Why is This Country Dancing?: A One-Man Samba to the Beat of Brazil - Softcover

Kirch, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0815412614 ISBN 13: 9780815412618

Publisher: Cooper Square Press, 2003

Synopsis

Details the major aspect of Brazilian popular music and its relation to the formation of national identity in Brazil including a wealth of in-depth musical history about such sub-genres as choro, bahia, bossa nova, axe music, Brazilian jazz, and a retrospective on leading musicians. There are extensive portraits on great singers, composers like Antonio Carlos Jobim ("Girl from Ipanema"), and Americans such as Lyle Mays, Herbie Mann who have long been associated with Brazil's music.

About this title

About the Author:

John Krich's travel and sports writing, reportage and fiction, have appeared in Mother Jones, Vogue, Sports Illustrated, the Village Voice, Image, Commentary, California, The New York Times and many others. His novel on the private life of Fidel Castro, A Totally Free Man, won a Special Citation, PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award. He leaves his luggage in San Francisco.

From Publishers Weekly:

Over the course of three years during the late 1980s, Krich ( El Beisbol ) traveled from Rio to Sao Paulo to Sao Luis to Bahia to Recife to tiny Exu to create this uneven travelogue. In keeping with Brazil's famed fertility, each town has its own sound: some, such as samba , bossa nova and lambada , are well known; others, like carimbo , forro and baiao , are not. Most are represented in mini-discographies after each chapter called "Music to Read By." Those three years translated into three carnivals as well, in Bahia, Recife/Olinda and Rio, though Krich participates in the latter, as most Brazilians do, only through the overwrought television coverage. But it is the musicians who steal the show, men mostly who have combined music from Brazil's European, aboriginal and, above all, African roots with lyrics from the country's experiences of poverty, segregation, dictatorship and torture. Brazil is colorful enough (witness Alma Guillermoprieto's straightforward but interesting book, Samba ) without Krich's hyper-tinted prose, a collection of the pleonastic ("decadent decay"), the scatological (" samba of the 'Turd World' ") or just simplistic ("Brazilian television, like Brazilian culture, is fixed somewhere around the third grade.").
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cooper Square Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0815412614
• ISBN 13: 9780815412618
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328