Rio de Janeiro Listening Bars — mountain, rhythm, sea — Tracks & Tales
Rio de Janeiro was listening long before the listening bar reached it. From the salt stone of Pequena África to the alley where bossa nova lowered its voice, this is a guide to the city's rooms, circles and evenings worth sitting still for.
By Rafi Mercer
Before the music, there is the stone. At the foot of the Morro da Conceição, in the old port district of Saúde, a slope of granite rises out of the pavement with steps cut into its face, worn smooth by two centuries of use. Salt was once unloaded here, which is how the place got its name. On Monday evenings, as the offices of the Centro empty, stalls set up in the small square below, a circle of musicians forms around a table, and people drift in from the side streets. Nobody announces anything. The first cavaquinho chord lands, the surdo answers it from somewhere lower down, and a square that was simply a square a moment ago becomes a room. Rio has always done this. It turns public ground into listening ground without asking anyone's permission.
The city is made of different tempos laid side by side.Saúde and Gamboa, the old Pequena África, move slowly, with cobbles, colonial doorways and the excavated stones of the Cais do Valongo. Copacabana is denser and more nocturnal, with apartment blocks shouldering up to the Atlantic and a side street, Rua Duvivier, where a whole genre once found its scale. Lapa runs on brick, arches and noise. Santa Teresa climbs above it on trams and hairpin lanes, quieter and greener and a few degrees cooler. Ipanema has its own pace altogether, salt-bleached and unhurried. To listen well in Rio you have to move between these speeds and notice how each one asks something different of your attention.
Samba began close to that stone. After abolition, Black Brazilians, many of them migrants from Bahia, settled around the port and made it the community later called Pequena África. Music happened in backyards and kitchens, most famously at the house of Tia Ciata near Praça Onze, where the circle of players who gave the city "Pelo Telefone" in 1917, often counted as the first recorded samba, gathered and played. Pixinguinha and João da Baiana belong to this ground, and the square beside the stone now carries João da Baiana's name. The Pedra do Sal was listed as protected heritage in 1984. What survives here is the shape of the roda itself. The musicians face one another, and the listeners stand outside the circle. Nobody performs to you. You lean in and join something already happening.
Then, a few miles south and half a century later, the music got quieter. Between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s, a dead-end alley at Rua Duvivier 37 held three tiny nightclubs: Bottle's Bar, the Little Club and the Bacará. The neighbours above, kept awake by the music, threw bottles down into it, and the nickname stuck: Beco das Garrafas, Bottle Alley. Inside, samba met jazz in rooms barely bigger than a living room, and the result was samba-jazz and, out of the same circle, bossa nova. João Gilberto's "Chega de Saudade" arrived in 1958 with its whispered vocal and guitar that hardly seemed to strike the strings. Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes wrote around it. Elis Regina, Jorge Ben and Baden Powell were among those who came through the alley early on. It is often said that bossa nova was soft because Copacabana's apartments were small and its walls were thin. Whether that is true or not, it was music built to be heard closely. After years of abandonment the clubs reopened in 2014, and Bottle's Bar, which now takes in the old Bacará, seats about eighty. That is still a room where a brushed snare carries to the back wall.
Some of the city's most attentive listening happens in the plainest places. Bip Bip has stood on Rua Almirante Gonçalves in Copacabana since 1968. It is around eighteen square metres, roughly a kitchen, with a single fridge you serve yourself from and a tab you are trusted to keep. When the roda starts, usually around eight, the room goes quiet, and regulars will let you know if you don't. Samba fills the Sunday and Thursday nights, while choro and bossa nova turn up through the week. The city has listed it as municipal heritage. Bip Bip sits in a long Carioca tradition of the boteco as music room, where the tiles are chipped, the beer is cold and the playing is good enough to stop conversation. You hear the same instinct along the calçadão, where kiosk musicians play into the sea air and people walking past slow down.
The landscape does the rest. Granite domes rise straight out of the city, Corcovado and the Sugarloaf among them, and they hold the light and turn sound back on itself. The long blue sweep of Guanabara Bay lies on one side and the open Atlantic on the other, so the sound of surf is never far beneath the city's music. Late in the afternoon people gather on the rock at Arpoador to watch the sun go down behind the Dois Irmãos, and when it drops into the sea they applaud. That applause is an act of collective attention the city performs every clear evening. It is the same ocean that carried the Portuguese language here, along with the word saudade, which gave João Gilberto his title and which Lisbon still sings in its own minor key. Our Lisbon guide follows the same longing from the other side of the water.
Rio was late to the dedicated listening bar, and that is worth thinking about, because it never lacked the habit. It lacked the furniture. That is changing. In Copacabana, the 111 Music Bar takes its lead from the Japanese kissa: high-fidelity sound, low light, deep sofas, curation by Danny Dee and a house expectation that voices stay low. It opens in the evenings from Tuesday to Sunday. Arriving from the circle at Bip Bip, you notice how little needs explaining. The city already knew how to hush for a guitar. Now it has a room where a record can get the same treatment, with every sustain allowed to decay to nothing before the next track begins.
Evenings in Rio are a week-long calendar more than a single night out. Monday belongs to the Pedra do Sal, free and open-air, with the classics sung back by a crowd that knows every word. Lapa takes over from Thursday to Saturday beneath the white arches of the old Carioca Aqueduct. Carioca da Gema on Avenida Mem de Sá has been booking strong samba bands since 2000, and Rio Scenarium fills its antique-crowded floors with players and dancers. Both close on Sundays, which is when Bip Bip's roda becomes the obvious place to be. In Ipanema, the bar on Rua Vinicius de Moraes where Jobim and Vinicius watched a girl walk past on her way to the beach still trades on the song they wrote. Order something, sit by the window, and listen to the street the song came from. Late in the week, the Beco's small stage keeps bossa nova at the volume it was written for.
What Rio teaches a listener is that attention doesn't have to mean stillness. At the roda your body is moving and your ears are fixed on the cavaquinho. At Arpoador, a thousand strangers fall quiet together and then break the quiet on the same beat. The city's best listening is shared and in public, a little untidy, and it is serious all the same. A room can hold silence, but so can a square, a beach, or a bar with one fridge, as long as everyone in it has agreed, without saying so, to pay attention.
On Monday the stone will still be there, warm from the day, waiting for the first chord.
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Where the granite meets the Atlantic, Rio keeps its music close enough to touch.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more, subscribe or read more from Tracks & Tales.
