Rio de Janeiro

Becos, Botecos, and Byways...

In lieu of any real content, I'll begin for the time being by talking up Bob and his Maze Inn. The "maze" in the denomination refers to the rambling walkway one must follow from the end of the street at the top of the hill where Bob lives and hosts his guests.

And some illustrious guests Bob has hosted. Quincy Jones, Beatles producer George Martin, all manner of musician and actor (well okay, Snoop Dog too, and the cast of Hulk 2, a scene from which was filmed on Bob's terrace), and what they come for is something impossible to find in the glitz and glamour down at sea-level, a view like no other on the planet and a chance to domicile temporarily in the kind of area where so many of Rio de Janeiro's residents live, a favela.

Bob has an interesting back story: Some decades ago he set to sea, the better to assuage the pain of a broken heart resultant of a star-crossed love affair. What better way than to lay upon a rolling deck at night, looking into the universe and pondering eternity. Alas, the ship, on its way to Ecuador via Cape Horn, broke down off the coast of Brazil and put into Salvador for repairs. And unbeknownst to Bob, Carnival in Bahia was in progress, in earnest.

Bob caught a taxi piloted by another rookie in Salvador, cousin of the fellow to whom the taxi actually belonged, who himself was partaking of the festivities. Somewhere along the line the hapless driver took a wrong turn and did something which would be impossible to do nowadays; he drove straight into the Carnival parade.

Host/Raconteur/Good Guy Bob Nadkarni

Pitiful Bob, sitting in the back seat, was suddenly surrounded by Carnival-goers bouncing the taxi up and down, shouting "Gringo, gringo, gringo!" A door opened and water splashed in on the frightened young man. The other door opened, and as Bob reflexively winced in anticipation of some sort of attack, an attractive young woman dressed (is that the right word?) in a nearly nonexistent bikini bottom slid in, sidling up to Bob, closing the door. And Bob thought to himself, "Why didn't anybody tell me this country existed!" Nights of forlorn staring into the universe had come to an abrupt and unexpected end.

Bob moved to Brazil, to Rio, where he worked as a cameraman for the BBC. He, like other middle-class cariocas (residents of Rio) lived at sea level. The woman who cleaned for him, like most poorer people in Rio, lived in the hills. So one propitious night Bob gave the cleaning woman a lift home, and once again he was astounded, although this time the physical beauty was that of the landscape around Rio's Guanabara Bay. The poor people had fabulous views denied their more well-healed brethern below! This was the place for Bob! And why should he be so selfish as to hoard the vista for himself?! No, he would build a guesthouse, in a favela, where they said nobody would come...but come they did, and do!

The View from Bob's Terrace

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/nov/24/guardiansaturdayreview.riodejaneiro

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/4204153/Slum-enchanted-evening.html

Bob's official site: http://www.jazzrio.com/

Now, a fair question might be why isn't "Bob's" favela racked with the violence that afflicts most of the others in Rio. The answer is because the BOPE is headquartered there. BOPE is "Batalhão de Operações Especiais da Polícia Militar", the Battalion of Special Operations of the Military Police. This is precisely the SWAT Team like special police force charged with battling drug traffickers, and beyond carrying big sticks they reach out to the community in a number of ways, like a friendly small-town police force on the beat. Tavares Bastos is the favela of choice for the Brazilian television and film industry (a film about the BOPE itself, Tropa de Elite -- Elite Squad in English -- was filmed here, for example), and for others when a favela is called for as a filming location.

Another fair question might be why is Bob's site called "jazzrio.com". This is because Bob is a guitar player and a jazz lover, and on the first Friday of every month The Maze Inn is flooded by 400 to 500 people who climb the hill to hear jazz.

The morning I was there Bob prepared breakfast himself, while I played cars with his young son. By the time breakfast was ready a documentary filmmaker on a break from filming in Afghanistan had come down, and we had strong Brazilian coffee and fresh fruits on the terrace. Then I was off to the Swiss embassy for a work visa for 25 on their (our) way to Zurich for a show at the Maag Music Hall. I was hoping to see Roland...

A couple of years earlier I'd looked up to see an extremely affable fellow smiling down at me in Cana Brava Records. He introduced himself as Roland, the soon-to-be new Swiss consul to Brazil, in Salvador for six months training in the Portuguese language, thereafter to be posted to the consulate in Rio. He was fresh from the Hindu Kush mountains, where in the headquarters there he piped in via internet Brazilian music from Radio Cana Brava, music which, according to him, put smiles on the faces of the otherwise taciturn Pashtuns he worked with. Alas Roland was travelling when I made it to the consulate.

Leaving the consulate, which was located conveniently close to Bob's place (I got there on the back of a moto-taxi), I wandered out into the streets looking for a taxi which would take me back to the airport. Of course there were taxis everywhere, and having some time to kill I walked for a bit, and after a few minutes was surprised to find that by chance I'd wandered into musical mecca Lapa.

Os Arcos da Lapa, by Heitor dos Prazeres

This rounded off an excellent first night in Rio, and it was back to the airport, back to Salvador, and two days later hello beautiful Zurich!

Speaking of foreign urbanity...

New York! London! Paris! Rio! A cry of exultation and definition, of the most glamorous cities in the world, a quartet heard in how many films of yesteryear...with Rio by far the most exotic of the urban paramount, an animal primality slinking beneath shining elegance on the most stunning harbor in the world. Hey, we're talking about a movie line, but it wasn't necessarily invented whole cloth.

A Tale of Two Cities...

...in one; of a city divided in the extreme...Zona Norte and Zona Sul (Northside and Southside, unlike Chicago the southside being the more monied) separated by a mountainous east-west ridge, the Serra da Carioca; morro (hill) and asfalto (the flat areas of the city), the morros being where the favelas (poor neighborhoods for want of a more sharply defined definition right now ) are located, those on the northside being the natal redoubts of syncopated samba after the "gentrification" of the centro in the early part of the nineteenth century, the southside asfalto being the berth of cool, jazz-and-classical-inflected bossa nova, most all of the two cities in some sense profoundly affected by Brazil's history of slavery.

Landing at Rio's Galeão airport puts one on the by far largest island in the bay to which Rio owes its existence, Guanabara. The island sits to the western edge of the bay, which is oriented north-south, with the outlet to the Atlantic Ocean at the south end (this is at a place where the general north-south trend of the South American Atlantic coast has temporarily settled into an east-west trajectory).

The drive in from the airport takes one past the Zona Norte, to one's right, including the neighborhoods of Mangueira (home to Cartola and the Mangueira Samba School), Vila Isabel (home to Noel Rosa), and Estácio de Sá (home to Ismael Silva, founder of Rio's first samba school (saying, in respect of a nearby teachers' school, they graduate school teachers, well we graduate samba teachers! Somos professores de samba!

The Zona Norte is also home to football (soccer) stadium Maracanã, largest in the world and principal venue for the 2014 World Cup Games, and Rua Marquês de Sacupaí and the Sambódromo, where Rio's Carnival parade is held (close to Praça Onze, home to Rio's Carnival parade before it was bottled up in concrete -- perhaps well-meaningly, but anyway -- by governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro Leonel Brizola in 1984).

Then one eases into Centro, downtown, the first area of the city to be extensively settled. This area encompasses the neighborhood of Santa Teresa, an old neighborhood of genteel colonial airs, accessible via the bonde, a streetcar which takes one across the nearby Arcas de Lapa, originally an aqueduct and now symbol of the neighborhood over which they preside, birthplace of Carmen Miranda and haunt of Madame Satã, Lapa.

Continuing on (unless you've stopped off along the way for a song, a drink, a dance, or a night's sleep), one reaches standing over the mouth of the bay the South American analog to the Rock of Gilbraltar, Pão de Açucar...Sugarloaf in the King's English, just behind Morro Cara de Cão (Dogface Hill), which juts further out into the water.

Rounding the rock brings one to the Atlantic coast and the first and most famous of Rio's beachfront...Copacabana. Ironically, this name which sounds so quintessentially Brazilian, so synonymous with glamour (in the popular imagination anyway, thanks to the presence of the Copacabana Palace, and Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers in Flying to Rio), is actually Bolivian, of Indian derivation, in local terms originally denoting an area church named for Bolivia's patron saint. A further touch of irony in the name is that the church is named for an iteration of The Virgin (enough said about that for now).

Through a tunnel, next beach down is Ipanema, location of the bar where Vinícius de Moraes was sitting when a tall and lovely teenager strolled past, prompting him to write -- on the spot -- the lyrics to Garota de Ipanema (The Girl from Ipanema). The leggy adolescent with the killer sway was Heloisa Pinheiro, nowadays a drop-dead gorgeous sixty-five year old.