Yesterday was the centenary of birth of Luiz Gonzaga, without a doubt one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century in Brazil. Gonzaga popularized the music of the northern-eastern countryside of Brazil like no other, at a time when the rest of the country did not pay much attention to this poor, dry, forgotten region. The style almost singlehandedly brought to the rest of the country by Luiz Gonzaga is called baião, which is the original variant of the now very popular style forró, now enjoyed and danced by scores of young and not-so-young people of different social backgrounds and all over Brazil. (It is very popular among the youth of middle and upper classes in cities such as Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which according to some has led to a regrettable transformation of the original northern-eastern origins of the music.) Luiz Gonzaga was the one who defined the still now official instrumental composition of a forró band: accordion (Gonzaga himself was an accordionist), zabumba (bass drum, played standing) and metal triangle; he also composed all the great classics of the genre. Because of the accordion, baião and forró sound a bit like European folk music (say, Irish folk music), and also Cajun music.
It is difficult to choose just a few songs by Luiz Gonzaga to post here (I am myself a huge fan of forró, both to dance and to listen to), so here are four classics: ‘Asa Branca’, the uber forró classic (a very sad song about how drought drove people away from their home lands in the northeast), ‘Vem morena’ (with a very fast beat), ‘Cintura fina’ (a bit more mellow), and ‘Xote das meninas’. They all date back to the 1940s and 1950s, and remain among everyone’s favorites.
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