Although I major in History, my passion for history is considerably weaker than my passion for music. I have played piano and guitar since I was a kid and started getting into jazz around 9th grade. My high school jazz band was comprised of nerdy white kids like myself, but our director was an old black man from New Orleans. Such was the nature of Garfield High School, where white kids were bussed into the heart of Seattle’s blackest neighborhood. This eclectic mix gave Garfield an electric charge. Race and music are two essential components of my identity, and Garfield showed me that great things can happen when different cultures come together.
I spent two months this past summer in Brazil on a travel fellowship. Because Brazil has a history closely parallel to the United States, a trip there could offer insights to the music and cultures of both countries. Like the US, Brazil was a New World state with immense wealth of natural resources and access to cheap labor from West Africa. Slavery was so integral to these economic systems that it wasn’t abolished until 1863 in the US and 1888 in Brazil. The two nations entered a new era of racial interaction around the same time. The rhythmic traditions of West Africa preserved by slaves mingled with the orchestral traditions of Europe; the instruments, dance steps, and musical vocabulary of two “older” continents — Africa and Europe — coalesced to create new forms of music that would serve as outlets for lower-class black people of two “new” continents. In Brazil, choro and samba. In the US, blues and jazz.
I had no prior schooling in any Romance language, let alone Portuguese. I took classes in Brazil, to some avail. Brazilians are proud of their native tongue, and I ran into the language barrier on a daily basis. This quickly grew old, even as my Portuguese rapidly progressed. I took great solace, then, in two languages that don’t have much of a barrier: music and futebol. At my friend’s church my first week in Brazil, I had no idea what the pastor was saying, but I could sing along with the hymns. That weekend, at his feijoada party, I sat mostly in silence at the dinner table, but empathized as we watched my new friends’ favorite team Botafogo blow a 2-0 lead and lose the game to Cruzeiro.