“Só ponho bebop no meu samba...”: Cultural Exchanges and Background of the Composers in the Formulation of MPB During the Decades of 1960 and 1970

Abstract

My objective is to discuss cultural exchange seeking to find, on the one hand, the general lines associated to the subject of national identity in the production of Brazilian popular music (MPB) and, on the other, the particular features of the choices made by some of the creators of such music. The approach I propose takes as a reference the studies of popular music which have reflected on local, regional and global dimensions, and the contemporary debates over cultural exchanges which have made use of the concepts of hybridization or transculturalization. I discuss the question of cultural exchanges in Brazilian popular music in two stages. In the first one, I deal with the debate over the existence of a particular national identity –a “brazilianness”– present in the discussions on the history of Brazilian popular music. In the second one, in turn, I refer to the musical background of the principal members of the generation of the central names in Brazilian popular music between 1960 and 1970. On focusing on the testimonies of those musicians and their aesthetic choices, I try to demonstrate that they were more worried about thinking of ways of hybridizating than purely accepting or reflecting on the elements considered alien, which was decisive in the composition of what today we designate as Brazilian popular music.