wait WHAT?! Bands in Brazil are obsessed with Phil Collins' song Against All Odds?

Why Brazil’s State-Sponsored Brass Bands Are Constantly Playing Phil Collins

Wow what a read! Bands in Brazil, not rock bands but school type bands, love to play the Phil Collins song Against All Odds. You know the one "take a look at me now..."

There are a ton of YouTube videos out there. Some good, some not, most kind of in-between. Lots of saxophone solos.

So what gives?

In 1976, Brazil’s national arts foundation—the Fundação Nacional de Artes, better known as Funarte—created a nationwide program to support municipal bands out of concern for the tradition of brass bands.

Called the Projecto Bandas de Música (Music Bands Project), it continues to this day with a goal of training musicians and supporting performances throughout Brazil. Today, there are 2,455 bandas playing across Brazil, with the majority in the state of Minas Gerais. Funarte has given out around 40,000 instruments in the past 40 years.

According to Funarte’s Marcelo Mavignier, the band project is also designed to reach young people in high-risk areas, with performances that benefit the musicians as well as the communities they come from.

“They usually present in public squares, theaters and auditoriums,” he says. “The target audience is the population.”

And this explains how the bandas ended up playing Phil Collins.

Instead of competing against each other, as school bands tend to do in the U.S., Brazilian bands play at friendly events called encontros, or meetings. After a day of playing old favorites and dobrados, Reily says, the bands host an evening concert to entertain the audience—and each other.

That’s when the bands show off by playing popular music, like “Against All Odds.” According to Brucher, that particular song checks a lot of boxes that would make it popular in an encontro.

“If you’re a band with a proficient saxophone soloist, it’s a big way to feature them,” Brucher says. “It’s a radio hit, it’s very melodic, it’s one of those songs—the lyrics are pretty simple, it’s really universal, and even if you didn’t speak English, you still could sing along.”

Hmm so bottom line - people like it and bands like to play it. I get that.

more at the link