On Carnaval, Savoring the Message Inside the Samba.

SALVADOR DE BAHIA — We were sitting in a cafe with a view of the Pelourinho, the historic city square in Bahia, observing a group of mostly…

Carlinhos de Jesus, master choreographer, at a Mangueira rehearsal

SALVADOR DE BAHIA — We were sitting in a cafe with a view of the Pelourinho, the historic city square in Bahia, observing a group of mostly old men hunched over instruments around a table.

Nothing much was happening — it was like watching paint dry, but with much better sonics. That’s because the music was samba, the old style called “samba de roda” (in the round), and in the weeks leading up to Carnaval celebrations, there were outbreaks of it in the streets every place I went. A few teenaged percussionists stood over the table, supplying the unwavering, little-changing rhythm that seemed to magnetize passers-by. Around them, in a circle that obscured the musicians and nearly swallowed the sound, was dancing.

My host, a journalist named Rodrigo Montero who works for an N.G.O. fighting illiteracy in Bahia, made sure I caught the distinguishing characteristic of the crowd moving gracefully over the worn cobblestones: It was all ages. Moms held babies and danced. Weathered old folks danced alone. Preteens imitated the couples near them. Suit-wearing professionals broke into languid side-to-side steps as they passed by. All agreed on the basics of the rhythm, the flow of it. No dancing lessons were needed.

“In Brazil, you party with your mom….and your grandparents,” Montero said, neatly summing up the salient inclusiveness of samba. “As a young person in Brazil, you are part of what Americans would recognize as typical youth culture, but right along with it there’s this other, older culture that keeps coming around. You welcome it because the music is so powerful and uplifting….[and because,] at Carnaval time especially, everyone becomes part of samba. It transcends age. And class. It reminds us about where we come from in a deep way.”

Every year as Carnaval approaches, I think about that January day, and how that glimpse into Brazilian culture differed from those perfunctory U.S. cable news reports from Carnaval. You know that reel: Extended aerial shots of massive crowds in the Sambadrome and closeups of the dancing throngs, accompanied by mind-boggling statistics about attendance, the cost and the man-hours that go into the floats.

It’s a reliably colorful segment for February, a glimpse of exotic urban pageantry in a sundrenched locale. And, of course, it’s the tourism version. The story is more complicated in the favelas that ring Brazil’s cities. There, samba schools are at the center of daily life — some offer daycare and health services, all give residents a sense of belonging to a crew, in a neighborhood.

Despite the well-documented troubles Brazil faces — the corruption and the extreme poverty and everything else — the everyday people have one rich and undeniable birthright: The neural net of samba. Inside it is the wisdom of the ages and whatever passed for wisdom last week, jumbled together into a wildly alive, endlessly regenerating perpetual-motion machine of celebration. This thing is so strong, so enveloping, that people will march for hours playing the same rhythm, singing the same song in an endless loop.

Even the dour goth teens and soccer aces born in Brazil can’t escape samba. It is in the air. Maybe the DNA. It supersedes language. It’s understood well before formal education begins. Some professional drummer friends from Rio confessed to me that at first, they didn’t bother to sit down and study the intricacies of samba — shortly after picking up the instruments used in the parades, they discovered they intuitively could play the basic patterns. They were hardwired.

Samba is a kind of life information, holding clues and hints about a way of being. It arrives not on a screen but through the drum. Make that drums. Sometimes thousands at once. Heard from a distance in the streets, the percussion of the samba schools sounds chaotic and otherworldly, like doom arriving via a synchronized team of impossibly dexterous earthmovers. Get closer and the rhythm clarifies: It becomes sinewy and tauntingly sexy, a lure into a dance in progress, an affirmation of tribes and neighborhoods, the celebration of a unifying force.

It goes without saying: Nothing in modern American life, not even blockbuster movies, has this resonance, this power to bring people together. The music and dancing of the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans at Mardi Gras comes close. But that has elements of an elite society, with closely guarded secrets and history-minded gatekeepers. Samba is for everyone.

I witnessed this over and over again, on a January trip I’d timed to coincide with the elaborate preparations for the mid-February Carnaval. At a midnight “rehearsal” of the Tijuca samba school on a desolate street in Rio’s port district, wide-eyed preschoolers sat on their dad’s shoulders as families sauntered down the street behind the drum corps. At the open-air Bahia headquarters of the bloco known as Ile Aiye, a nighttime rehearsal drew 1000 paying customers; easily three times that number clogged every adjacent street within earshot.

And in every location, the scene was the same: People in constant and fluid motion. Samba demands some level of engagement, participation. There are no passive spectators. On a Tuesday afternoon three weeks before Carnaval in Rio, I got to spend an hour with the celebrated choreographer Carlinhos de Jesus in his office. He was between rehearsals for the massive Mangueira samba school, and he showed me the grueling practice regimen his dancers endure daily, the hours they spend learning every last shrug and gesture. de Jesus described this part of the process as the easy part, dependent on rote learning. He maintained that the secret to transforming thousands of people into a cohesive samba corps was mostly mental: To create a unified impression in the deafening Sambadrome, he has to get his team thinking of samba not in terms of precision moves, but as the visual expression of a feeling, a spirit.

To illustrate, he got a few of us to hold hands in a circle, and he began a whispered rendition of the pep talk he gives his crew just before the performance. His grip was ironman firm, as though his hands were jump-starting an electric circuit. His eyes were shooting darts as he calmly stared at each of us.

“Do I have enough time?” he began, almost hissing. “Of course I want more time to get things just right. But that doesn’t matter if the company isn’t united. If it doesn’t move together, with conviction. That’s why there’s always a circle like this in our dance, at least one. So that they feel connected to each other.” He paused, maybe for effect, like a preacher. “I tell them: Do not rely on me. I do not make samba. You do not make samba. The people on the street do not make samba…Only together we make samba.”