I've recently been laying a lot of Maracatu (in Paris, with Studio Olinda) at the same time I'm watching Treme on HBO.

And I keep seeing similarities. A most recent episode featured a cajun party, and the plaintif wailing sound sounded straight out of a northeastern Brazilian song forro tune.

As it turns out, I'm not the only who sees the connection between northeast Brazil and the US south :

In the accordion and fiddle instrumentation of forro, a more harmonic style from the farmland outside Recife, they saw a cousin of Cajun zydeco. In maracatu, they detected ties to New Orleans' second-line marching music that matched down to key technical details: "The swing is different, but a lot of the bell patterns are similar, and a lot of the snare drum patterns are the same," Kettner says.

There were cultural similarities, too. The ceremonial crowning of slave kings and queens in Recife, around which maracatu was born, matches with Mardi Gras tradition. In different ways, Kettner began to find in northeast Brazilian genres affinities with blues, bluegrass, country, and jazz. Even the klezmer dimension has a cultural logic: The first synagogue in the New World was in Recife.

Kettner is also a force behind Maracatu New York, which has one of the only maracatu albums easily available for download on Amazon and Spotify.