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Abstract
This paper will argue that jazz emerges as samba’s kindred foil in Brazilian popular music discourse of the 1940s and 1950s. Eager to underscore “blood” ties between idealized samba do morro and early blues and jazz, contributors to journals such as Diretrizes and Revista da Música Popular nonetheless tended to equate postwar bebop and big band with the menacing venality of the US music industry and the “vulgar” fandom to which it was associated. It was amidst such critical ambivalence toward jazz that bossa nova arrived on the scene, acutely vulnerable to accusations not just of appropriation but also servile imitation and therefore second-hand “decadence.”
Notes
1. For an insightful analysis of Phono-Arte's enduring impact and importance, see Nunes Frota Citation2003, 91–8.
2. In interwar Cuba, the lack of a centralized, economically viable culture industry (records, cinema, radio) comparable to that of Brazil led to an exodus of performers to the United States, Mexico and elsewhere, thereby undermining attempts by ruling regimes to fully ‘nationalize’ forms such as rumba and son. See Robin Moore, Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997); and Leonardo Acosta, Cubano Be, Cubano Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba (Washington: Smithsonian, 2003). In the case of Argentina, where a state-culture apparatus loosely comparable to Brazil’s did exist during the 1930s and 1940s, the general disavowal of race as a constitutive category of national identity made the promotion of tango a fundamentally different endeavor from that of samba. See Garramuño Citation2011; Jason Borge, ‘Dark Pursuits: Race and Early Argentine Jazz Criticism’, Afro-Hispanic Review 30.1 (2011); and Matthew B. Karush, Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920–1946 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
3. For information on jazz culture in Argentina, for example, see Sergio Pujol, Jazz al sur: la música negra en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1992). For an overview of pre-war jazz culture in Chile, see Chapter One of Álvaro Menanteau, Historia del jazz en Chile (Santiago: Ocho Libros, 2006). For keen insights into the overlap of swing, big band and contemporaneous Cuban forms, see Acosta, op. cit.
4. See Cláudia de Oliveira, As Pérfidas Salomés: a representação do pathos do amor em Fon-Fon! e Para todos...--1907–1930 (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, 2008).
5. As early as 1932, Mário de Andrade recognized the importance that music played in Vargas’s political vision. ‘[The president] is a highly musicalized being’, he wrote. ‘Music obsesses him’ (Citation1976, 267).
6. Lisa Shaw writes that ‘[t]he turnaround in the portrayal of the malandro [in sambas of the late 1930s] is, without doubt, the clearest example of [the] cooption of the state’ (Citation1999, 37).
7. Magno Bissoli Siqueira has observed that the ‘whitening’ of samba was both ideological, a strategy meant to reinforce the widespread notion that blacks were inferior to whites, and also economic, since it effectively kept Afro-Brazilian labor out of radio stations and recording studios (Citation2012, 166–7).
8. In the first issue of the short-lived but influential avant-garde journal, Andrade’s manifesto named the ‘Jazz-Band’ one of the pillars of Brazilian Modernism ‘[Ours] is the age of the Oito Batutas, of the Jazz Band, of Chicharrão, Charlie Chaplin, Mutt and Jeff. The Age of Construction. The Age of KLAXON’ (Citation2002, 264).
9. Andrade’s comparison of jazz and the minstrel tradition, though essentialist, is not without some basis. Simon Frith has noted that in minstrelsy ‘black Americans became coded as the “other” of lower-middle-class relaxation, a source of musical access to one’s heart and soul less daunting than bourgeois concert forms’, a process later to be repeated in the consumption of jazz (Citation1988, 49).
10. While lauding choro and samba for their creative synthesis of African and European styles, Freyre, in a crônica from the early 1920s, declared jazz ‘barbarous’, and full of ‘sensuality without a single note of grace or spirit’ (Citation1978, 155). Like the United States itself, Freyre suggested, ‘the “whoof-whoof” of jazz-bands’ expressed a puerile, commercialized and spiritually lacking quality to which Brazilian listeners and spectators were particularly vulnerable (156–7).
11. As early as 1932, Villa-Lobos served as the director of Vargas's Superintendência de Educação e Artística (Vianna Citation1999, 133n). In 1937 he composed the score for Humberto Mauro's iconic film O descobrimento do Brasil, a patriotic product of the Instituto Nacional do Cinema Educativo (National Institute of Educational Film), or INCE (Williams Citation2001, 71–2), and in 1940 he presided over state-sponsored samba rehearsals in the Quitungo favela (Vianna Citation1999, 92). Though his relationship with the Estado Novo was considerably more strained than Villa-Lobos’s, Mário de Andrade also held prominent positions in the 1930s, for example directing São Paulo’s Department of Cultural Expansion (Stroud Citation2008, 137).
12. Florencia Garramuño has written that both samba and tango underwent complex processes of discursive ‘cleansing and modernization’ intended to make them symbols of national identity more palatable to elites in Brazil and Argentina (Citation2011, 22). Yet nationalist intellectuals in both countries did so ‘without abandoning their concern for heterogeneity and difference’, hence ‘the primitive became a vector of modernity’ (66).
13. For Miranda’s critics, the singer’s transformation at the hands of the US film industry endangered the nation’s frequently fragile sense of patriotism symbolized by samba. Hollywood thus gave global reach and visual form to what some saw as a betrayal of Brazil’s true essence. Tellingly, the distortions of Brazilian national identity brought to bear by the scripted ambiguity of Miranda’s pan-Latin picture personality were accompanied by the hybridization of samba at the hands of commercial rumba and, especially, big band jazz. That the perceived defilement of ‘pure’ Brazilian music played a central role in the controversy is evident by the way Miranda defensively responded to the cold reception given to her at Rio de Janeiro’s Cassino da Urca upon her first return to Brazil. The song ‘Disseram que eu voltei americanizada’ [They said I came back Americanized] (1940, written for Miranda by Luis Peixoto and Vicente Paiva) presents samba de morro as a touchstone of her maligned Brazilian identity.
14. For a general overview of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, including ample treatment of Brazil, see Darlene J. Sadlier, Americans All: Good Neighbor Cultural Diplomacy in World War II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012). For an analysis of Orson Welles’s Brazilian project, see Catherine L. Benamou, It’s All True: Orson Welles’ Pan-American Odyssey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
15. Perhaps mindful of not straying too far from estadonovista nationalism, A Cena Muda contributor Roberto Paulo Taborda announced in his first column (‘Jazz no cinema e no radio’) that he would be discussing ‘jazz groups from this country and others, as well as small crônicas comparing our “crooners” with those abroad, drawing comparisons [between the two]’ (Citation1942, 10).
16. Duque Filho 2007, 12–16; Ferrari Citation2008, 2–5.
17. Guinle’s Jazz Panorama appeared in print the same year as Sérgio Porto’s Pequena História do Jazz, a book heavily influenced by Ortiz Oderigo’s work.
18. Seigel Citation2009, 100. See also Sérgio Cabral, No Tempo de Ari Barroso (Rio de Janeiro: Lumiar 1993), 35–7.
19. Probably the most widely commented pan of the concert came from The New York Times’ John S. Wilson, who berated the ‘monotonous mush’ of the sound system and the ‘routine’ talent of the singers. Though Wilson praised the playing of guitarist Luis Bonfá and conceded that João Gilberto was ‘several notches’ above the rest of the singers, he lamented that Gilberto’s ‘extremely intimate style was lost in Carnegie Hall’ (Wilson Citation1962, 51). This view was echoed by Down Beat's Bill Coss, who also praised Gilberto while accusing the production of a distinct lack of professionalism (Dunn Citation2012, 264). Billboard, meanwhile, extensively quoted one of the show's sponsors, who maintained that the audience's reaction to the concert was ‘extremely good’, even if the large number of musicians involved in the show, many of them last-minute bookings, made for a somewhat crowded – and expensive – spectacle (Chase Citation1962, 16).
20. Harb Bollos’s exhaustive survey of Brazilian periodicals suggests that negative reviews of the concert were focused as much on Wilson’s Times piece as the show itself. Of the eyewitness accounts, the most authoritative was probably that of O Globo jazz writer Sylvio Tullio Cardoso. According to Cardoso, the concert, even if ‘far from perfect’, was nevertheless a ‘most significant success’ (Harb Bollos Citation2010, 181–2).
21. For Tinhorão, Johnny Alf was a ‘Brazilian mulatto with an American name’; Vinícius de Moraes, ‘unknown’ until his emergence as a Bossa Nova lyricist (a statement that was patently false: Moraes was by the 1940s already a celebrated poet), was pilloried for having written a fox-trot in 1933 (‘Dor de uma saudade’) that ‘imitates North American rhythms’; João Gilberto, Tinhorão reminded his readers, would soon become a US citizen (20); and Baden Powell, another turncoat, was further impugned for his name, ‘which comes from his father’s alienated admiration’ for British imperialism (21). Yet the critic saved his choicest vitriol for the Afro-Brazilian singer and guitarist Bola Sete. ‘Physically [...] not so different from a gorilla’, Tinhorão wrote, Bola Sete ‘monkeyed around’ with his guitar in a way that ‘transformed Carnegie Hall for the first time in its history into a veritable ‘zoo’’ (Citation1963a, 12).
22. Ostensibly lamenting samba’s demise due to the corrupting influence of jazz, ‘Influência do jazz’ sounded more like an ironical treatise of cultural integrity than it did a death knell. While traditional samba was under siege by the ‘modern’ complexities symbolized by jazz, Lyra suggested, at stake was not the survival of samba per se but rather the symbolic power and stability of samba within the national imaginary.