I think it may have started with the photos of old Rio. Someone posted a series of black and white photos from the 1890s to the 1970s, and I found myself looking at them with a dreamy kind of nostalgia, as if I’d been there and was missing it.

But of course I’d never been there. I was born in the USA and came to Rio for the first time in 1990. I think what I was longing for was a sense of tradition, something I’d actually had a taste of when I was involved as a percussionist in Rio’s famous Carnival for more than five years in the early 90s.

I soon discovered that what I’d been missing was a hands-on involvement in Brazilian musical culture. I stopped playing samba a number of years ago, and hadn’t really thought about it much—until now. So I found myself glued to…