Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [135]
Seeing the ceremony makes the connection between Candomblé and Salvador’s street music viscerally real to us. Two kinds of bands dominate the music scene, afoxés and blocos Afros. Both orient their year around the city’s Carnival, which is less formal and more robust in many ways than the same celebration in Rio. To prepare for the annual event, they rehearse publicly before live audiences, usually once a week and often in Pelourinho.
Afoxés basically perform a nonreligious rendition of Candomblé music, with a similar percussive rhythm and lyrics in a ritualized vein. The first afoxé joined Carnival in 1895, and a decade later, another of the groups broke the color barrier in the annual festivities, simply marching into the then segregated white parade. Today’s largest and best known afoxé is Filhos de Ghandy (Sons of Gandhi), formed in 1949 to honor the recently assassinated Indian leader and his spirit of peaceful resistance to oppression.
On a Sunday night, when the group rehearses, we happen to wander by their headquarters in Pelourinho. Hearing music, we hesitate outside, unsure whether it’s an open performance until a young man at the door motions us in. He leads us down a flight of stairs, crammed with people coming and going, and through a crowded bar out to a covered terrace where the band is playing. It looks much like the ceremonial space at the Candomblé service, down to the strips of fabric hanging from the ceiling, and the percussive beat and shuffle style of the dancing are nearly identical. When Carnival rolls around again, the Filhos will come out five thousand strong in Indian robes to celebrate this cadence and movement on the streets of the city.
Blocos Afros go several steps further in secularization. They maintain African roots as fully as the afoxés but adapt the ancient percussive rhythms to contemporary music. Dozens of them flourish in Salvador and some, especially Olodum (featured on Paul Simon’s The Rhythm of the Saints album), have achieved considerable commercial success and international recognition. One night in Pelourinho, we catch an Olodum performance at a fund-raising concert for a local food bank, paying an admission of a sack of sugar each. Twenty or so drummers, under the lead of a professional conductor, rock the concrete stage with such intensity you think it’s going to crack the floor. A young boy in front of us tries to keep up with the beat on an imaginary drum, banging it furiously with two empty water bottles. A Brazilian sports star, who we never identify, saunters in after us, signing autographs and shaking hands. He stands a head taller than anyone else, proudly displaying an extraordinary hairdo in synch with the vibrant music, a masterpiece of beads and woven rags in Day-Glo lime and fuchsia.
Strolling through Pelourinho on another evening near the end of our stay, we fall into step behind one of the newer blocos Afros, an all-woman ensemble called Dida that’s led by a former music director of Olodum. They move slowly down the street, playing as they go, toward a performance stage, stopping often and collecting an entourage of dancers and other enthusiastic followers. It’s a spontaneous party, bubbling with excitement. By now, we’re beginning to expect this kind of thing. It’s just another routine night in the hometown of Candomblé.
Our long-standing interest in Salvador derives, as you might guess, from the food, specifically the city’s great reputation for Creole cooking. In all bastions of Creole cuisine, the culinary tradition is closely tied to other aspects of the local culture, but we had no inkling of how in this case until now.
In the United States, people often take a narrow, parochial view of Creole food, associating it exclusively with New Orleans. This perspective even mutates into a fixation sometimes when a curious person tries to sort out clear and absolute differences between Creole and Cajun cooking in Louisiana. The two, in truth, are city and country cousins, related by virtue