THE NEW YORK TIMES
January 9,2004
POP REVIEW; Brazil’s Happy Dance Party, In Session on Avenue C
By BEN RATLIFF

After the predominating samba, forro is the 20th-century popular music from Brazil that won’t subside. You hear it all over the country, and despite its age and earthiness, that’s not embarrassing: it remains genuinely popular. It may have taken 60 years, but now it’s cool in the East Village, too.
At Nublu, a bar on Avenue C, a band called Forro in the Dark has been playing this music almost every week for more than a year, and the movement and the feeling in the room are almost as important as the genre itself. Forro is a loose concept: it really means a kind of happy dance party in close quarters, in which musicians and dancers are both taking part in the same ritual. (Nublu has the close quarters part down, and it has a good feeling, too.) But what is played at the party, more precisely, is baião, a style that was more or less the invention of Luiz Gonzaga in the 1940’s.
Gonzaga drew on circle dances of African origin that were common in northeast Brazil, and he set up a template for this music that is still basic to it: a heavily syncopated 2/4 rhythm made of the zabumba bass drum, accordion and triangle. It’s simple, and it swings hard. Forro in the Dark keeps that sound at its core and adds guitar, trombone and extra drums, depending on who drops by. What you hear is pretty close to formula, with almost all songs by Gonzaga, but the trombone and the guitar lead some excursions toward other territories that seem to lie a hairsbreadth beyond forro rhythm, among them New Orleans zydeco, Caribbean dancehall and cumbia.
The band is made of refugees from other kinds of music. It is led by the zabumba player Mauro Refosco, who has played with David Byrne and the Lounge
Lizards. The accordionist Rob Curto studied as a jazz musician, and Smokey Hormel spent a lot of the last decade as Beck’s guitarist. On triangle, dancing
nonstop as he meted out the swing on Wednesday, was Jorge Amorim: Karma Zaviani sang some of the music’s greatest melodies, including Gonzaga’s “Asa
Branca” and Dominguinho’s “So Quero Um Xodo.”
The drop-ins on Wednesday night were the jazz trombonist Clark Gayton, who sounded good improvising over the music, and Ze Mauricio on the tambourine like pandeiro.
Another part of the traditional forro style that the band has preserved is playing in a circle, even when it would make more sense, within Nublu’s skinny dimensions, for the musicians to play in a line against the wall. You nearly had to pass through the middle of the band to get to the back of the club, but that was beside the point: once you stepped in the door, you were part of the music.