The Only Thing That Helps Me Be within the Moment

Earlier this yr, Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” got here on at a celebration I used to be at. I didn’t acknowledge the tune at first; the room was crowded, and making out Simon’s strumming over a number of streams of chatter and dialog proved troublesome. But then I heard it: a pointy noise, reducing by way of the monitor’s main chords in jagged intervals like a pair of blunt scissors. When I requested my buddy what she thought the sound was, she paused, then guessed it may need been a duck. Another buddy likened it to throat singing. They didn’t count on that the alien noise got here from a kind of drum — the cuíca.

The cuíca is an odd instrument. It can buzz, hum, squeak and squawk; it might moan or creak; generally it even sounds prefer it’s weeping. If we’re being particular, cuícas are Brazilian friction drums, and though the phrase “friction” refers back to the methodology used to play the instrument (musicians attain contained in the drum to control a wood stick whereas their second hand applies strain to the opposite aspect), the phrase additionally describes the abrasive impact it might have on listeners. Punching by way of songs as if it disagrees with how they’re purported to sound, the cuíca is a key instrument within the bateria, the drumming wing of Rio de Janeiro’s samba ensembles throughout Carnival.

I can’t bear in mind the primary time I heard it. Maybe it was in my grandmother’s lounge in Brasília late one Christmas Eve, when, after a number of drinks, my aunt Patrícia would placed on Chico Buarque’s “Apesar de Você.” Or maybe I heard it once I was nonetheless a child, when my mother would play certainly one of her favourite songs, “Carolina Carol Bela,” by Jorge Ben Jor and Toquinho. The specific second hardly issues. The cuíca’s central position in most Brazilian music — from samba to Tropicália — means it has swathed me all my life. While I’ll by no means know the place I first heard the drum, I maintain going again to that sound, looking out it out.

I left Brazil once I was 1 and have spent most of my life outdoors the nation. Though I now reside in London, I’m nonetheless delicate to sounds and smells that remind me of my birthplace. I’d be mendacity if I stated I prefer to take heed to the cuíca for that cause, although. When I hear the cuíca, it doesn’t take me again to Brazil; it takes me some place else altogether.

I wrestle with being current, and sometimes gravitate towards issues that demand my consideration in fast bursts: fountains, spicy meals, the colour orange, Leos. Cuícas fall into that class. They swallow me entire one second, solely to cough me again up the subsequent. Hearing the sound feels just like the aural equal of driving over a pothole. For a second or two, I soar in my seat. My abdomen clenches. I lose monitor of house and time. Then, after a number of measures, I’m again in the true world once more, solely now every part round me feels clearer and louder — and emptier, too. Sometimes I really feel as if I’ll have misplaced one thing within the course of. But once I rack my mind for what that could be, I can by no means determine what I’m in search of.

It can buzz, hum, squeak and squawk; it might moan or creak; generally it even sounds prefer it’s weeping.

In some methods, the cuíca’s capacity to move listeners is a part of its enchantment. When Paul Simon was recording “Me and Julio” with the Brazilian jazz percussionist Airto Moreira, he stated he wished one thing that sounded “like a human voice” within the combine — a noise that may shock and transfer folks, making the tune’s characters come alive. After Moreira performed the cuíca for him, Simon knew he’d discovered what he wanted. He wasn’t the one one who appreciated the way in which it sounded both: In 1972, the tune charted within the U.S. for 9 straight weeks.

It’s an odd but nice sensation, typically making me consider the completely different processes that transfer sounds throughout house and devices throughout continents. Pain and pleasure commingle within the historical past of the cuíca. Some historians consider that, like many percussion devices within the area, enslaved Africans introduced it to the Americas; it took root in Brazil within the type of samba. It’s believed that individuals initially used the drum to hunt lions, hoping that the animals would mistake the noise for one more residing being. After all, not many devices sound like weeping or laughing, geese or singing.

The extra I replicate on the distinctiveness of the sound, the extra I discover myself reckoning with the complicated historical past of migration — each pressured and in any other case — that underpins it. It makes me consider how, within the Americas — the place most of us are migrants or descendants of migrants — it’s arduous to know precisely the place or what “home” is. Sometimes it’s beans and bay leaves and strangers whose voices undulate once they speak. The cuíca, although, jogs my memory of my very own historical past of motion. It complicates the concept of residence.

A number of months in the past, I used to be out at a bar once I heard the instrument once more — this time within the type of Jorge Ben Jor’s “Taj Mahal.” Seated on the desk with my buddy, I couldn’t maintain monitor of what we have been speaking about. That unusual noise — laughing? gasping? weeping? — within the background commanded my consideration. Once the tune was over, I returned to the dialog in full. Secretly, although, I’d been carried to a special time and place fully, and located myself wishing I may keep there some time longer.

Carolina Abbott Galvão is a author based mostly in London.