(AUSTIN, TEXAS - Nov. 8, 2017, source: Juice Consulting) - The world's premier Brazilian Mardi Gras outside of Brazil, Austin's  Carnaval Brasileiro, returns for its 41st year on  Saturday, Feb. 10, 2018. Derived from the decades-old tradition of Brazilian Carnival, Austin's own  Carnaval Brasileiro is one of the most wildly authentic indoor Brazilian Carnival parties in the world, with more than 6,000 attendees each year. 

"The event is a cross between Carnaval in Brazil, Burning Man and an EDM/world music dance party," said  Carnaval Brasileiro organizer, Mike Quinn. "It's been a part of Austin's creative soul for the past 40 years and welcomes the young and old. It's for people who love culture, dance and self-expression. Think Eeyore's birthday in feathery costumes and on steroids." 

The event will be held at the  Palmer Events Center, 900 Barton Springs Rd., Austin, Texas 78704. Doors open at  8 p.m., with music starting at  9 p.m. Tickets are  $35 in advance and  $45 at the door and will go on sale  Dec. 15. Tickets will also be available for the  VIP Samba Circle Lounge where guests will have a private space with windows facing the downtown skyline, no-line restrooms, no-line bars and other surprises. For tickets and general information, see www.sambaparty.com. The nonprofit partner for the event will be announced soon.

Founded in the early 1970's, this vibrant, wild party has attracted people from all around the country and it keeps getting bigger and better with each passing year. Attendees are encouraged to dress in costumes spawned from their wildest imagination, whether they choose to wear a costume of their own conception, or by assembling a group of friends and neighbors to dress in themed costumes, which Brazilians call a bloco.

"A Carnaval event of this magnitude and eccentricity could only flourish outside of Brazil in a city like Austin where its eclectic party goers are ready to dance all night long to the sounds of authentic samba drums, all the while dressed in the most exotic, bizarre costumes you've ever seen," said  Quinn.


 
Carnaval Brasileiro 2018 will feature exhilarating performances from world-renowned Carnaval performer  Dandara Odara and her seven-piece band flown in all the way from Salvador, Bahia in northeastern Brazil, a city whose Carnaval celebration is even more raucous and wild than that of Rio. Dandara and her band will perform everything from traditional Brazilian carnaval rhythms such as Rio-style sambas and marches to her native Bahian samba-reggae grooves. The evening will also feature Austin's own Recife-style maracatĂș ensemble,  Grupo Massa, a local group of seven drummers, accompanying bass, guitar and accordion. 

"To me, it's still all about the music," said Quinn. "Yeah, everyone goes to have a good time at the hottest party in town. But what they may not know is that they are also getting an amazing concert of authentic Brazilian carnaval music thrown in for free!" 

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About Carnaval Brasileiro:
Austin is still a young city, in search of its own traditions. Though it has come up with a few native creations, Austinites still borrow and adapt traditions established elsewhere. Its public festivals, for example, tend to mirror those civic events promoted by local governments and chambers of commerce from coast to coast. So why would a mid-sized Central Texas city boast a Brazilian carnival, lifted straight out of Rio, with purely Brazilian music played on Brazilian instruments, and sung entirely in Portuguese? The story of Carnaval Brasileiro in Austin is a curious one, yet it typifies the way things often happen in this community.

It all began around 1975. At that time there were many Brazilian scholarship students at the University of Texas at Austin taking a six-week long intensive English course. Faced with the prospect of a February without CARNAVAL, they decided with their local friends to hold their own celebration. Carnaval '75 took place in a small room at Austin's Unitarian Church (which is into almost anything). The 200 or so revelers had planted a seed. For the next several years, the party moved further downtown, drawing ever larger crowds. Carnaval '76, held at The Bucket (a bar then located on West 23rd St.) drew over 300 folks who struggled to keep their footing, covered with an inch or two of spilled beer. A group of devoted "Brasilianistas" continued to organize a Carnaval that began growing rapidly beyond their control. The last party to retain the original university focus was held at the Dobie Center in 1977, with over 500 participants. The size of the crowd and problems with the homestyle sound system pointed up the need for a large hall with professional sound equipment. And as the number of scholarships dwindled, the Brazilian students were gradually submerged into a Carnaval that Austinites were already making their own.

At this point, Mike Quinn entered the picture. Quinn (for 10 years the producer of "Horizontes," a daily radio program dedicated to the music of Latin America on KUT-FM, Austin's NPR affiliate) in 1978 was a lowly but ambitious retail clerk at Discount Records across from the University of Texas campus. Mike undertook the organization of Carnaval '78 as an outlet for his own creative interests in Brazilian music. The celebration, held at the double-tiered Boondocks Club (later infamous as Club Foot) on East Fourth St. in downtown Austin, was the take-off for Carnaval Brasileiro as it's known today. Carnaval 1978 packed in over a thousand bodies, sweating and gyrating to the drumming of Austin's first Carnaval group: an ad hoc assembly of local musicians including ethnomusicologists from UT and members of Beto y Los Fairlanes, all under the direction of Dr. Gerard Behague of the UT Department of Music. Though the drumming was improvised, the atmosphere was magical, and it set the stage for the live music featured at every Carnaval since. 


 
Accordingly, in 1979 Carnaval moved into the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters (sadly, now defunct), where Austin's first Brazilian band, Os Imperialistas do Samba (later Unidos de Austin), played to a capacity house of 1,800. The night's $3 tickets were scalped outside for as much as $25. In 1980, Carnaval Brasileiro finally moved to the warehouse-like Coliseum, which, despite two sojourns at Austin's 7,000 capacity Palmer Auditorium (1981 and 1984), became its home until 2003 when the party moved into its current home, the Palmer Events Center on the shores of Austin's Town Lake.

The event continued to grow in size and sophistication throughout the '80s as organizers searched for the right formula to make the party sizzle. The earlier costume contests have been dropped because they interrupt the flow of the music and dancing, being replaced with large video screens flanking the stage which help highlight some of the more spectacular costumes and the performers on stage. The music of Carnaval - samba, march, frevo, trio elĂ©trico and lots of batucada, or drumming - now pours out in seamless, driving, 90-minute sets. This is the euphoria of a real Carnaval, magnified by an arena-style sound system that makes three or four drums sound like a hundred. The key to the samba sound is the heavy boom of the surdo bass drums set against the counter-rhythms and back beats for the smaller percussion. When all of this is on the mark, samba kicks ass! It can be seen on the faces of the crowd as people begin to lose control and abandon themselves to the charged atmosphere.

Carnaval Brasileiro has now become an Austin institution, one that nobody really planned as such. A small party grew into a giant public bash because there were Brazilians who needed a celebration, local individuals to nurture it along the way, a radio program ("Horizontes") to promote its music, a series of bands to play the music and, above all, enough Austinites who felt the magic and kept coming back for more. Carnaval has emerged and thrived in Austin, because long ago it became a city of open attitudes and spontaneity, due in large part to the university influence. Now that bohemian attitude has mixed with just enough business sense and hard work to make music happen in a way that is attracting attention from around the world. Perhaps the greatest monument to that spirit - the defunct Armadillo World Headquarters - is now just a memory. But Austin's Carnaval Brasileiro, its peculiar winterfest of flesh and fantasy, was nurtured in that unique semi-cohesive, culture-conscious environment and still flowers every February. For more information on Carnaval Brasileiro, please see: www.sambaparty.com.

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MEDIA NOTE:

**For high resolution press images, please click here. 

**To RSVP for event coverage on Feb. 10 or for advance media inquiries about Carnaval Brasileiro, please contact the team at Juice Consulting:

Heather Wagner Reed                        Tyler Ostby
713 208 3891                                          210 854 9119
heather@juiceconsulting.com            tyler@juiceconsulting.com