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Samba to success
By LISSETTE CORSA CARROLLWOOD -- It wasn't quite Friday night. It wasn't quite Saturday morning. It was well after midnight, appropriately, when the real fun began at Carruseles Restaurant and Nightclub. Up on the television screen, you could see samba schools parading down the Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro. Live, on the dance floor, causally dressed men and young women in tight hip-huggers, halters and heels swayed their hips to Afro-Brazilian rhythms. "The girls went crazy, especially when I played funk," said disc jockey Mauro Pagani. That it happened at all, despite the region's growing Brazilian population, can be attributed to Pagani, 29, and promoter Andre Santos, 25. Slowly, gradually but definitely, Santos and Pagani, who both live in Town 'N Country, have introduced Brazilian samba into the lexicon of Latin clubgoers in northwest Hillsborough County. Selections include rapid-fire sambas, pagode (roots samba), axe (pronounced ashe) music from northeastern Brazil, Brazilian funk and forro (pronounced foho). Hearing some tunes, the crowd will break into a synchronized choreography of hand motions, plenty of hip movements, turns and samba steps. Management at the Gunn Highway restaurant and nightclub is thrilled at the popularity of these samba nights, which happen the first Friday of every month. "Sometimes the lines get so long we have to turn people away because we have no room for them," said Nelson Roldan, one of the club's three owners. "Brazilians really know how to party. They stay on the dance floor all night long." A tour of Tampa clubsSamba nights might have been an overnight success for the nightclub. But success was a long time coming for Pagani, a native of Santa Catarina, Brazil, who now lives in the Sheldon Palms apartment complex. Pagani first undertook Tampa samba nights in 1997, at La Cueva in Ybor City. He did it all: organizing, promoting and acting as DJ. Wanting a weekend schedule, he says, he moved in 1998 to Sugar Palm. That club later closed. Pagani moved on to Red Star, which also folded. After his stint at Red Star he started throwing parties at restaurants specializing in anything from Peruvian to Italian fare. It didn't matter to Pagani what they served; it didn't matter to his hosts what kind of musical concoctions Pagani included in his repertoire either. "They would tell me as long as the house is full, we don't care what you play," Pagani said. But Pagani reached a breaking point. Burnt out, he decided to go on hiatus. It didn't last long. A few months into his vacation he met Andre Santos through a mutual friend. Santos, from Minas Gerais, Brazil, had made a name for himself in Tampa Brazilian circles. Every weekend for about a year he hosted underground parties at his house. "I have a lot of friends in the Brazilian community here, so sometimes there would be a hundred people in my house partying," Santos said. "I realized there was a lack of places for Brazilians to come together and have a good time." Hence Pagani and Santos joined forces. "I was tired of promoting the parties so I asked Andre to handle that aspect," Pagani said. Santos willingly obliged. Pagani, who had worked as a DJ in Brazil for 10 years, would naturally churn out the tunes. This time the parties would be at Carruseles, a Latin nightclub and Colombian restaurant that hosts parties for various Latin American nationalities, including Venezuelan and Mexican. Nelson Roldan, one of the club's three owners, had organized Brazilian parties in New York and brought the idea with him to Tampa. He went to local Brazilian businesses in search of someone who organized parties. Finally a Brazilian travel agent on W Waters Avenue told him about Santos. 'People from as far as Orlando'At first Roldan and partner Eduardo Mejia were skeptical. But when Pagani and Santos threw the first party at Carruseles in September, the owners were blown away. At least 400 patrons flocked to the club. "I was surprised," Roldan said. "We had people here from as far as Orlando." On Carnival night at Carruseles almost everyone was seduced by the contagious sounds of pulsating drumbeats blaring from the speakers. "Brazilians are full of positive energy," said 32-year-old Gaston Aristegui, from Buenos Aires, Argentina, as he drank a caipirinha. "Not only can you feel it in their music and in the way they dance, but you can see it in the way they take life one day at a time." On the dance floor people gyrated their hips to the quick, symmetrical, twisting foot movements of the samba. It's not an easy dance. But, as Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim once warned, "Brazil is not for beginners."
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