Um estudo sobre o samba e os sambistas da velha guarda soteropolitana

Abstract

This study aims to compose a panorama of urban samba in Salvador based on the life trajectories of the Velha Guarda masters, mapping territories, relevant historical moments and identifying the main challenges they face today. Presenting a literature review in the light of concepts such as musical epistemicide and quilombism, I propose a critical reflection on the erasure of the memory of urban samba in historiography, analyzing its migratory impacts and circuits of circulation in the Bahia-Rio-Bahia diaspora. By returning to Bahia as a market product, samba legitimizes itself as a possibility for the political and cultural insertion of the subaltern classes, lending itself to the insurgency of organized black movements against dominant sectors. The research revealed the strong character of resistance of urban samba in Salvador and the struggle faced by its agents in the face of predatory media and market models, highlighting how veteran samba musicians experience generational discrimination that culminates in the absence of affirmative and inclusive public policies. This dissertation contributes to the appreciation of urban samba in Salvador and its masters, demonstrating its plurality of subgenres and its vivacity. Even after so many political clashes in the struggle to win the rights of black peripheral populations, what we see is how the cultural industry and the mass media insist on making the samba produced in Bahia invisible, in the face of the economic and organizational power of agents from the Rio-São Paulo axis and the imposition of their own production on the Brazilian market.