MAGAZINES 
Duas Caipirinhas, por Favor
How a group of (mostly) Anglo musicians are bringing a little bit of Brazil to Colorado’s Front Range
It’s a quiet, uncharacteristically warm October evening in South Boulder. At a small coffeehouse called Caffè Solé in the Table Mesa Shopping Center, folks are ordering up their chai or mochas, wincing at laptops or chatting quietly around the counter. Thursday night, this is a mostly after-work crowd, not many students.
In the larger room on the café’s north side, a group of musicians sit incongruously around a couple of tables set together in the middle of the floor. They chat up a few of the locals and then start to play — seven-string guitar, a flute and two percussionists at first, a simple guitar figure drawn across unmistakably Latin chords, a gently skipping beat and a spry flute melody dancing across the top. It’s as simple and plaintive a live-music experience as one is ever likely to hear in Boulder, almost an afterthought.
And then their singer shows up; she opens a notebook with sheet music and takes her place at the circular stage, and starts to sing. In Portuguese. Within minutes, half the crowd is on their feet, swaying and smiling (and some singing along) to the mellifluous, gently intoxicating strains of Brazilian samba.
WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?
Caffè Sole has become a once-monthly regular gig for Ginga, the six-piece Boulder band specializing in Brazilian samba music. The group was assembled six years ago by flutist Greg LaLiberté and guitarist Francisco Marques (who plays the traditional cavaquinho, a half-scale guitar somewhat like a Latin mandolin) as a quartet playing at the St Julien hotel. But Ginga has taken on the thoroughly improbable image of a club-venue phenomenon, even in Denver, where the band does a once-monthly gig at the Mercury Café and hosts its annual Holiday Carnival Dec. 10.
Across Boulder at Pearl Street’s Laughing Goat coffeehouse, Ginga (pronounced zhin’-ga, roughly translated from Portuguese as “motion”) is hardly anyone’s idea of a well-kept secret. Instead of the roda de samba (“samba in the round”) that the band plays at Caffè Sole, Ginga has been staging a full-on show at the Goat on the first Thursday of every month for a couple of years. Still based in samba, one of Brazil’s foundational musical forms, the gig at the Goat is Ginga playing the samba pagode, the high-octane version—faster and more propulsive beats, full ensemble singing. The place gets so completely packed that its current owners have actually drawn up architectural plans and cost estimates to expand the venue into the space in back.
It’s pretty unusual for a venue to physically enlarge its space to accommodate a single band’s regular crowd, but when you have enough arms doing this and hips doing that, well, you need the space.
“We’ve heard from innumerable people that they don’t go anymore,” LaLiberté says, “because it’s so packed. Some people don’t like to dance like sardines squished together … but a lot of other people do!”
Or as Marques explains, quite matter-of-factly, “People just freak out at our shows. It’s the energy in the music; people just feel it.”
ONE COOL CAMP
Success didn’t happen overnight. LaLiberté and Marques jammed with a loose ensemble of local players after first gigging at the St Julien. They mixed up traditional Brazilian instrumentals in the choro style (built primarily around the seven-string guitar, with flute-based melodies and percussion) with other Latin forms, including some Venezuelan traditional music. The process became a vehicle of deep study for the two musicians. In time they invited percussionist Raoul Rossiter, drummer/percussionist Carl Dixon and guitarist Bill Kopper into the group because of their passion for Brazilian music and their top-flight skills as musicians.
Marques, who is Brazilian by birth but grew up with his Brazilian parents in the U.S., says that the band probably crossed their own musical Rubicon when they started attending the California Brazil Camp a few years ago. “It’s two one-week intensive workshops,” Marques explains, “where you go and hang with masters like Ivan Lins, who is like the Leonard Cohen of Brazilian music. Just world-class musicians, like [percussion maestro] Jorge Alabê. They fly these musicians direct from Brazil to the camp, and that’s where we first really got exposed to this samba pagode energy. The musicians would sit in a circle and go for three hours without stopping. There are people singing and clapping. And when we got a piece of that, we just felt like, ‘Oh, this is what we need to be doing.’ So it’s not so startling that people go absolutely nuts over this music, when it’s executed at a high level. You can’t just hack this stuff off.”
Both Marques and LaLiberté stress that the music, even in its simplest rendering, is fiendishly complex, especially the interlocking percussion lines. Their passion for the music comes not only from the sunny, liberating resonances that the music evokes, but also from its subtle and intricate mechanics. Much of that may be lost on a partying dance-floor audience, but is not lost on the musicians who have trained countless hours to get it just right.
LaLiberté, who is a classically trained woodwind player with a lengthy résumé extending from the Colorado Symphony Orchestra to Barry Manilow, taught himself traditional Brazilian percussion to perform with this group. He says that the attention to detail and authenticity is probably Ginga’s foundational ethic. “Oh yeah, all the variations and the interplay we have … that only comes through having studied it for years. And playing with each other, where we trust each other and we can find the groove instantaneously. That’s where we always want to go first.”
To Marques, the band’s ethic has to do with spreading the music. “It becomes almost a social responsibility,” he says. “For us, to have this thing happen two or three times a month, getting together and having a party, and exposing people to this music that most people don’t know—it feels like it’s our responsibility to disseminate it, first in Colorado, and then branching out from there.”
GUILHA JOINS THE BAND
Ginga has also benefitted from the relatively recent addition of Guilha Camargo, their Brazilian vocalist, who grew up in Estado de Saõ Paolo, started singing at church at a young age and was singing in bars (under her father’s watchful eye) by the time she was 13. She brings a native fluency and familiarity to the music that the other players had to train for, but even she was taken aback by the band’s level of preparation.
“We’ve added many songs since Gui joined us, probably 30 songs that she brought to us,” LaLiberté says, “as well as teaching her songs that we know. She keeps saying, ‘You guys know more Brazilian music than I do.’ We’d play a song for her that we’ve been playing for years, and she’s never heard of it before. It’s been a fascinating experience.
“What I’ve noticed,” he continues, “is that in Brazil, it’s common for the bulk of people to know traditional music. It’s just sort of everywhere in their lives. It’s partly through the Carnivál experience, where these songs and the style of music is being played everywhere, in the streets and in the clubs, and it’s commonly felt and heard by everybody.”
And it’s being felt and experienced in Boulder and Denver. The band’s monthly Brasil Night shows at the Mercury Café are quickly becoming the stuff of legend. The band enlists local Brazilian food merchants to serve traditional foods, their sister project The Boulder Samba School holds samba dance lessons before the show, and their insistence on uncompromising authenticity even extends to the traditional libation, poured with cachaça¸ the sugarcane liquor native to Brazil.
“Ah, yes, the caipirinhas,” laughs Marques. “We try to help the bartenders with them. It’s not an easy drink to make, and you don’t want to get it wrong.”
Dave Kirby has been writing about music in various publications since 1978. He lives in Boulder with his wife and their white German shepherd.
WHERE TO HEAR GINGA
The Laughing Goat, 1709 Pearl St.: First Thursday of the month, 8 pm
Caffè Solé, 637-R South Broadway (Table Mesa Shopping Center): Third Thursday of the month, 7:30 pm
Mercury Cafe, 2199 California St., Denver: Dec. 10, Dec. 31; monthly Brasil Night dates vary.
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