Email bt_paris@yahoo.com, Telephone 55 (Brazil) 71(Salvador) 8812-4576

This is Ben Paris, on his way back from the island of Paty (see further down, and that's pronounced pah-TEE) in the Baía de Todos os Santos (Bay of All Saints). Originally from New York City, Ben has been living in Salvador for most of the past 18 years (he's married to a Baiana), and he knows the city inside and out, like the proverbial back of his hand. He's also an inveterate traveller* into the Recôncavo, the region around the bay which was the birthplace of Bahia's culture.

(*Usually in search of stories; see Bennet Paris in the author's index of Fiction, Volume 14, Number 2, along with, among others, Heinrich Böll and Joyce Carol Oates.)

If you're looking for somebody to get you where you're going and then tell you about it when you get there (or even tell you where you ought to be going), Ben's your man! This is something he enjoys doing! Plenty of tour guides will get you to the places in the guidebooks, and Ben can as well. But he can also get you to places the guidebooks never knew existed!

Email him at bt_paris@yahoo.com, or call him at 55 (Brazil) 71(Salvador) 8812-4576.

Pai Raimundo in the front window of his house/restaurant

Pai Raimundo & Santo Amaro's best-known daughter

Dining at Nando's Restaurant in Santo Amaro (after a samba-de-roda at the Casa do Samba)

Filho de Gandhy

Notes on the Filhos de Gandhy here...

Cana Brava Records in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

Brazilian music is deep, there's no question about that! And while musical depth is not unique to Brazil, Brazil's harnessing of depth and warmth to complex and sophisticated rhythms makes it a source of enormous richness to a people -- including many musicians -- who don't have such richness in a more material sense.

Pixinguinha

Cana Brava Records was founded as an outlet for the music of Bahia and Brazil's Nordeste (Northeast, an ethnographic entity unto its own, defined by hardship and spirited resilience), and as an outlet for hard-to-find music in Salvador (while making room for Brazil's consecrated artists, Cartola, Jobim, et al, and styles ranging from the sambas of Rio's morros - hills - to choro - "cry", a style which gave birth some of Brazil's most beautiful compositions and most extraordinary instrumentalists, per which, below, is the trailer to Finnish-born Salvador resident Mika Kaurismäki's 2005 choro documentary, Brasileirinho).

Hamlet said: "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." The dreams of the composers, singers, and instrumentalists beneath our arches pulse and soar through space and time, extending our shop beyond its walls to the plantations beyond the bay, to the backlands, to the terreiros de candomblé, to the hills ringing Guanabara, to the gafieiras (dancehalls) of 1930s Lapa, the Ipanema of the 1950s and 60s...

Our shop is small, but it encompasses a universe!

Where we're located in Pelourinho...

Our Own Short History of Brazilian Music

Notes on current Bahian music and how it got to be this way...

A new way to find and/or propagate great music. If you're a musician or music lover, join up! Join these guys! Fast, free, fabulous!