The healthy evolution of live music depends, and has always depended, on the mixture of existing traditions. Both jazz and samba emerged from the musical melting pot, combining styles which had extremely widely dispersed geographical roots. A central objective of the Favela Brass project is to teach our children the musical traditions of Rio de Janeiro and of New Orleans, hopefully laying the ground for the creation of new musical combinations further down the line
To that end, we recently hired a new teacher, French professional jazz drummer Emile Saubole, with a very specific mission – to research and analyse the traditional and more modern New Orleans brass band rhythms and pass this knowledge on to the children. The result of this focused teaching was evident yesterday during our show at the Junta Local food fair, where the children absolutely nailed the authentic New Orleans swing, playing the rhythms of a musical tradition that until now was pretty much unknown in Brazil as if it was the most natural thing in the world.