Embolador, or embolada singer, at the crafts market in Recife, Pernambuco.
Have you ever had someone improvise a song-poem about you? No? Well, it happened to me, and may very well happen to you, if you ever find yourself wandering inside the crafts market in downtown Recife - the building that used to be the old penitentiary. Just make sure you take a tape-recorder along. I didn't - it's the sort of thing you don't really expect will happen, isn't it? - and the embolada this singer-poet on the photograph created in my honor is lost forever! But at least I have a picture of the guy...notice he's playing a tambourine? It's one of the percussion instruments most used by the emboladores.
The embolada is a poetic-musical form with stanza-and-refrain structure, declamatory melody and fast tempo. It is very popular in northeastern Brazil. It may be improvised or not, and recited by one person or more, as in the desafios (challenges) between two singers and the cocos, traditional dances of northeastern Brazil. If you'd like to hear what an embolada sounds like - a sophisticated version of it, that is - listen to the vocals in a song called Magalenha, by Carlinhos Brown. It's in a fabulous SΘrgio Mendes CD called Brasileiro.