Samba Wiki

This website is intended to become a constantly growing archive, with information on instruments, the samba schools of Rio de Janeiro, their carnival themes (enredos), theme songs (sambas de enredo) and corresponding musical arrangements of the past years and audio examples.

Many non-brazilian samba drummers do not know much about the roots of samba, and that it is a complexly grown cultural movement that goes far beyond pure percussive drumming. For many sambistas in Brazil, the samba school can become the centre of their lives.
Therefore, this website tries to convey the cultural background of samba music.

Samba is an oral culture, so I would like to keep the words as short as possible and only as long as necessary.

This website includes a google translator plugin, so you can translate any content on any subpage with just one click into your native language. This feature might be interesting especially in the samba enredo lyric and enredo synopsis part of the different carnivals.

Let's start our journey into the world of samba with the beautiful short movie "The City of Samba" by Jarbas Agnelli and Keith Loutit. It'll start at the samba desfile part, but you can go back to the beginning to see some more breathtaking scenes from Rio de Janeiro.