The saxophonist Inaldo Cavalcante de Albuquerque, known as Spok, founded the SpokFrevo Orquestra in the 1990s.
Photo: Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesBy BEN RATLIFF
OCT. 26, 2014
Frevo, the fast and fizzy music from the city of Recife in northeastern Brazil, could be explained as one of jazz’s distant cousins. It developed through street parades around the end of the 19th century, linked to national holidays and carnival season. It came out of military-band maneuvers and a spirit of intense competition in a Catholic town. It expresses itself through two-beat marches, call-and-response patterns among horn sections, and dances involving umbrellas. It has its standard repertory and its innovators. All that sounds familiar, if you’ve heard about early jazz in New Orleans.
But it had a lot of competition among styles of popular music in Brazil through the 20th century. Unlike samba — or jazz, up here — it mostly stayed within its function and its region, and never reached the center of its country’s musical expression or its recording industry. That imbalance became an opening for Inaldo Cavalcante de Albuquerque, known as Spok, the bandleader who started his own frevo orchestra in the late 1990s, and has used it more like a jazz orchestra, a laboratory for arranging and improvising.
read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/arts/spokfrevo-orquestra-plays-at-jazz-at-lincoln-center.html?_r=1
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