ABSTRACT
The last three decades of the twentieth century witnessed vibrant new musical and cultural currents flowing from two of Brazil’s principal cities—Salvador da Bahia and Recife, Pernambuco. During the 1970s and 1980s, a renaissance of black musical activity centered in Salvador da Bahia emerged from the more general context of a growing black consciousness movement in Brazil. The confluence of social, political, economic, and cultural factors came to a critical juncture in 1988 during Brazil’s official celebrations marking the centenary of the abolition of slavery in the country. Calling attention to what they believed to be an unbroken history of deep-seated racial discrimination in the country, Afro-Brazilian political and cultural groups throughout the country held demonstrations to counter Brazil’s official celebrations of 1988. In Salvador da Bahia, widely acknowledged as the country’s most “African” city, coordinated pressures from several sectors of the black community caused the government to cancel its official celebrations. Key among those protesting were the city’s black Carnival groups (blocos afro) whose musical style—widely dubbed samba-reggae—had become a strategic resource for asserting black collective identity. Drawing on Afro-Brazilian musical heritage as well as African and black diasporic musical forms including Jamaican reggae, bloco afro groups such as Olodum and Ilê Aiyê ushered in a new musical era with transnational implications. Within the popular music industry of Brazil, Salvador’s bloco afro groups—and other manifestations of the city’s black cultural renaissance—garnered media attention and spawned a nationally and internationally recognized style of world music called axé music.
