Transcription - Edu Ribeiro, "Baião Doce"

Today I've got for you a groove that comes from the northeast of Brazil called a Baião.  You may have heard of it before, as it often gets a passing mention in method books after the one page on samba.  Baião comes from a family of rhythms called Forró.  I've got a larger piece about forró in the works, so for now we'll leave the history lesson at that.

The underlying rhythmic feel of a baião looks like this:

It's likely that you've seen an arrangement where the & of 2 is also on the bass drum, but I don't think that's very accurate.

In a drumset orchestration, the bass drum is imitating a drum called a zabumba, which is worn on a sling at an angle, much like an old snare drum, but higher.  The zabumba plays both the high sound and the low sound as the top head is played with a beater or mallet, and the bottom head is played with a long, thin stick held in the left hand.  The stick creates a sharp snap sound which we can imitate with a rim click.  It's quite common for the only other percussion instrument to be a large triangle.  So a stock baião orchestration would look something like this:

When a comping instrument is present, it's common for it to chase the low sounds of the zabumba.  This is also often supported by the high sound of the drum like so:

Where I feel the vibe of this rhythm is often lost when applied to the drum set is in the absence of improvisation.  While the part you see above is the foundation of the groove, many drum set players stay there and never move.  It's very common for a forró group to be only a trio: triangle, zabumba and accordion.  As the triangle is the motor and rarely fluctuates, most of the interaction with the accordion must come from the zabumba.

Edu Ribeiro nails this improvisatory element on "Baião Doce", a tune written by bassist Paulo Paulelli for Trio Corrente's debut album.  Check out how the basic baião feel is always present, but is very much embellished with the rim click, and improvisation with the bass drum.

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"Baião Doce" starts at 25:12