Tambor de Crioula do Mestre Felipe

Jongo is an Afro-Brazilian circle dance and song tradition from the coffee-growing heartlands of southeastern Brazil, especially the Paraíba Valley spanning Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais. It is typically performed around a bonfire with two drums—the larger caxambu and the smaller candongueiro—driving interlocking rhythms while participants sing call-and-response verses known as pontos. Rooted in Central and West-Central African (Bantu) cultural memory brought by enslaved peoples, jongo blends ritual, poetry, dance, and social commentary. Dancers invite one another into the circle using the umbigada (a belly-to-belly gesture), and singers improvise metaphor-rich, often enigmatic lyrics that encode devotion, resistance, and wit. In some regions the practice is also called caxambu, reflecting local naming of the larger drum and the tradition itself. Beyond performance, jongo serves as an intergenerational archive for Afro-Brazilian communities, embodying ancestry, spirituality, and communal cohesion while maintaining a lively, dance-forward character.