Raimundo Sodré via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
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'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
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Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Raimundo Sodré
- City: Salvador, Bahia
- Country: Brazil
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Raimundo Sodré (the last name is pronounced “saw-DREY”) is one of the most fundamentally important musicians in Bahia...at the forefront of a handful of people who play a very African style of samba which predates and is a precursor to Rio-style samba, a style which could be said to be analogous to the blues in the United States (although far more rhythmic).
Bahian samba is samba-de-roda (roda is “circle”) and this samba dates back to when the Bantu slaves on Bahia's sugarcane plantations would gather into circles, clapping and singing, one slave inside the circle showing off is or her hottest moves. This was the slaves' manner of turning misery – for a short time anyway – into the elemental joy of simply being alive.
Raimundo is also heir to Luiz Gonzaga and Jackson do Pandeiro, last in a great triumvirate of masters of the moving music of the sertão), the hardscrabble backlands of Brazil's Nordeste, Northeast).
And interestingly, and in an essential and almost ironic way, Raimundo Sodré mirrors the history of the Nordeste. This is a man who has suffered at the hands of the influential (his career was kicked out from under him due to his criticism of a powerful government official during Brazil's dictatorship) and who is yet possessed of a soul which they haven't been able to grind into the backland's dusty red clay and destroy (in "A Massa" -- a song which swept Brazil -- he sings in the voice of those who work the earth (as a challenge and not as a lament): "...no cabo da minha enxada não conheço coroné (...at the handle of my hoe, the powerful are unknown to me").
Raimundo Sodré is the very definition of a soul survivor. If Bahia has anything like greatness it is because it is such fertile ground for producing people capable of weaving poetry out of poverty.
My Media & Markets
Matrix Music Player
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Sina de Cantador - Raimundo Sodré13 tracks58,014 plays | 10,745 views
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
