Earlier this month, Brazilian pop star, composer and producer Carlinhos Brown presided over the launch of the spectacular new International Center For Black Music at the Museu du Ritmo (Rhythm Museum) in his hometown of Salvador, Bahia. The Brazilian megastar, who once remarked that his head was a "museum of rhythms," has spent the last two years quietly laying the foundations for a major international arts and cultural center in his birth city. The new center will be incorporated into the Museu du Ritmo, which first opened in 2007 - a groundbreaking event vitrually ignored outside of Brazil. The museum and concert space are part of the restoration efforts for the Cidade Baixa (Lower City) area that was once Salvador's commercial center and occupies the old Mercado do Ouro (Gold Market) site, now designated as an historic landmark.

The Museo du Ritmo space currently comprises a once abandoned building complex with a huge open-air concert courtyard space (est. capacity: 2000 standing and hundreds more in the multi-storied floors above), a massive, high-tech stage and superb sound system, beautifully painted rhythmic pattern designs throughout the arcaded courtyard, and many nooks and crannies filled with magnificent allegoric, Afro-Brazilian spiritual artworks. Indeed, the entire space seems consecrated, imbued with spiritual and mystical secrets?

In the concert courtyard, the pungent aroma of gently bubbling dende oil wafts through the warm tropical air as smiling Bahiana women offer mouthwatering cakes of acarajé (bean fritters with spicy condiments), and small stands with caipirinhas and icy beers are all part of the mix. The Museu du Ritmo regularly presents splendid live performances open to the public with nominal gate fees.

November is "Black Consciousness Month" in Brazil and as part of this year's celebration, coinciding with conclusion of The Year of France-Brazil 2009, the Museu du Ritmo inaugurated the Black Music Center (Centro de Música Negra - CMN) on November 12th. The Center is to be housed over 1000 square meters in the museum's complex of building structures. The initiative, the very first black music center worldwide, is a project partnership between the French media company Mondomix and Carlinhos Brown. This partnership is under the Bahian aegis of Mr. Brown's Associação Pracatum Ação Social (Pracatum Social Action Association), and the Secretary of Culture of the state of Bahia, with support from the Brazilian Ministry of Culture.
With interior architectural designs by architect Pedro Mendes da Rocha, the Black Music Center will include permanent and temporary exhibition spaces, an online research and documentary center, a café, a restaurant and a concert-lecture-workshop space. Intended to become a museum of live cultures, not the usual artifacts, the conception and production of the project is headed up by Mondomix in tandem with a committee of international specialists and is set to open in December 2010.
Per Marc Benaïche, Mondomix President, plans include 100 interactive multi-media installations focused on African-based music, two state-of-the-art recording studios, and an adjoining film screening center. The overall goal of the center will value and disseminate the cultural and musical heritage and history of the Afro-Brazilian people of Salvador, Africa, and the African Diaspora throughout the Americas, while stimulating scholarship, cultural and tourist activities, and importantly, job creation and income.

To underscore the moment's festivities, the first Brazilian edition of the Festival Músicas Mestiças held its premier at the Museu du Ritmo, during the evenings of November 13th- 15th, with special appearances by artists from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean and Bahia, including: Costa do Marfim's Tiken Jah Fakoly, Senegal's Didier Awadi , Congo's Les Tambours de Brazza, Chad's Mounira Mitchala, Cape Verde's Tcheka and Haiti's Bélo, and, from Bahia, a few of Salvador's most popular stars: Carlinhos Brown, Margareth Menezes, Mariene de Castro, Mariella Santiago, Olodum, Lazzo Matumbi, Letieres Leite & Orkestra Rumpilezz, and Percussivo Mundo Novo. Attendance grew packed each night with mixed, joyous, dancing crowds.

One of the world's great festival producers and winner of the WOMEX 2009 Professional Excellence Award, Christian Mousset, who originally founded "Jazz in France" in Angoulême, in the Poitou-Charentes region of France in 1976 - later known as the Musiques Métisses Festival - was charged with artistic selection of the Francophone African artists for the Brazilian Festival Músicas Mestiças. Each African musical group ("from the younger generation" per Mr. Mousset) was marvelously contrasted with special guest appearances by the well-established Bahian stars, all thematically binding their various musical lyrics and rhythms to black consciousness and resistance to European cultural dominance.

The most captivating aspect of the well-organized performances were the brief, cameo appearances by some of the Bahian stars, far too rarely seen outside of Brazil, with the exception of Carlinhos Brown himself. Apart from full performances by Bahian bandleader Letieres Leite on sax and flute & his Orkestra Rumpilezz, a big-band jazz percussion group, and the innovative Percussivo Mundo Novo group mixing futuristic electronica and handmade percussive instruments, standouts were clearly Bahia's powerful women vocalists: Margareth Menezes, Mariene de Castro, and Mariella Santiago with their brilliant, expansive stage presences as seasoned stars.

Two of the most surprising and electrifying performances threw off the dynamism and ease of spontaneity: During the opening night rousing finale concert by Tambours de Brazza, who thrilled the crowds with drumming and acrobatics, Carlinhos Brown - clad in a stylish, floppy denim cowboy hat, a white jacket, and embroidered jeans, accompanied by a procession of his corps of Timbalada drummers, suddenly appeared to wildly thunderous cheers and throngs of fans rushing the stage. Without prior rehearsal, Mr. Brown, ever the master percussionist, took charge of the stage full of drummers with lightening speed, drummed, sang, paced back and forth exhorting the drummers, and, as if on cue, heavy rain showers drenched the audiences in the open-air courtyard, cooling the boiling ambience but none of the exuberance.

The other festival surprise yet unknown to wider international music circles, was the delightful and glowing newcomer Chad beauty, Mounira Mitchala in a silver ornamented headdress, who gracefully and seductively danced, swirling her glittering orange veils, thoroughly mesmerizing the audience with her clear, bell-like voice, while backed by her band members on traps, bass and guitar. Hailing from a country that frowns upon women performers and women's music, Mounira is an exceptionally gifted singer-songwriter with traditional "Hakkama" (women praise-singers) lineage from her grandmother and mother. She was winner of France's 2007 "Decouvertes RFI" award and CultureFrance's 2008 "Visas Pour La Creation" award. Her songs exalt love, delve into peaceful solutions to war, and especially, call upon Chad's women to work together to help unite and develop the country. Her stage exploded into an intense, mini Bahia-Chad carnival as members of one of Salvador's most renowned Afro-Bloc Carnival drumming troupes, Olodum, surrounded her, dancing, waving and holding their drums aloft, as she sang a song of celebration she'd composed in their honor.

Carlinhos Brown's Museu du Ritmo along with the Center of Black Music will decisively establish Salvador as an international cultural capital of black music. Considering the fact that Bahia is the historical birthplace of modern Brazil through her early history of over 4.5 captive Africans (from different West African and Bantu ethnicities and regions) who drove the Portuguese colonial sugar industry between the 16th - 19th centuries, the country's relatively recent efforts (since 2003) to help bring about racial equality for African descendents through cultural black consciousness celebrations is a real reason to acclaim Salvador as Brazil's 'Capital of Happiness.'

Today, 80% of Bahia's population is of African descent while Brazil has the largest population of black origin outside of Africa. Yet, what makes Afro-Brazil so enthralling and fascinating also has as much to do with the mixed racial heritages that embrace not only Africa, but the original native indigenous peoples as well as the European colonial past.

Carlinhos Brown firmly noted during interview that he aims to help Brazil "recognize the beauty of her many cultural diversities and racial mixes." The Festival Músicas Mestiças' contagious happiness and joy in the smiling crowds of all ethnicities, as they celebrated African heritage and black consciousness together, bore out his genius.