Today being Ash Wednesday, the excesses of Carnival have come to an end, and forty days (not counting Sundays) of Lenten penitence that lead up to Easter are being observed by millions of people throughout Latin America.Of course, the Sambadrome of Rio de Janeiro is one of the most famous faces of Carnival in Latin America, the home of lavish pageantry and the center of the city’s famed, wild celebrations. But the Samba is only one of many, many musical forms used to express the exuberance of the season. The Samba is a tradition specific to the southern Brazilian cities of Rio and S?o Paulo, which also has a magnificent Sambadrome.In the city of Salvador, Bahia, mobile sound stages with massive speaker systems emit the sounds of the local Axé rhythm-based musical genre, or perhaps the sounds of Samba-reggae or Arrocha, which derives from popular regional musical dance styles of Seresta and Brega. The African-derived Condomblé religion has strongly influenced the music of this region.In Recife, in northeastern Brazil, frevo music is accompanied by a distinctive, fast-paced, acrobatic style of dance that evolved from the fighting style of capoeira, while maracatu groups put on performances involving impressive drumming, a singing chorus, dancers, stock characters that include the king and queen, the African traditional calunga doll, Afro-Brazilian Condomblé, and mockery of the Baroque Portuguese royal court.Moving yet further north into the Caribbean, the sounds that ring out during Carnival are of Afro-Caribbean melodious steel drumming, along with its descendant, soca, which combines many newer sounds such as reggae, R&B, and DJ. It is interesting to note that it was the outlawing of stick fighting and African percussion that brought about the melodic steel drum sounds that are such familiar icons of The Islands today. The slaves who were brought over by the French were also originally banned from participating in Carnival, so they created their own festival called Canboulay, which later became part of the distinctive celebration that has spread throughout the Caribbean.
These themes of breaking prohibitions and turning social customs upside down are a big part of what Carnival is all about, and they play an important role in the histories of all Latin American countries, whether it was Black Africans who were brought to the New World as slaves or indigenous people who were forced to accept the status quo of European Colonialism that enslaved them to impoverishment. The Carnival season has offered a welcomed opportunity to these communities to use satire and burlesque performance to express dissent in an explosion of mischievousness and mockery while celebrating cultural heritage that has often been undermined and discouraged by the colonial powers and the social structures that replaced them. Moving from the Caribbean westward to Mexico and Central America, Carnival represents a celebration of regional cultural pride. Heading further south, the issue of social status again rises up in a playful way in Colombia, where Carnaval de Negros y Blancos celebrates one day of people painting their faces black and on the next, white cream and talc paint everyone in the crowd white, so that in the end, blacks and whites are really brothers and sisters in one big human family. Distinctively Colombian music and dance styles include garabato, torito folk dancing, and sultry cumbia. Comparsas are musical performance groups that are specifically associated with Latin American Carnival celebrations that get back once again to African roots, and include the famous Cuban conga lines. In Uruguay, the comparsas de negros y lubulos again pick up on the theme of reversal of traditional social positions, as whites paint their faces black and join in the candombe drumming and dancing street parades that have their roots in Africa.Murgas, Humoristas, Parodistas, and Revistas are musical theater traditions that are very popular in Uruguay during Carnival season as well as appearing in Carnival celebrations in other South American locations such as Argentina and Colombia.View the original article here
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