Brazil received more enslaved Africans than any other country in the Americas — approximately 4.9 million people between 1500 and 1888. The musical legacy of that history is the foundation of Brazilian musical identity.
THE ATLANTIC SYSTEM AND BRAZIL
Brazil received approximately 4.9 million enslaved Africans between the beginning of the Portuguese colonial period and the formal abolition of slavery in 1888 — more than any other country in the Americas. The enslaved population came predominantly from West and Central Africa: Yoruba (called Nagô in Brazil), Ewe-Fon (called Jeje), Bantu-speaking peoples from Angola and Congo. Each group brought distinct musical traditions, and the interaction of these traditions with each other, with Portuguese culture, and with Indigenous Brazilian cultures produced the Afro-Brazilian musical synthesis that forms the foundation of Brazilian music.
CANDOMBLÉ: SACRED MUSIC IN DIASPORA
Candomblé is an Afro-Brazilian religion that maintained Yoruba, Fon, and Bantu religious practices under the conditions of slavery — often concealing African orixás (divine spirits) behind the names of Catholic saints as a survival strategy. Its musical practices are among the best-preserved African-derived religious musical systems in the Americas.
Candomblé music uses a battery of three differently pitched atabaques (barrel drums, closely related to West African drums) to summon and welcome the orixás. Each orixá has specific rhythms, songs, colors, foods, and days associated with them; the music is not entertainment but liturgy. To perform the wrong rhythm for an orixá is not merely a musical error but a spiritual one.
Candomblé's survival shows how it maintained its structural integrity across centuries of oppression — a demonstration of music's capacity to carry cultural identity when other forms of cultural transmission were forcibly disrupted.
SAMBA: FROM QUILOMBO TO CARNIVAL
Samba — now internationally synonymous with Brazilian national identity — originated in the early twentieth century in Rio de Janeiro's Afro-Brazilian communities, above all in the homes of Bahian migrants around Praça Onze and Cidade Nova in the city centre, drawing on the batuque rhythmic traditions of Afro-Bahian culture and the rhythms of Candomblé.
The earliest documented samba recordings date from 1917. By the 1930s, samba had become a vehicle of national identity under the Vargas government — a process by which Black Brazilian culture was simultaneously celebrated and appropriated as a symbol of a mixed-race national identity that nonetheless marginalized Black Brazilians in practice.
The samba escolas (samba schools) of Rio de Janeiro's Carnival are large community organizations — some with thousands of members — that spend the entire year preparing for Carnival week. The bateria (percussion section) of a samba school, with dozens of percussionists playing surdo (bass drum), repique, tamborim, caixa, pandeiro, and cuíca, produces the most complex urban percussion ensemble sound in the world.
Samba's rhythmic texture, especially the tamborim and partido-alto patterns, contains asymmetric patterns related to the timeline logic of Cuban son, African-American jazz and West African music, pointing to the common Atlantic origin of these forms.
BOSSA NOVA AND BEYOND
Bossa nova, developed in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1950s by João Gilberto, Tom Jobim, and Vinícius de Moraes, refined samba's rhythmic complexity through a filter of US cool jazz and French impressionist harmony, creating one of the most influential popular styles of the twentieth century. Gilberto's guitar technique — where the right-hand thumb plays the surdo pulse in the bass while the fingers play syncopated samba chords — internalizes the entire rhythmic-harmonic structure of the music within one instrument.
The global success of bossa nova (particularly after the 1962 album "Jazz Samba" recorded by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd) is itself an ethnomusicological case study in how a Brazilian tradition traveled, transformed, and returned home transformed.
Música Popular Brasileira (MPB) — the broader category of sophisticated Brazilian popular music that developed in the 1960s through the work of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento, and others — represents a politically engaged, aesthetically rich synthesis of African-Brazilian rhythms, European harmony, and contemporary rock that remains one of the high-water marks of twentieth-century popular music.
CAPOEIRA: MUSIC, MOVEMENT, AND SURVIVAL
Capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial-art-dance-music complex of Bahia, is one of the clearest examples of how musical practice carries cultural memory under conditions of oppression. Developed by enslaved Africans and their descendants — combining Central African n'golo fighting techniques with rhythm-driven choreography that could be performed as dance to evade colonial prohibition of martial training — capoeira survived slavery, criminalization (it was outlawed by the 1890 penal code and only gradually legitimised from the 1930s), and marginalization to become a globally practiced cultural form. The roda (circle) of capoeira is structured by music: the berimbau (a single-string musical bow with a gourd resonator), the atabaque, the pandeiro, and the agogô bell together set the tempo and intensity of the game (jogo). Mestre Bimba (Manuel dos Reis Machado) and Mestre Pastinha (Vicente Ferreira Pastinha) were the twentieth-century masters who institutionalized capoeira angola and capoeira regional as the two principal living lineages.
MARACATU AND NORTHEASTERN BRAZILIAN TRADITIONS
Beyond Rio's samba and Bahia's Candomblé and capoeira, the Brazilian Northeast hosts some of the country's most distinctive Afro-Brazilian traditions. Maracatu — a percussion-driven processional tradition of Pernambuco — combines large drums (alfaias), agbê (rattles), and call-and-response singing in performances tied to ritual coronations of Black community leaders. Forró, the regional dance music of the Northeast, draws on Indigenous, African, and Iberian sources in a triangular accordion-zabumba-triangle ensemble. Mangue beat, developed in Recife in the 1990s by Chico Science and Nação Zumbi, brought maracatu's rhythmic vocabulary into contact with rock, hip-hop, and electronic production, demonstrating how Northeastern traditional materials remain generative within contemporary Brazilian popular music.
CHORO: THE INSTRUMENTAL ANCESTOR
Choro (also called chorinho, "little cry") is an instrumental popular music developed in Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteenth century — earlier than samba — combining European dance forms (polka, schottische, waltz) with African-derived syncopation and an emphasis on virtuosic improvisation. The traditional choro ensemble (regional) consists of flute, guitar (often a seven-string guitar), cavaquinho (a small four-string instrument resembling a ukulele), and pandeiro. Composers such as Pixinguinha (Alfredo da Rocha Vianna Filho, 1897–1973) and Jacob do Bandolim wrote bodies of work that constitute one of the highest accomplishments of Brazilian instrumental music. The choro tradition is often described as Brazil's equivalent of New Orleans early jazz, both in its historical timing and in its synthesis of European harmonic forms with African-derived rhythmic vocabulary.
MUSIC AND CITIZENSHIP IN MULTIRACIAL BRAZIL
The dialectic between celebration and marginalization that shapes the place of Afro-Brazilian music in national identity continues into the present. Carnival is simultaneously the largest celebration of Afro-Brazilian culture in the world and a context in which Black Brazilians frequently experience economic exploitation by predominantly white organizers and sponsors. Contemporary movements within the samba schools to assert Black community ownership of Carnival, and the work of artists such as Elza Soares and Karol Conká to address racism in Brazilian society through music, demonstrate that the political dimensions of Brazilian musical life remain live.
EXERCISE: RHYTHMIC ANALYSIS OF SAMBA
Find the surdo part in a samba school bateria recording (Smithsonian Folkways has excellent examples). The surdo plays on beats 2 and 4 of a four-beat measure. Now find the tamborim: its pattern is a syncopated figure built on sixteenth-note subdivisions (the teleco-teco). Count the interaction of these two instruments for thirty seconds. How does this relate to the West African timeline patterns analyzed in the African Music lessons?