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t is normally fast and has a fast beat and tempo.

Actually samba can also be slow. What makes it sound different from other types of music is the specific samba swing. By this I mean not speed or enery or tightness, but the fact that half of the notes in a bar always fall slightly off the beat, in a very consistant pattern. The swing stays the same throughout all of the instruments and variations of patterns, and is held by the melody too. It is the swing that gives samba its addictive feel. The samba swing is not the same as Jazz or latin swing, which have different offbeats.

The swing cannot be annotated by conventional means so you can't learn it by reading musical notation, but you can hear it clearly in samba recordings. It derives from the African origins of samba music, which grew out of a complex mix of African music, marches and the polka.

There is some great historical material on YouTube - try looking up anything by Clara Nunes, or Cartola. The modern samba schools in Rio play a much faster samba with more emphasis on percussion - you can also find these well illustrated on youtube - search for "ensaio tecnico na avenida". This bateria samba is so fast you can hardly hear the swing but it's there - without it the music would just sound like a march.

Not all Brazilian traditional music is samba, there are many other styles such as Maracatu and samba reggae which sound quite different, having a slightly different swing, different orchestration and a very different cultural tradition.

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13y ago

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