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Description
Maxixe is a lively Brazilian couple dance and the music that accompanies it, often nicknamed the "Brazilian tango." It crystallized in Rio de Janeiro in the late 19th century as a hybrid of Afro‑Brazilian and European dance musics.
Musically, maxixe sits in duple meter (2/4) with buoyant, off‑beat accents and syncopation derived from lundu and the habanera/tresillo cell, but propelled with the forward motion of the European polka and schottische. The style flourished in urban salons, theater revues, street festivities, and early carnival, moving deftly between refined piano pieces (sometimes labeled "tango brasileiro") and small ensemble settings with guitars, cavaquinho, flute, and clarinet.
As a social dance it was animated, close‑embrace, and playful, which lent it both popularity and controversy. Stylistically it bridged the 19th‑century salon world and the emerging 20th‑century sound of Rio, helping to seed choro, marchinha, and eventually samba.
History
Maxixe emerged in Rio de Janeiro around the late 1860s (famously cited as 1868), when Afro‑Brazilian rhythmic practices (especially those heard in lundu) intermingled with fashionable European couple dances (polka, schottische, and the ubiquitous waltz). The habanera/tresillo pulse, circulating transatlantically, supplied a distinctive syncopated lilt, while the urban salon and theater circuits provided the social stage where the new hybrid took hold.
By the 1880s–1900s, maxixe traveled easily between street parties and salons. Pianists and composers notated it as "tango brasileiro" to distinguish it from the River Plate tango and to gentrify a dance sometimes deemed risqué. Chiquinha Gonzaga’s "Gaúcho (Corta‑Jaca)" and Ernesto Nazareth’s many tangos/maxixes exemplified the idiom’s elegant yet rhythmically insistent style. Ensembles of flute, clarinet, cavaquinho, and violões (guitars) also popularized instrumental maxixes alongside choros.
A watershed moment came in 1914, when Brazil’s First Lady Nair de Teffé publicly performed Gonzaga’s "Corta‑Jaca" at the presidential palace, igniting debate and signaling the music’s ascent from popular dancefloor to national conversation.
Contemporaneous with the growth of Argentine and Uruguayan tango, maxixe drew frequent comparison abroad and was sometimes exported as a Brazilian counterpart. The two dances shared close‑embrace sensuality and urban modernity, but maxixe retained its characteristic Brazilian swing—lighter, polka‑inflected, and steeped in lundu/habanera syncopations.
By the 1920s the style’s DNA had diffused through Rio’s musical life, informing early choro aesthetics, carnival marchinhas, and the rhythmic vocabulary that fed into samba and later MPB. While maxixe as a named dance waned, its grooves, forms (multi‑strain AABBACCA designs), and syncopations remained foundational to Brazilian popular music.
