Sleevenotes: the director's perspective

Brazilian music is famous for its variety, but this is ridiculous. Yesterday we were out in the countryside at the house where bossa nova’s greatest composer Tom Jobim once lived, and his son and grandson were in the sophisticated all-star band, playing, just for us.

Now we are heading into the Rio favelas: poor and lawless shanty towns under the control of the drug gangs. Damian Platt, who works with the band AfroReggae is our guide, and has arranged for us to travel with a car and driver known to the gangs, who don’t like outsiders coming in. Especially film crews.

There are strict instructions that we should not film either the drug deals happening around us, or the young 'soldiers' who guard the gangs' territories against the regular attacks by the police. These people are heavily armed. There are even gunmen at the all-night ‘baile funk’ party organised by the gang-leaders, who sit on a balcony watching the frantic dancers. Our researcher Laura Kaye can thankfully disarm them in perfect Portuguese.

It’s carnival, it’s the middle of the night (yet again) and the whole city seems to be on the street. According to one estimate, there are two million people out partying in the specially-erected venues overlooking the carnival route, or following the trio eletricos. These are like giant lorries, but with built-in changing rooms and even toilets, and with a giant stage constructed on the top.

We’ve been invited out on two such trios – one featuring Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s current Minister of Culture (and still a great performer) and the other with Brazil’s biggest pop star of the moment, Ivete Sangalo. She’s ridiculously fit (as we discover, there’s a large gym taking up part of her expansive penthouse flat) and she needs to be. She sings for 5 or 6 hours non-stop as her trio slowly trundles through the massed crowds around the city – with our cameraman Andy Dunn up on the top deck, filming and dancing with her all at the same time.

Back in the early Nineties, a Washington research institute decreed that Recife was the fourth-worst city in the world to live in – but it’s hard to believe that now. Thanks to the Mangue Bit movement that set out to transform the city through the arts, this is now one of Brazil’s great music centres.

It’s very different to Rio, Salvador or Sao Paulo. The bands here were influenced by local folk rhythms like maracatu, that has its roots back in the days of slavery.

Out in the sugar cane fields, there’s a bizarre maractu ceremony, with rival groups dressed in extraordinary colourful costumes competing against each. And in the city centre the maracatu-influenced rock band Nacao Zumbi are playing free to yet another massive crowd at the most exhilarating show I’ve seen all year. What a great country.

Director, Robin Denselow