Brian Slattery Photos
With a nod, David Sasso leapt into a cascading melody on the mandocello. Naomi Senzer fell in on flute, taking up the same melody, spinning it, and handing it off to Will Minter on accordion while Joe Murfin laid down a pulsing rhythm on the pandeiro. Together, the quartet with the punny name of Roda Trip on Monday evening brought the driving music of tropical Brazil to the New Haven area’s first snowy night of the year in a performance at Best Video.
As Murfin explained, choro’s origins lay in southern Brazil, and perhaps specifically Rio de Janeiro, after West Africans liberated by the end of slavery in Brazil in the 1880s migrated from the northern part of the country to the south. There, they mixed West African rhythms with European song forms to create new, uniquely Brazilian musical styles. Samba and choro developed alongside one another; as Murfin put it, at a party in Rio a century ago, “they would put the choro in front and the samba out back.” Samba flourished into the kind of party music that has made Rio famous the world over. Choro for a while was thought of as “old people’s music,” Murfin said, though “there’s been a bit of a choro renaissance — younger people taking the music back.”
Roda Trip — Minter on accordion, Murfin on pandeiro and cavaquinho, Sasso on mandolin, mandocello and guitar, and Naomi Senzer on flute and clarinet — took its own name from the roda, or circle, in which musicians “jam and drink beer,” Murfin said, and play choros. And play choros Roda Trip did, with skill, enthusiasm, and humor, along the way dropping clues as to how each of these Americans had stumbled into the music in the first place. Murfin and Minter, it turned out, had met at a choro camp. Senzer explained that Sasso had a chance to recruit her because they were members of the same synagogue.
“Some of them” — the choros, Senzer meant — “sounded a lot like klezmer music, in minor keys but sounding kind of happy,” she said. That was her way in. Sasso agreed. “This is a good switch for me because I usually play bluegrass, which sounds happy but is actually kind of depressing.”
Murfin, meanwhile, took a little time to educate the crowd about the pandeiro, the tambourine-like instrument that Murfin showed could produce an astonishingly wide variety of sounds, from a bass to a snare to a set of shifting pitches and rattles.This versatility, he said, made it a “pretty ubiquitous instrument in Brazilian music” — the drum kit of Brazil.
And they delved into the origins of a few of the pieces they played. One called “Fla-Flu” was named after a soccer match between crosstown rival teams in Rio de Janeiro. Another, the title of which translated to “Whispers,” allowed Senzer the observation that so many of the twisty melodies she played reminded her of people speaking — and speaking Brazilian Portuguese specifically.
Toward the end of the set, the quartet slowed it down with a moody waltz, then picked things up again. “We’ll leave you with something fast — ” Sasso began.
“Not so fast!” Senzer said, drawing a laugh from the amiable crowd.
The final piece ended in a flourish that garnered a final hearty round of applause.
“Drive safely in all that snow,” Senzer said. It was a jarring statement; the music had made it possible to believe that we would look out the windows and see fronds of tropical trees waving in the sun instead.
