While the best way to experience samba is by travelling to Brazil, living in the 21st century means that we have an insight, through recordings (both video and audio), books, and the Internet, into how samba sounds and feels. Despite its many forms and the style morphing into different sub-genres and fusions, samba, in its purest sense, is Carnaval music created to be experienced on the streets. Of course, there is no true substitute for experiencing a style of music in the environment in which it originally developed. This article will look more closely at this rhythmic sway and explore some methods for learning this style of music as authentically as possible, without actually travelling to Brazil. One example I gave was Brazilian samba, which has a very unique rhythmic sway that cannot be accurately notated in the traditional Western sense. In the last article, we discussed some of the reasons that many traditional folkloric musical styles don’t translate seamlessly when applying Western notation.
