Samba rock (also known as samba soul, samba funk, and sambalanço) is a Brazilian dance culture and music genre that fuses samba with soul, rock, and funk. It emerged from the dance parties of São Paulo's lower-class black communities after they had been exposed to rock and roll and African-American music in the late 1950s. As a development of 1960s música popular brasileira, the genre was pioneered by recording acts such as Jorge Ben, Tim Maia, and Trio Mocotó. It gained a wider popularity in the following decades after breaking through into discotheques. By the 2000s, samba rock had grown into a broader cultural movement involving dancers, disc jockeys, scholars, and musicians, who reinvented the genre in a modernized form. Origins Samba rock's origins lie in the predominantly black favelas of São Paulo during the late 1950s, when Brazilian radio and dance halls were reached by the global spread of American rock and roll and related African-American music such as blues and jazz. Its first incarnation was as a dance phenomenon at community block parties that began to play these styles alongside traditional samba and bolero music. These parties eventually moved to larger venues hosted by disc jockeys. The first known samba-rock deejay Osvaldo Pereira—known by his stage name "Orquestra Invisível (Invisible Orchestra) Let’s Dance"—debuted in 1958 in downtown São Paulo. "The parties started to get crowded, and the rooms for the parties started to get larger", Pereira recounted. "Then, I thought of building my own equipment, which had to be powerful, and faithful to the sound of the live orchestras." His early equipment included a 100-watt sound system featuring a rudimentary version of a crossover, which allowed Pereira to control the frequencies of the music. Dance culture In the earliest samba-rock parties, deejays played music from a number of genres, including Partido Alto sambas and Italian rock, while attendees joined in pairs and engaged in rock and roll (Lindy Hop, Rockabilly) and samba dances (Samba de Gafieira). In 1957, Brazilian pianist Waldir Calmon recorded a samba version of Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock", which was a turning point for the events; according to Brazilian journalist Beatriz Miranda, "gradually, partygoers turned all the rock and samba moves into one single dance style, later named samba rock." The dances of samba rock honor an exchange between the original music and a variety of other styles, according to Mestre Ataliba, one