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Year 1933: in the city of Campinas there was only an Italian-Brazilian band. This band did not accept Blacks in its ranks. In this same year, a group of Black musicians founded the Campinas corporation for colored men. The band exists up to today; the other one changed its name.
Every Friday, at no. 127 Luzitania street, they ceremoniously meet to talk about their lives, their families, their anguishes, their difficulties and their past.
Every Friday, they meet to rehearse songs that they will play as a band, even if no gigs have been scheduled. Every Friday they rehearse songs that they all know and have played for a long time.
They are approximately twenty musicians and more than half of them are retirees, part of the second generation – the legacy continues.
Considered by Darcy Ribeiro as transplanted peoples, the blacks were brought from Africa to America since the 16th century as slaves to do manual work. They came from different regions and spoke different languages. They were crowded unto slave ships and then taken to plantation quarters to live in sub-human conditions. Their very diverse cultures and fragmented way of life forced them to accept standards imposed by the dominant class, the White Europeans. They learned the latter’s language and progressively lost their original identity. Cultural change whittled away their values, robbing them of their memory. Nevertheless, their imaginary survives up to present day.
In some regions of the country, religious syncretism, a blend of Catholicism and African rituals has allowed the continuation throughout the centuries of slavery up to present time of an Afro-Brazilian religion that preserves the voices of the Orisha as well as the rhythmic musicality of their drums.
The assimilation of dominant values was due to a greater or lesser extent to the economic cycle in which the blacks were caught up.
The city of Campinas, the former vila de São Carlos grew due to the development of the coffee cycle. This period coincided with the abolition of slavery. As is known, in the years prior to the end of slavery, the flow of slaves diminished. During this period, the major wave of Italian immigration occurred, thus becoming competition for the recently freed slaves on the coffee plantations.
Freed and abandoned, they were no match to compete with the productivity of European immigrants, accustomed to selling their labour. The immigrants would sign much more advantageous labor contracts and land leases. The Blacks, rejected in the fields, would migrate to the cities to form the urban proletariat in a growing industrial city.
In this context, their identity, already broken up and reworked by slavery, would become even more diluted in the complex social fabric of urban modernity. It is against this backdrop that the need for Black musicians to incorporate the musicality of the dominant group, so as to create their own alternative, organised and autonomous space, must be understood.
Today, Campinas is a city of over one million inhabitants. It is essentially an industrial city, in which much research on state of the art computer technology, telephony, chemicals, nuclear physics, synchrontonic light, among others, is conducted. Parallel to its rich intellectual and artistic activity, Campinas preserves practices typical of small towns, for example, the “Folia de Reis” (king parades) and bands.
So, on Sundays we can observe on the orchestra stand in the public square, a band in all its formality, playing samba, popular songs, and marches. What is unique is that all the musicians are Black.
Eyes glazed over and mesmerised by the sombre nots of the tuba or by the maestro’s majestic conducting will not notice that among these remarkable men an energy circulates that is as strong as the very music: their identity as Black men constructed in the intimacy of daily life.
Year 2005: every Friday evening on Luzitania street the musicians meet to talk, laugh, complain, reminisce…. They come together through the music and they have done this religiously for seventy years.
This photographic essay is built around two frameworks brought together in constructing this group’s identity: negritude-musicality and body-instrument. It is nothing more than a portrait of the metonymic extension between the body and instrument, a relation of passion.
Fernando de Tacca is a photographer and professor at the Department of Media and Communication, State University of Campinas. He was Brazilian visiting professor at the Department of Foreign Studies, Osaka, Japan (1995-97) and professor of Brazilian studies at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina/2004. Editor of the journal, Revista Studium: http://www.studium.iar.unicamp.br.
The black musicians´ band
Every Friday, at no. 127 Luzitania street, they ceremoniously meet to talk about their lives, their families, their anguishes, their difficulties and their past.
Every Friday, they meet to rehearse songs that they will play as a band, even if no gigs have been scheduled. Every Friday they rehearse songs that they all know and have played for a long time.
They are approximately twenty musicians and more than half of them are retirees, part of the second generation – the legacy continues.
Considered by Darcy Ribeiro as transplanted peoples, the blacks were brought from Africa to America since the 16th century as slaves to do manual work. They came from different regions and spoke different languages. They were crowded unto slave ships and then taken to plantation quarters to live in sub-human conditions. Their very diverse cultures and fragmented way of life forced them to accept standards imposed by the dominant class, the White Europeans. They learned the latter’s language and progressively lost their original identity. Cultural change whittled away their values, robbing them of their memory. Nevertheless, their imaginary survives up to present day.
In some regions of the country, religious syncretism, a blend of Catholicism and African rituals has allowed the continuation throughout the centuries of slavery up to present time of an Afro-Brazilian religion that preserves the voices of the Orisha as well as the rhythmic musicality of their drums.
The assimilation of dominant values was due to a greater or lesser extent to the economic cycle in which the blacks were caught up.
The city of Campinas, the former vila de São Carlos grew due to the development of the coffee cycle. This period coincided with the abolition of slavery. As is known, in the years prior to the end of slavery, the flow of slaves diminished. During this period, the major wave of Italian immigration occurred, thus becoming competition for the recently freed slaves on the coffee plantations.
Freed and abandoned, they were no match to compete with the productivity of European immigrants, accustomed to selling their labour. The immigrants would sign much more advantageous labor contracts and land leases. The Blacks, rejected in the fields, would migrate to the cities to form the urban proletariat in a growing industrial city.
In this context, their identity, already broken up and reworked by slavery, would become even more diluted in the complex social fabric of urban modernity. It is against this backdrop that the need for Black musicians to incorporate the musicality of the dominant group, so as to create their own alternative, organised and autonomous space, must be understood.
Today, Campinas is a city of over one million inhabitants. It is essentially an industrial city, in which much research on state of the art computer technology, telephony, chemicals, nuclear physics, synchrontonic light, among others, is conducted. Parallel to its rich intellectual and artistic activity, Campinas preserves practices typical of small towns, for example, the “Folia de Reis” (king parades) and bands.
So, on Sundays we can observe on the orchestra stand in the public square, a band in all its formality, playing samba, popular songs, and marches. What is unique is that all the musicians are Black.
Eyes glazed over and mesmerised by the sombre nots of the tuba or by the maestro’s majestic conducting will not notice that among these remarkable men an energy circulates that is as strong as the very music: their identity as Black men constructed in the intimacy of daily life.
Year 2005: every Friday evening on Luzitania street the musicians meet to talk, laugh, complain, reminisce…. They come together through the music and they have done this religiously for seventy years.
This photographic essay is built around two frameworks brought together in constructing this group’s identity: negritude-musicality and body-instrument. It is nothing more than a portrait of the metonymic extension between the body and instrument, a relation of passion.
Fernando de Tacca is a photographer and professor at the Department of Media and Communication, State University of Campinas. He was Brazilian visiting professor at the Department of Foreign Studies, Osaka, Japan (1995-97) and professor of Brazilian studies at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina/2004. Editor of the journal, Revista Studium: http://www.studium.iar.unicamp.br.
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