3 watches, $5 duffel bags, about-to-rot fruit, grease-laden snacks, and the like. Besides the plethora of cheap hotels where the woeful girls turn their tricks, there are streets devoted to legitimate commerce: one street for light fixtures, another for auto parts, another for telephone and computer equipment, then stereos, and finally, I knew I was getting warm when I came across a couple of music instrument stores. Many of these stores operate in the informal economy, which means that you don’t get an official receipt (nota fiscal), but you do get the lowest price.

A Contemporanea is an oasis of orderliness amidst its chaotic surroundings: a legitimate store filled with Brazilian instruments of all kinds. Recorded Pagode music was blaring at the door, and I was afraid that that was IT for the Choro. But when I found my way to the very back of the store, there was a small room, no bigger than 12 x 15 feet, with four rows of benches crammed in. In the first two rows the musicians sat facing one another, practically knee-to-knee; the other two rows were for overflow musicians and spectators.

I came in tentatively, making eye contact with someone to see if it was OK to sit down. Just then the mandolin player announced that he was going to play a Choro that he wrote only two weeks ago. (In fact, there are “new” Choros written in jazz and traditional styles, and I was expecting one of those). Then he pulled a hand-written music sheet out of a yellowed cardboard notebook, picked the first three bars, hesitated for a nanosecond, and then roared into the song. When he was immediately joined by the other eight musicians, it was clear that he had been joking—his new song was one of the chestnuts of Choro which everyone knew.

In traditional Choro there were three instruments: guitar, mandolin, and flute. With the passage of time, the Choro style became the Choro-canção, merging into samba, and today there is no set rule. Because the A Contemporanea happening is impromptu, the instrument composition that day had more to do with who showed up with what, than with music protocol. In fact, today Choro accepts practically any composition of instruments.

When I peered into the room, I saw the mandolin, an-eight string (2 x 4), ukulele-sized guitar known as the cavaquinho, traditional and 7-string guitars, and a percussion man who was working both the tambourine and the bongo drum. Of the four, the mandolin was dominant because the player uses its high pitch to pick the melody, and because it affords the opportunity for virtuosity when the highest notes are stroked so fast that they become a seamless melody sounding a bit like a flute. And, the mandolin players today take the role of leaders--they call the shots and get the accolades.

The session proceeded with great informality: players walked in, walked out to get coffee across the street; they swapped instruments, depending on the song, told jokes, clean and otherwise. When one mandolin player couldn’t remember the melody, another player da-da-da’d a few measures, and that was all he needed to launch into the song.

After a while, as the session was moving along in slow gear, a mandolin player came in and was given such a reverential reception that it was clear that he was a Top Dog. A space in the middle of the bench magically became available, and he proceeded to hold forth. When the coda of his first song exploded into a pyrotechnical fury, even the old, dour guitar players broke into wide, approving grins.

A few minutes later another Big Boy came in, remarkable by his rectangular face whose symmetry was broken by generous jowls which sloped all the way down to his neck. He was Arnaldinho, a regular whose caricature was pasted on the wall. His cavaquinho looked more like a spoon cradled in his fleshy hands. And while at first he played only chords, he pulled out original chord progressions which spiced rich harmony into the mixture, and then he polished things off with lightning riffs. Later he showed that he could pick with the best of the mandolin players.

Then a well-known journalist walked in. Befitting his station, he was smartly dressed and his black hair peppered with some white was jauntily parted down the middle. He seemed to have just stopped by to schmooze with the boys, but he did pick up a guitar for one of the songs and strummed it desultorily.
The tambourine man was the youngest, alternating between the pandeiro and the bongo drum. At one point, in order to get just the right sound for a song, he took out some duct tape and pasted three strips across his pandeiro. When he went for coffee, another fellow took his place.

All the while the audience kept rotating: two young fellows hung out for a long time, one of whom, sporting a crew cut with generous brush-cut wax pushing up the front and coiffed with a wide-tooth comb, wearing cargo pants with cuffs dragging on the floor. Two young girls, in their late teens, stepped diffidently into the room. From their appreciative smiles it was clear that they were Choro aficionados too. Then a puffy, older lady with shoe-polish red hair waltzed in with a hand-sized recording machine which she put on the floor between the two benches. It was clear that she was a regular (the Muse?) when she got Brazilian-squeeze embraces from all of the musicians. Choro, it was clear, appeals to the widest band of Brazilian society.

The Contemporanea is filled with every Brazilian music instrument that exists. One flyer on the counter announced percussion lessons from Professor Tata, and the list comprised over 26 different noise makers. Another flyer was an application blank, with three pages of rules, for the submission of original Samba de Quadra songs and stating that the winning song would be used by one of the Samba Schools for next year’s carnival.

After 1 ½ hours of scintillating, sand-lot Choro, I slipped out of the room and made my way through the street detritus back to the subway and on to my next stop. (May 12, 2001 in São Paulo.)

(*) Choro is a Brazilian music genre (or just a style, according to some) which was immensely popular from about 1890 to 1920 both in Brazil and abroad. Similar music was written in France by the Groupe des Six (Eric Satie, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud et al; the latter actually came to Brazil and wrote a song for the 1916 carnival). In Brazil Ernesto Nazareth popularized the genre, and later, Pixinguinha, the greatest Choro artist, brought it to its apotheosis. Some of Scott Joplin's music owes a debt to Choro. Today Choro, in its various mutations, is the most played music in Brazil—call it the substrate of Brazilian popular music. Difficult to define--you just know it when you hear it.

Update: On Sunday afternoons the Municipality of São Paulo has been sponsoring three hours of Choro concerts in the square in front of the gloriously restored Teatro São Paulo in the Old Center of São Paulo. The concerts are free and feature the best Choro musicians from around the country.

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Frank Cherry is a Brazil-focused business consultant who has lived many years in Sao Paulo. He writes about aspects of Brazilian popular culture which are often under-appreciated at home and unknown abroad. Frank lives in New York City and his email is francischerry@earthlink.net