Pousada (guesthouse) Encanto de Itapoan is owned and run by the Brazilian/English Rocha family, of whom the Brazilian part (Octacílio; guitar in hand in the top photo) and a Brazilian/English part (daughter Bia) are musicians. As such, the pervading ethos of Encanto is the music of Brazil, which day and evening (per above) drifts over pool and grounds. www.encantodeitapoan.com.br

Jews and Brazil? An oxymoron? Not by a long shot! The first synagogue in the western hemisphere was located in Recife...as a matter of fact it's still there. Clarice Lispector, Brazilian literary giant, was born in a shtetl in the Ukraine (from there her family emigrated to Brazil's nordeste (northeast), and from there to Rio). And then there is the sublime Jacob do Bandolim (Jacob of the Mandolin).

Jacob was the son of a Jewish woman from Lodz, Poland, who fled the First World War to Brazil, and a Brazilian pharmacist from Espirto Santo. He worked in musical style called "choro", a style gloriously replete with brilliant melodies, harmony, and counterpoint, over sly, subtle and evershifting Afro-Brazilian swing (in Brazil the music can swing in 10 different directions at once!)...and amazingly a style almost unheard of outside of Brazil.

The composition below is Jacob's Bole Bole.

The dance style here is called gafieira, taken from name (identical) for Rio's samba dancehalls of the 1930s, a style which has seen a big resurgence centered around Rio's Lapa district over the past few years. Interestingly, these people aren't emulating the past (like at a 50s party, for example), and they aren't living in it...it's that Brazil, unlike the United States and Europe, where musical styles get tossed out as fashion changes, doesn't move on...it accretes, and almost every kind of music which was once played here is still being played here somewhere or other, right now.

This clip is from Finnish filmmaker (and Salvador resident!) Mika Kaurismäki's documentary Brasileirinho. Also, we'd like to mention that although choro is usually associated with Rio, it was not only influenced by samba (from Bahia), it was imbued with it, and for the past century choro wouldn't be choro if it didn't include a pandeiro...and it wouldn't include a pandeiro were such not introduced into choro by the essential João da Baiana, youngest son of a Bahian family which, like so many others, emigrated to Rio de Janeiro.

When addressing the artistic life of a peripatetically prolific man, is it unreasonable to address also the artistic life of that man's emphatically prolific father*? Simon Brook thankfully allows this question to answer itself, having addressed his father's artistic life in two exquisite documentaries: Brook by Brook (2002), and The Tightrope; the latter co-written with his father and recently shown at the 69th (2012) Venice Film Festival.

*We are speaking of course of British theatrical director Peter Brook, who among much else directed Gielgud and Olivier for the Royal Shakespeare Company...whose foray into film directing yielded Lord of the Flies in 1963.

But what a tortuous path this prodigal son (his prodigality expressed in art) took to get back there...

Simon was born in London, educated in London and Paris, and now makes his home in Paris. At twelve years of age he began as a runner at Pinewood Studios. He spent a year in training at The Drama Center, and then moved to Paris where he became company manager for the European tours of Dave Brubeck, Pina Bausch, and the Murray Louis Dance Company. Moving into film, and among other projects, he was assistant director on The Unbearable Lightness of Being (with Philip Kaufman) and worked as production consultant for In the Soup, with Steve Buscemi and Jennifer Beals (1st Prize, Sundance Festival, 1991; Prix du Public, Deauville, 1992). During this period he also helped to develop and finance the political thriller Primary Motive, starring Judd Nelson and released through Twentieth Century Fox.

In 1992 Simon directed the documentary on French theater director Jean Mercure for the series Parisian Mémoires.

He directed, in 2000, Karos D'Ethiope: Les Amoureux du Fleuve, treating love stretched to the breaking point between modernity and tradition in the Valley of Omo, in the south of Ethiopa.

Mirage in Yemen (2002) was a making-of following location scouting in the Yemen desert for The Naval Battle.

Amazone, an intellectual adventure as broad and extensive as its subject, utilizing the notes of novelist Paule Constant and broadcast on France 2 (French public television), followed the world's greatest river from Peru and Columbia through Brazil.

Simon directed Cleopatra's Lost City for Discovery Channel (2003), and The True Legend of the Eiffel Tower (2005), for Canal+/Discovery (a record 5.6 million viewers watched its first primetime France 3 television broadcast). Between these projects he spent weeks back in the Amazon directing Jungle Magic (2004), a documentary on the world's largest folk festival, Boi Bumba, which takes place on an island in the world's largest river (the Amazon, naturally) in a specially constructed stadium for 35,000 people, in the town of Parintins.

Skipping an ocean and decades, Simon moved to Generations 68 (2008), documenting, forty years after the facts, the arts and zeitgeist of Europe at a time when bombs and napalm exploded over Vietnam and people blew their own minds. With Milos Forman, Vaclav Havel, Mary Quant, Dennis Hopper, Annie Nightingale, William Klein, Ed Ruschka, Peter Brook and others.

Simon's 2011 documentary for the BBC, Annie Nightingale: Bird on the Wireless, included Mick Jones, Paul McCartney and Fatboy Slim.

When he's in Venice, Simon's been known to have the occasional drink at Harry's. When in Salvador, his place of choice is O Cravinho, on the Terreiro de Jesus (where the price of one drink at Harry's will get you thirty!).

Viva O Cravinho! Viva Simon Brook!

Santiago do Iguape, on the Iguape bay, is a small fishing village almost as old as Salvador, having been founded in 1561 by Jesuits. The communities in the surrounding areas were founded as quilombos, villages of runaway slaves.

The preferred musical style here and in the once-hidden satellite communities is, of course, samba-de-roda. Viva!

Set in seemingly the most unlikely of places*, on the margin of the bay of Iguape, itself set in the course of the Paraguaçu river, which debouches into the Baía de Todos os Santos -- Bay of All Saints -- this is São Francisco do Iguape's Convento Santo Antônio.

Work was begun on the convent in 1649; by 1653 the convent was ready for occupancy. The first stone for the church itself was laid between 1651 and 1658 (historical sources vary).

Decline began to set in in 1825 when Santo Antônio's House of Novitiates was transferred to the convent of São Francisco in Salvador (in the old city, the area nowadays referred to as "Pelourinho"). In 1888 an article in the Gazeta da Bahia said that the convent "is nowadays abandoned, serving only as a lair for nocturnal birds."

* The peninsula of Iguape was arguably the richest sugarcane producing area in Brazil, home to fourteen plantations and numerous quilombos (refuges/villages founded by runaway slaves).