For Carnaval 2023, Mestre Ciça has prepared a slightly slower tempo. The longest-serving drum master in Rio de Janeiro, he —together with directors and Carnaval partygoers — pulled the reins of the drums at Unidos do Viradouro, a samba school known for its agility and expressive snare drum section, under the nickname Red and white Hurricane. "The drums are tight, but with a more comfortable tempo", says Ciça. "I took it back a little so that the samba could evolve better on the avenue. I'm happy with the cadence of the drums. It's the school's proposal."
This movement has been intensifying in recent editions of the event— the reduction in the time of some drum sections and the return of plots more connected with the Brazilian people, with emphasis on the rescue of Afro-Brazilian memory. For Luiz Antônio Simas, historian, and co-author of the book "Samba de Enredo: História e Arte" ( Samba-plot: history and art) these are some of the reasons for a recent improvement in the new batch of samba-plots. "This year's Carnaval confirms a trend — a good plot is already halfway to a good samba," he says. "There was a period when the samba-plot was not very popular. We had a very big drop in quality." Simas links this decline, accentuated between the 1990s and 2000s, to the process of samba schools getting more professional, and the consequent selection of plots that privileged commercial agreements to the detriment of the interests of the public. It's a paradox — the sambas started to get worse as the schools got richer.
If the 1970s and 1980s marked a peak in the popularity of sambas-plots, driven by a thriving phonographic industry, the following two decades, broadly speaking and with exceptions, were not as brilliant. Scholars like Spirito Santo, in the book "Do Samba ao Funk do Jorjão" ("From samba to Jorjão's funk") also point to a creative stagnation in the drum section. "The spontaneity that the percussionist had in the past is gone — and I miss it. Today the parade is all planned out, in the past we used to gather 200 or so men, and off we went", says Ciça, aged 66, with more than half his life dedicated to leading Carnaval Drum sections.
It is a process of responding to the jury's criteria, which are increasingly technical, as the percussion directors work all year round to correct what was pointed out as an error at the previous Carnaval. In a certain way, the drum sections already come out with a ten, but with each detail pointed out as an error, they lose points.
"A cymbal, tambourine, or a ganzá that they think is being played ahead of time loses a point. So, that doesn't exist anymore in schools", says Ciça. "Today you do a tuning of the first marking and everything has to be the same. The judges today really take this into account. You have to play everything right, it can't fluctuate." Winning Carnaval, also a consequence of the inflow of money, became more important than having a samba-plot that people will sing along to. "We are hindered. The schools have become too professional. There are many rules within samba because the competition is at a high level. The drum sections have become too well-behaved."
The year 2012 was remarkable in this regard. Porto da Pedra paraded a sponsored plot, called "Yogurt, from the Ottoman Empire to the European Courts". "But at the same time, you have two samba-plots of exceptional quality — Portela, about Bahia, and Vila Isabel, about relations between Angola and Brazil. It has been improving over time, but there has been no turnaround. We can see some improvement taking shape."
Translated by Cassy Dias