Maracatu
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Maracatu de baque virado is procession music for a drum battery and a chorus with essentially no harmony instruments: a wall of alfaias — rope-tuned wooden bass drums with goatskin heads, struck with short thick mallets — lays down a heavy swung duple pattern whose accents lean behind the beat so the groove feels dragged and enormous, while caixas and taróis (snares) chatter on top, the gonguê (a large iron double bell) rings the timeline, and mineiros and ganzás hiss underneath; the mestre calls out a loa in a strained, high, carrying chest voice and the whole nação answers in blunt unison chorus, so the melody lives entirely in the voices and everything else is drum, iron and rattle, at a slow-to-mid tempo that a costumed royal court can walk to; the rural cousin, maracatu de baque solto (also called maracatu rural), is faster, looser and brighter, adding brass, a rabeca fiddle, cuíca and improvised sung verse traded between mestres.
History
Maracatu nação grew out of the colonial coronations of Kings and Queens of Congo in Pernambuco, where Afro-Brazilian brotherhoods paraded a royal court through Recife and Olinda; each nação is a community organization tied to a terreiro of Xangô or Jurema Sagrada, carrying a calunga doll that holds ancestral presence, a porta-estandarte, baianas and the drum battery, and the oldest surviving groups — Nação Elefante, whose Dona Santa reigned as queen until her death in 1962, Leão Coroado under Mestre Luiz de França, and Estrela Brilhante do Recife, founded in 1906 — carry that line unbroken despite decades of police repression that treated the processions as disorder; folklorists including Mário de Andrade and the American Katarina Real documented the nações through the mid-twentieth century, and in the rural sugar zone around Nazaré da Mata mestres such as Salustiano built the parallel baque solto tradition; the commercial breakthrough came with Maracatu Nação Pernambuco, founded in Olinda in 1989 with a fixed touring lineup, whose Batuque da Nação (1992) was billed as the first record devoted entirely to maracatu and who went on to work with Sérgio Mendes and tour Europe and the United States; Recife's mangue beat movement then made the alfaia a national sound when Chico Science & Nação Zumbi welded it to rock, funk and hip-hop on Da Lama ao Caos (1994) and Afrociberdelia (1996), setting off a boom of new nações, percussion schools and maracatu groups from São Paulo to Europe and Japan, and Siba's Fuloresta do Samba took the baque solto repertoire into contemporary Brazilian songwriting; IPHAN registered maracatu nação as Patrimônio Cultural do Brasil in the Livro das Formas de Expressão in 2014.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- Cheguei, Meu Povo(2002) — Maracatu Nação Estrela Brilhante do RecifeSpotifyYouTube
- Morô Omim Má(2002) — Maracatu Nação Estrela Brilhante do RecifeSpotifyYouTube
- O Mestre Luiz de França(2018) — Maracatu Nação Leão CoroadoSpotifyYouTube
- Nação de África, Nação de Mina(2018) — Maracatu Nação Leão CoroadoSpotifyYouTube
- Baque de Guerra(2023) — Nação do Maracatu Porto RicoSpotifyYouTube
- Princesa dos Orixás(2023) — Nação do Maracatu Porto RicoSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- IPHAN, "Maracatu Nação" (Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional, registered 2014), https://bcr.iphan.gov.br/bens-culturais/maracatu-nacao/
- Larry Crook, "Brazilian Music: Northeastern Traditions and the Heartbeat of a Modern Nation" (ABC-CLIO, 2005)
- Instituto Cultural Cravo Albin, "Maracatu Nação Pernambuco," Dicionário Cravo Albin da Música Popular Brasileira, https://dicionariompb.com.br/termo/maracatu-nacao-pernambuco/
- Governo de Pernambuco, "Nação Porto Rico no baque das ondas" (Portal da Cultura de Pernambuco), https://www.cultura.pe.gov.br/canal/carnaval/nacao-porto-rico-no-baque-das-ondas/