Jesse From Brazil: Very jazzy style of writing, unpolished, stream of consciousness stuff man….. Jive…

ola,

tonigh im staying at the rio white house. an interesting, beautiful place. amazing casa rising up a mountainside above the ocean at the end of ipanema beach. i cant even put into words the past 24 hours. on a whim i came out to meet jane, an englishwoman of about fifty. the wife of deniz who runs the place. deniz is in bahia for a bit. jane welcomes me in and takes me to a fechaoda (a brazilian stew over rice...like gumbo) party a few hundred meters up the street. both places are right below chacara and vidigal favelas...(the cab driver was nervous bringing me here the first day i arrived). but we get to this beautiful house with a giant gate.
this young brazilian girl leads jane and i along with this australian surfer name joo up three flights of steps. we find ourselves walking out onto a huge bar-like veranda with a few dozen drunk silhouettes.
No sooner that we arrive, this english man named peach (also engaged to the young girl it turns out) hands me a guitar. the young girl puts a beer in front of me and in perfect english begins insisting i play. before i know it i~m bombarded with demands in portuguese to play. jane leans over and in this beautifully dirty english accent informs me that she just found out that we are sitting in what used to be the Zeppelin...one of the most important bossa nova bars in the 1960s...the one i have heard so much about. a french girl in a blue and white dress rips herself from her boyfriend and pulls up a chair next to me and also puts a beer in front of me. Do you know tom jobim..they ask me in portuguese, broken english, and now french.
i~m sober, its saturday night, im sitting under dim lights with a guitar in my hands while a bunch of drunken brazilians are insisting i play the music of the most beloved bossa nova composer ever. the waves of the ocean are crashing below us, the lights of ipanema are off to our left and im treading on hollowed ground..the zeppelin.
i~m playing waters of march as a few brazilian women drunkenly sing the lyrics as they read them from a cd booklet. went to the second rehearsal of the Mangeira school (team...mostly adults) of samba...the most beloved samba school in rio. thousands of brazilians dancing and singing...over a hundred drummers...deafening, samba gets in your pores...a story for another time. i move into the zeppelin tomorrow.

jb