Enjoy a musical performance and lecture at the Washington Public Library on Saturday, April 15th, beginning at 11 am. Brendan Loula is a Madison, WI-based educator and musician who specializes in Northeastern Brazilian music and culture. After growing up in Washington, he studied music at Truman State University, where he focused on composition and began a lifelong passion in capoeira, a Brazilian cultural art form combining music, martial arts, and oral history. After graduating, he served in the Peace Corps in West Africa, where he continued his interest in other musical cultures by conducting a music recording project with the Gambian government. This work served as the basis of his Master’s thesis for his MA in ethnomusicology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 2015, he founded Forro fo Sho, the first and only Forro group in Wisconsin, with his wife, Whitney Justin, and fellow grad student Antonio Souza. Forro fo Sho regularly plays to crowds of all sizes in Madison and the surrounding area and has occasionally given performances in Milwaukee, Chicago, Iowa City, and Washington. The performance at the Washington Public Library will be a lecture performance. Brendan will introduce the audience to the genre of Forro and its history as a popular music. He will play some classic Forro songs and explain their meanings and connections to broader Brazilian history and culture.