Cariocas de New Orleans: Brazilian Interpretations of North American Jazz

Abstract

This article focuses on three Brazilian accounts of jazz history and argues that North American music, often dismissed as a “foreign influence,” was an indispensable component of Brazilian national identity to many carioca intellectuals. These texts, “O Jazz: Sua crônica, seus homens e seus mistérios,” by Vinicius de Moraes; Jazz Panorama, by Jorge Guinle; and Pequena história do jazz, by Sérgio Porto, were written between 1951 and 1953 and give us a window into the ways popular music in Rio de Janeiro was being compared (and becoming comparable) to jazz throughout the twentieth century. They used jazz, envisioned through African American musicians in New Orleans, as a model to determine authentic and inauthentic forms of popular music. The idea that different genres, rhythms, harmonies, and lyrics could originate from similar social processes and be applied in new ways from a cultural and aesthetic point of view emerged as a critical approach in the works of Moraes, Guinle, and Porto (whose trajectories are closely analyzed in this article), foreshadowing future perspectives to socio-racial matters in Brazil and the United States.