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By Root 2281 0

Cornell, would say half seriously that Feynman was drawn to drumming because it was a noisy, staccato activity, because he had long fingers, and because it went with being a magician. But Morrison also noticed how freakish Western classical music had become by the twentieth century in one respect: of all the world’s musical traditions, the West’s had most decisively cast out improvisation. In Bach’s era mastery of the keyboard still meant combining composer, performer, and improviser in one person. Even a century later, performers felt free to experiment with improvising cadenzas mid-concerto, and Franz Liszt toward the end of the nineteenth century gave concertgoers a taste of the athletic thrill of hearing music made up on the spot as fast as a pianist could play, hearing impromptu variations and embellishments along with the false steps and blind alleys from which the performer-composer would have to extricate himself like Houdini. Improvisation meant audible risk and wrong notes. In modern practice an orchestra or string quartet that plays a half-dozen wrong notes in an hour is judged incompetent.

Having resisted the MIT version of Western culture for engineers, having rejected the liberal arts version of culture at Cornell, Feynman finally began his own process of acculturation in Brazil. Travel for most Americans, physicists included, still began with the capitals of Europe, where Feynman never ventured until he was thirty-two and a conference brought him to Paris. In the streets of Rio he discovered a taste for the Third World and especially for the music, the slang, and the art that was not codified in books or taught in school—at least not American schools. For the rest of his life he preferred traveling to Latin American and Asia. He soon became one of the first American physicists to tour Japan and there, too, headed quickly for the countryside.

In Rio Feynman found a living musical tradition—rhythm-centered, improvisational, and hotly dynamic. The word samba was nowhere to be found in his Encyclopaedia Britannica, but the sound rattled through his windows high above the beach, all brass, bells, and percussion. Brazilian samba was an African-Latin slum-and-ballroom hybrid, played in the streets and nightclubs by members of clubs facetiously called “schools.” Feynman became a sambista. He joined a local school, Os Farçantes de Copacabana, or, roughly, the Copacabana Burlesquers—though Feynman preferred to translate farçantes as “fakers.” There were trumpets and ukuleles, rasps and shakers, snare drums and bass drums. He tried the pandeiro, a tambourine that was played with the precision and variety of a drum, and he settled on the frigideira, a metal plate that sent a light, fast tinkle in and around the main samba rhythms, the mood shifting from explosive abstract jazz to shameless pop schmaltz. At first he had trouble mastering the fluid wrist torques of the local players, but eventually he showed enough competence to win assignments on paid private jobs. He thought he played with a foreign accent that the other musicians found esoteric and charming. He played in beach contests and impromptu traffic-stopping street parades. The climactic event in the yearly samba calendar was Rio’s carneval in February, the raucous flesh-celebrating festival that fills the nighttime streets with Cariocas half naked or in costume. In the 1952 carneval, amid the crepe paper and outsized jewelry, with revelers hanging from streetcars whose bells regurgitated the samba beat, a photographer for a local version of Paris Match snapped a carousing American physicist dressed as Mephistopheles.

As hard as he threw himself into life in Rio, he was lonely there. His ham-radio link was not enough to keep in touch with the fast-changing edge of postwar physics. He heard from hardly anyone, not even Bethe. That winter he drank heavily—enough to frighten himself one day into swearing off alcohol one more time, for good—and picked up women on the beach or in nightclubs. He haunted the Miramar Hotel’s outdoor patio bar, where he socialized