Why are samba capoeira chants and santeria significant to study and appreciate in jazz?

Answer 1

The question itself points in many different directions.

Jazz musicians have long been ethno-sponges. Though our persistent will to categorize will always generate debate as to "what is and what isn't", there is little question that musicians themselves often look for ways to expand their horizons, or at least their tools. From a purely technical standpoint we may survey the global scene from a Borg-ist drive to assimilate.

From a more anthropological perspective, there is the fascinating development of parallel histories based on African traditions mutating within new circumstances.

Call and response forms, field hollers, dance/fight games, various tensions between secular and non secular contexts, all were present in one way or another across "the new world". IE places where slaves were brought. But the specific forms and their evolutions vary.

(including of course, the very means of music making---what remained the berimbau in Bahia became the banjo in the southern US, or so goes one history.)

I will answer pursuant to my own primary interest.

Initially however, i think we need to tease out important distinctions between participants and performers. My understanding is that the relationship between dancers and musicians in live settings is more dialogical, or dialectical perhaps in many African traditions than in the contemporary US. That is to say, it is a "dancing with" rather than a "dancing to".

My suggestion is that we cant speak of , say, capoeira chants/music distinct from the movement form itself.

(Clearly i am focusing here on a particular subdivision of the question. Santeria's Yoruban cousin in Brazil is Candomble, which has all sorts of intersections with capoeira. However, it is the irreducible form of Capoeira movement/Capoeira music that i will henceforth try and attend to)

Jazz in the US has (in general) mutated into something which, though requiring intense and active listening engagement, is largely performed to a seated audience.

These days, Capoeira music is indeed listened to in car and home stereos and perhaps even at concert halls, just as capoeira moves can be seen in movies and MTV videos and advertisements, as we see the classic process of divorce from the signifier and the signified . But still, the dominant form of the music is one of absolute symbiosis with the movement form.

Thus i think we must speak of capoeira as a single multi faceted entity. Though, as i initially suggested, one might indeed listen to, for instance, a berimbau player strictly to exploit the marvelous use of variation and timbral nuance ( or whatever...) , it is when considering the entire capoeira experience with an eye/ear towards parallels in the North American development of jazz my own interest becomes particularly stimulated.

END OF CHAPTER ONE