In 1922, Os Batutas spent six months in Paris, playing in night clubs and parties. The group was under the direction of Pixinguinha and included Donga, composer of Pelo Telefone's music. The trip is a little-known episode in the history of Brazilian popular music, with important consequences for Pixinguinha's career and the future of Brazilian popular music. The article approaches it as the departure phase toward Pixinguinha's consecration, pointing to the necessity to understand popular music as a crucial language of the system of relationships of modern nation-states, with articulated local, regional, national and global nexuses. Here art, folk and popular music are considered as universes in communication and phonography a constitutive process. The reconstruction of the journey is made through the reading of French newspapers and other texts of the time.
Modern nation-states system; Brazilian Popular Music; Os Oito Batutas; Pixinguinha; Parisian night
