The physical expression of Brazilian capoeira features an intriguing combination of playfulness and aggression that practitioners navigate with malícia-the ability to be deceptive. Expressions of malícia in capoeira include attitudes, utterances or actions devised to confuse, distract or mislead the opponent and onlookers, resulting in an improvement of one's position during the physical game. This article explores musical structures connected to malícia and argues that in promoting competition between those engaged in the physical game, musicians bring malícia to the foreground of the musical domain. Because capoeira's music is groove based and patterned at all levels of structure, this study uses periodicity and variation as the main categories of analysis, focusing on how musicians, singers and those playing the physical game manipulate or relate to patterns, variations and tempo at different levels of structure in order to display malícia.

Chapter 2 provides the book’s theoretical foundations by positioning tropes of Africanness as central to the analysis of musical constructions of diasporic identities. After introducing six well-known tropes—rhythmicity, percussiveness, embodiment, spirituality, spontaneity, and collectivism—with the baggage and symbolism attached to them, it presents their role in the debate of African survivals. By interpreting early writings on Africanisms, Paul Gilroy’s concept of anti-anti-essentialism, and Steven Feld’s notion of interpretive moves, this chapter argues for the importance of taking seriously musicians’ ideas and rhetoric about essentialisms as well as the ways in which they materialize them in sound, musical structure, and performance practices. This implies an analytical shift of focus from Africanisms as cultural imponderables to tropes of Africanness that are rhetorically asserted and overtly manifested, enabling better understandings of diasporic cultural creation and people’s agency.

This book discusses how musicians from Bahia, an emblematic African diasporic location in northeastern Brazil, think about, discuss, compose, rehearse, perform, and stage music inspired by what they perceive to be their own African ancestry. It argues that these musicians assert Afro-Brazilian identities and connect to the African continent and other diasporic places by creatively engaging essentialized notions about African music and culture: instead of mechanically reproducing these tropes, they emphasize them or downplay them. The book theorizes these preconceived notions about African music, culture, and performance as tropes of Africanness, emphasizing that they exist in two interrelated realms: as essentialist ideas in discourse and as concrete practices and sounds. Six commonly encountered tropes of African music are analyzed: the notions that its most important parameter is rhythm and that it is dominated by percussion; that it is meant to be danced to or deeply embodied rather than intellectualized; that it always touches on the sacred; that it is spontaneous and improvisatory; and that it reflects communalism rather than individualism. Through four case studies from Bahia (a jazz big band called Orkestra Rumpilezz, a symphony orchestra called the Orquestra Afrosinfônica, and two berimbau orchestras led by capoeira practitioners), the book demonstrates the nuances of musical creation in the African diaspora, acknowledging the genuine impact that essentialisms have on Bahian music while showing that they may not be an essential part of the musicians’ African roots.

This conclusive chapter compares and contrasts the ways in which the musicians and ensembles discussed in the book approach the tropes: sometimes emphasizing them, at others downplaying them, and at yet other times interrupting them. It presents the implications of this study for diaspora studies, Afro-diasporic religion, and the erudite/popular divide in Brazil. It closes by arguing that a conscious and disciplined study of African tropes enables researchers to discover that variety in African diasporic creation is limitless and enables musicians to access an expanded range of musical expression.

No abstract

Chapter 4 continues the discussion of Orkestra Rumpilezz, focusing on how it materializes Letieres Leite’s rhetoric about African rhythmic complexity. Two strategies for increasing rhythmic complexity are discussed: the transfer of drum patterns from Candomblé to the big band to form polyphonic textures; and the transformation of traditional timelines (clave-like patterns) borrowed from Candomblé and carnival music, including rotation (shifting the timeline’s reference point), truncation, and superimposing two versions of the same timeline, a phenomenon that is labeled staggered timeline alignment. The chapter theorizes unique cases of timeline usage, comparing and contrasting them with well-known studies of clave in other parts of the black Atlantic.

Chapter 1 provides a background on Afro-Bahian history, religion, politics, and musical activism focusing on two questions: How did Bahia emerge as an epicenter of African diasporic culture in Brazil and the black Atlantic? And what are the implications of this image for the study of tropes of Africanness? The discussion touches upon the specific practices and realms from which perceived Africanness emanates, including carnival percussion ensembles linked to black consciousness and, especially, the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion, which agglutinates Brazil’s most evocative African symbols, images, and sounds. Additionally, racial relations and the complicated relationship between African-based identities and national consciousness are discussed.

No abstract