On you samba drumming/music journey you will pretty quickly run into a conversation about samba swing. You are learning the basics of how to play and getting a little cocky about it and then someone says "It doesn't sound swingy."
Swing Crisis
My buddy calls this moment a "swing crisis" A time when you have to grapple with incorporating this illusive lilt into your playing. The swing informs pretty much everything and every instrument in a samba batucada group.
A lot has been said about how to feel it, think about it and embody it. Us nerds want to math it out on paper and draw diagrams etc.
Listen and Practice
IMO the only way to get good swing is to listen and practice a lot so I created some looped audio tracks that I could play along with while I practiced.
I started sharing these tracks with my students and people from Portland Samba and now I'll share them with you.
I have tracks specifically for repique mor (below), caixa em cima, and general samba swing. The following are the repique mor tracks. These are all recordings of Cariocas (Brazilian from Rio de Janeiro) playing.
Caixa em cima tracks here
Samba swing tracks here
*I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO USE REFERENCE RECORDINGS FROM CARIOCAS NOT GRINGOS.
Some gringos can swing their behinds off but using tracks from Rio players ensures that you will be hearing something true.
I know a lot of folks around the North America, Europe, Australia, Oceanea etc. who play samba and to be frank some of it is pretty weird. Currently my group Portland Samba has a weird swing but we're starting to work on it. And we're using these tracks as a reference.
Repique Mor from Beija Flor
These tracks are repique mor players from Beija Flor repique de bossas.
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