150 Years of Choro – Where Are We Now?

Abstract

According to a Brazilian saying, choro is the father of samba and the grandfather of bossa nova. Starting off as a way of interpreting European music with an African twist, it developed from a lower middle-class style played for fun and without monetary ambition to one of Brazil’s most revered genres, played by all classes. Choro fell in and out of fashion various times: It was declared to be the embodiment of Brazilianness in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1970s, and almost vanished twice (in the 1950s and 1960s, and from the 1980s into the early 1990s), because it was considered old-fashioned. When exactly choro saw the light of day, is a matter of discussion. This will be described in the article. We come to the conclusion that choro can claim to be 150 years old and has now reached its most diverse stage so far. It boasts a fairly good infrastructure with institutes, schools, concerts, jam sessions, sheet music, method books, books, an online magazine, CDs, films, radio broadcasts, TV productions, websites, and diligent studies, both by instrumentalists and scholars. Furthermore, it is by now played on all inhabited continents.