Event Preview: London Choro Festival 2026 (London; Friday 16th to Sunday 18th October 2026)

The London Choro Festival returns for its second edition this weekend, from Friday 16th to Sunday 18th October, at Copper Cats, an independent pub on Kingsland Road with bare brick and timber beams. Its three days of concerts, workshops and rodas, the open sessions where anyone with an instrument can join in, are all devoted to choro, Brazil’s oldest urban instrumental tradition. Every day pairs a free roda at 5PM with a concert at 7:30PM, and a ticket for all three concerts comes with a £10 discount.

Choro took shape in the mid-1800s in the hands of Rio de Janeiro’s working musicians, civil servants, military bandsmen and small shopkeepers from the city’s suburbs, many of them of African descent, who spent their evenings playing at birthdays, christenings and weddings. The group everyone wanted was led by a young flautist called Joaquim Callado, who turned up with two guitarists and a cavaquinho player to play the European dances of the day, polkas, waltzes and schottisches. His players had grown up with the lundu and the batuque, Afro-Brazilian rhythms that pulled the accent off the beat, so the dances came out syncopated and much harder to sit still to, and the group’s name, Choro Carioca, stuck to the new sound.

Between the parties, the chorões played for each other in rodas, in bars, restaurants and people’s homes, sitting round a table face to face. The circle suited music built on turn-taking. One player carries the tune while the others answer underneath, the lead passes round the table, and sitting face to face lets everyone follow where the music is heading. Getting everybody playing counted for more than getting it perfect, so newcomers pulled up a chair, listeners squeezed in behind, and the roda became the place where choro was learned, swapped and kept going.

More than a century later, the same circle took root in London. Guitarist Jonathan Preiss got it going in 2000 with Caratinga, one of the first choro groups in the UK. Twelve years on, the Rio-born musician Gaio de Lima opened the circle up with Clube do Choro UK, the country’s first organisation devoted to the roda, where amateurs could sit in with professionals every month. In 2016 a handful of regulars from London’s rodas formed Alvorada to bring choro to concert halls and festivals across the UK. Today there’s a roda somewhere in the city every week, and last year the musicians and fans who keep them going put on a festival of their own as volunteers and sold out the concerts.

On Friday 16th October, the festival opens with that community itself. Amateur players from Bath, Cambridge, Oxford, Salisbury and London play a roda in honour of UK choro, before Alvorada, the band that grew out of the city’s sessions, take the stage.

Their line-up draws on musicians from London, Brazil and Uruguay. Their debut, First Light (2019), set choro classics beside their own tunes. Faz Tempo (2024) is almost all original writing, pulling in xote, samba, bossa nova and baião, with room for jazz improvisation and a take on Caetano Veloso’s “Sampa” where all four melody and harmony players improvise at once. For the opener they swell into a gafieira band, adding trombone, bass and a second percussionist. Gafieira is the dance-hall sound where choro meets samba with a big-band punch. Part of the set goes to Moacir Santos, the Pernambuco-born composer and arranger who would have turned 100 this July. His 1965 album Coisas became a landmark of Brazilian music.

Saturday’s concert heads to the Brazilian Northeast, where the accordion drives baião, xote and forró. Nonato Lima, from Ceará, was playing professionally at 12 and served as a staff accordionist in forró bands. Dominguinhos saw him on television and asked him to accompany his shows, and Lima still keeps Dominguinhos in his repertoire as a tribute. He has played the São João season with Ivete Sangalo’s band since 2023 and recorded the xote “Bateu Saudade” with her in 2025. His own records head somewhere more exploratory. Brasiliando (2019), his first album of original compositions, travels between forró, choro and jazz, built on improvisation and richer harmony. In Dalston he plays as a trio with Luiz Morais, Alvorada’s seven-string guitarist, and Adriano Adewale, a São Paulo-born percussionist, based in the UK since 2000, known for coaxing sounds out of natural materials.

Closing night on Sunday brings Duo In Uno from Paris, where Italian saxophonist Giulia Tamanini and Brazilian seven-string guitarist José Ferreira met while studying and started playing together in 2014. With only two instruments, the seven-string does the work of a whole rhythm section, holding the bass and the harmony while Tamanini’s soprano or tenor carries the tune. Their repertoire runs through choro, frevo and baião, putting pieces by Hamilton de Holanda, Egberto Gismonti and Sergio Assad next to Pixinguinha and Dominguinhos. Nosso Canto (2025) gathers tunes they have played together for years, mixing instrumental pieces with arrangements of Brazilian songs, where arrangement and improvisation run into each other.

The festival’s artists also run hands-on workshops on Saturday and Sunday for anyone who wants to play choro as well as hear it, at every level, non-musicians included.

On Saturday morning, Adewale leads a pandeiro workshop on Afro-Brazilian grooves at Copper Cats (bring your own drum if you have one). Across town, Jonathan Preiss digs into baixaria, the seven-string guitar’s bass-line language, at The Muddy Puddle, a garden venue in N16. In the afternoon, Duo In Uno work on phrasing and the give-and-take between soloist and accompanist in a private home in N1.

Sunday opens with Dr Vinicius de Carvalho of King’s College London giving a free talk on Pixinguinha, the Rio flautist and composer behind “Carinhoso”, whose birthday Brazil celebrates as National Choro Day, with live examples, coffee and cake. In the afternoon, Lima unpicks the links between baião, xote, forró and choro back at The Muddy Puddle.

Bring a pandeiro, a flute or just a pair of ears, pull up a chair at the circle
and book through the London Choro Festival website

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