LEGACIES IN RHYTHM.

• Author: Holston, Mark

Two figures who all but defined their respective music traditions and became virtual cultural icons in their homelands have passed away, leaving a void that will not easily be filled.

In Brazil, the regal woman known as the First Lady of Samba, Neuma Goncalves da Silva, died on July 17 at the age of seventy-eight. As the reigning matriarch of the world's most famous samba school (choreographed, community-based samba parade group), Rio de Janeiro's Mangueira, she had come in recent decades to symbolize the most traditional elements of Brazil's samba culture.

In the U.S., Ernest Anthony Puente, Jr., the energetic, multitalented musician who for most of his half-century-long career was reverentially referred to as the King of Latin Music, died in New York City on May 31 at the age of seventy-seven. As a percussionist, composer, arranger, and bandleader, the man his millions of fans called simply "Tito" was largely responsible for the popularization in the 1950s of the mambo and in the 1980s and 1990s of Latin jazz.

Daughter of the man who served as the first president of the Mangueira Escola de Samba, Goncalves was born in Rio's most famous favela on May 8, 1922. At the center of her community's annual samba school activities from an early age, she became a central figure in the yearly drama to organize, rehearse, and stage Mangueira's storied samba extravaganzas. In her lifetime, the pre-Lenten celebrations of song and dance evolved from simply presented, purely community-based celebrations of Afro-Brazilian culture to the fiercely competitive, flashy, televised spectacles of today's Carnival. Up to five thousand dancers, singers, and musicians and a behind-the-scenes crew of hundreds are involved in samba-school productions today, with the creation of an annual theme--and the involvement of top-flight composers, directors, costume designers, and other show business professionals.

Such was not the case when Goncalves, dressed as a sunflower, first participated in a bloco--a small group that parades during Carnival--even before Mangueira was founded. Over the years, some of Brazil's greatest samba composers called Mangueira home, and Goncalves learned the art of samba at their feet. "We had wonderful sambas," she recalled in a recent interview for the Internet website Brazil On-Line. "We used to learn them without microphones and no speakers; it was only [composer] Cartola's guitar and a banjo. It was wonderful."

For her book Samba (Vantage...