May 2027: the plan

Favela Brass is a music school in Rio de Janeiro. Since 2014 it has taught brass and percussion, free of charge, to children in the favela of Pereira da Silva and across the city; around 200 students play in its bands today. Its music is carnival music: the bloco, a brass band that belongs in the street.

The exchange has been running in both directions since 2024. In September 2024 the Jugendmusikkorps Bad Kissingen came to Rio and paraded with Favela Brass through Santa Teresa. In July 2026 founder Tom Ashe travelled the other way: in one week of evening rehearsals, around thirty musicians in Bad Kissingen learned the Favela Brass repertoire, paraded at the Rakoczy Festival, and decided to keep playing. They call themselves the Freunde von Favela Brass. The same month, the Mannheimer Bläserphilharmonie spent a week in Rio, rehearsing and performing alongside Favela Brass students.

The 2026 pilot proved the method: the parts and reference videos carry the notes, a workshop week carries the style, and a standing band comes out the other end. 2027 is the first time the whole network plays together in one place.

The bloco camps. That is the model: the network stays together on the Funkhaus grounds, 50 to 80 people depending on funding, tents on the lawn, meals from the venue's kitchens paid per head, and the complex's studios as rehearsal rooms by day. A small non-camping tier of nearby rooms exists for those who need it. Proper sanitary facilities are rented in. And the camp stays this simple because Berlin is a young-adult gathering by design: no contingent brings minors.

The Funkhaus is the former GDR broadcasting complex at Nalepastraße: acoustically superb studios, a huge hall, and the Spree at the bottom of the lawn. As a base for a massed band it is close to ideal, and the Monday session in those rooms gives every band in the network a recording made together.

Music. The parade book is drawn from the Favela Brass repertoire, a deep book of carnival arrangements built since 2014. The parade set is fixed early in 2027 and distributed through brassify.org as parts plus reference videos, the same materials the Freunde learned from in three rehearsals. The Brazilians carry the percussion style, and the workshops in Bad Kissingen and Mannheim and the weekend at the Funkhaus are where the contingents become one band.

Money. Each side funds its own travel: the German and British musicians come to Berlin on their own arrangements, and the camp at the Funkhaus keeps costs low for everyone. The Brazilian group is funded from Brazil: a project under Brazil's federal cultural-incentive law (Lei Rouanet), submitted and under review, plus sponsors and donors (see the Support page). The core group travels either way; the funding decides how big the band is. Flights from Rio are the largest single cost.

The Karneval der Kulturen parade is the centrepiece, but not the point by itself. In Rio, carnival is not a stage or a procession you watch: it is blocos playing loose in the streets, and the crowd is part of the band. That is the culture this weekend brings to Berlin. Around the parade, the Karneval's own street festival, the Straßenfest, runs right through the weekend, and Berlin's street-music rules are famously generous: the bloco plays in streets, parks and squares, wherever the city gives it a corner.

Berlin is also, deliberately, the young adults' moment, and that shapes the kind of event it is: everyone together, one mixed bloco from across the network, which works precisely because the contingents are small, adult and free to mix. The children's exchanges run differently by design: two institutions at a time, band to band, the way Rio hosted the Jugendmusikkorps in 2024. The network's first youth exchange of that kind is being planned for July 2028.

And the road runs both ways. The payoff on the horizon for the network's European bands is the return leg: everyone together in Rio, playing carnival, or the pre-carnival season, with Favela Brass on its home streets. No date is set. Berlin is how the bloco earns it.