One Hot Night in the Bahian Backlands

"There are certain countries, the names of which fire the popular imagination.  Brazil is one of them; an amalgam of primitive and sophisticated, jungle and elegance, beating drums and luscious jazz harmonics -- there's no other place like it in the world. 

And while Rio, or its fame anyway, tends toward the elegant and sophisticated end of the spectrum, Bahia tends toward the other.  Bahia is the land of the drum..."

While the world awaits with trepidation the deepening of the economic downturn, there are some whose lives have never experienced an economic upturn.

Brazil has a musical palliative for such material poverty, a rhythmic pearl which is no less a protective device than the lustrous layers secreted by an oyster to defend itself from a grain of sand. Pure joy born in the berth of misery, this would be the sweet mystery called "Samba".