Choro · Jazz Wiki

Choro is Brazil’s first great instrumental music — born in Rio de Janeiro in the 1870s when local musicians took European salon dances like the polka and waltz and ran them through Afro-Brazilian syncopation. It isn’t dance music or song accompaniment; it exists to let a small group of virtuosos weave fast, contrapuntal lines around each other. Everything that makes Brazilian music harmonically sophisticated — the chromatic passing chords, the secondary dominants, the moving bass lines under Samba and Bossa Nova — has roots here.

A Rondo Built for Sections, Not Choruses

Where a jazz standard usually settles into AABA Form and a soloist blows chorus after chorus over the same 32 bars, a choro tune is a rondo of three distinct strains, each with its own key:

A – A – B – B – A – C – C – A
A section: tonic key (e.g., C major)
B section: often moves to the relative minor or the dominant (e.g., A minor)
C section: often shifts to the subdominant (e.g., F major), giving the tune a fresh harmonic color before the final return home

Each strain typically runs 16 or 32 bars. This three-strain, key-shifting shape is a useful contrast to jazz song forms: instead of one harmonic loop that a soloist reinterprets over and over, choro moves through a small, fixed tour of keys, and the “improvising” happens inside that architecture rather than by extending it.

Three Jobs, One Contrapuntal Texture

A classic choro group is a small chamber ensemble, and every instrument has a clearly defined role. The flute (later mandolin, called bandolim, or clarinet and sax) carries the lead melody, fast and ornamented. The cavaquinho — a small four-string guitar-like instrument, essentially Brazil’s answer to the ukulele — strums the syncopated chordal rhythm, functioning like a rhythm-guitar comping voice inside The Rhythm Section. Underneath it all, the violão de sete cordas (seven-string guitar) uses its extra low string to improvise a moving bass countermelody called baixaria — literally “bass line,” but really a running line of arpeggios and chromatic passing tones that weaves under and around the melody — while the pandeiro (a tambourine-like frame drum) keeps the syncopated pulse.

Improvising Around the Tune, Not Away From It

Jazz improvisation is mostly built on taking a chorus: the form repeats, the soloist reharmonizes and reinvents the melody freely, sometimes for many trips through the changes. Choro improvisation works differently — the written melody and form stay largely fixed, and the “solo” energy goes into ornamenting that melody and, especially, into the guitarist’s real-time baixaria. Over a single held chord, a seven-string player might walk a chromatic bass line like C–B–B♭–A under the flute’s tune, generating constant contrapuntal motion without ever leaving the chord’s harmonic function. It’s a heterophonic conception — everyone varying the same idea at once — closer to New Orleans collective polyphony than to trading fours.

The Root System Under Samba and Bossa

Choro’s harmonic vocabulary — secondary dominants and chromatic approach chords connecting diatonic chords, as in C–A7–Dm7–G7–C — shows up directly in Ernesto Nazareth’s and Pixinguinha’s writing decades before it resurfaces in Jobim. Samba grows out of the same Rio scene and keeps choro’s syncopated 2/4 feel while becoming vocal and dance-driven. Bossa Nova later softens choro’s contrapuntal bass thinking and chromatic harmony into something cooler and sparser, but the DNA — moving inner voices, chords that lean chromatically into the next chord — is choro’s.

♫ Listen

Pixinguinha — “Um a Zero” (1919): a classic instrumental choro; listen for the contrapuntal interplay between flute and the guitar’s baixaria, and for how tightly the AABBACCA form is packed with melodic incident.
Waldir Azevedo — “Brasileirinho” (1949): the best-known cavaquinho showcase in the whole repertoire — track the rondo form’s key changes and the blistering syncopated cavaquinho lead.
Jacob do Bandolim — “Noites Cariocas”: mid-century revival choro; listen for the bandolim’s virtuosic ornamentation against a full roda-de-choro (informal group jam) texture.