Toronto drum squad famous for bringing the party to street festivals turns 25
blogTO, by Phoebe Knight, April 2024
A collective of drummers that you’ve definitely seen at street festivals all over Toronto is turning 25 and throwing a special free show to celebrate.
Since 1999, the Samba Squad has been bringing the beats of Brazil to the streets of Toronto to share the love of music and dance with the city — and with a quarter century under their belts, it’s safe to say they’ve succeeded.
“I am not the only person who has said that Samba Squad changed my life, but that it saved my life on more than one occasion,” Lyba Spring, one of the group’s founding members, tells blogTO.
Headed up by award-winning percussionist Rick Shadrach Lazar, the Samba Squad was born in a studio at 401 Richmond, where a small group of people gathered to make music and magic.
“Rick grew the band from a small group of enthusiastic — mostly amateur — players into a rock-solid entertainment powerhouse,” says Lyba.
From there, the group (which has “waxed and waned” over the years, according to Lyba) has played festivals across the country, including Toronto favourites like JazzFest and Salsa on St. Clair.
This year will be no different: the Squad has a schedule packed with gigs for the upcoming festival season, and it all kicks off with a free show at Stackt Market in honour of their 25th anniversary.
The Samba Squad will take to the market’s Blue Moon Stage on March 29 between 8 and 11 p.m. for an evening of dancing and drumming to welcome in yet another year of Samba Squad-induced smiles.
“Our free show at Stakt is saying thank you, Toronto, for all the love and
support we’ve shared over these past 25 years,” says Rick Shadrach Lazar. “One heart, one mind, one groove. Peace out.”

Master drummer Rick Lazar and members of Samba Squad in 2009.
Latin music in Toronto once meant Herb Alpert’s annual visit to town in the ’60s, playing “Lonely Bull” with his Tijuana Brass.
The distance travelled since then can be found in the Latin Boardwalk Stage at the Beaches International Jazz Festival, Thursday to Sunday, with its wide range of salsa, mambo, Cubano jazz, all-round rhythmic madness and butt waggling.
Tapping into the sexy machismo drive of the HeavyMambo band and the sophisticated charts of The Latin Jazz Ensemble, festival artistic director Bill King brings to the 24th edition of the annual festival an attitude of physicality. Jazz is getting back its dance groove. Funk, soul, R&B, reggae and a variety of Afro-beats are to be found throughout the festival stretching some two kilometres along Queen St. E.
Rick Lazar didn’t start this although his band, Samba Squad, occupies a prominent position at the fest, playing nightly at 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. at the southeast corner of Woodbine Ave. and Queen St. E. But without the 64-year-old percussionist’s presence in the city over the years, this festival wouldn’t likely have the breadth of resources it draws on to shape its Latin identity.
After studying percussion at the powerhouse Indiana School of Music, Lazar did what any serious, classically trained artist would do: he hooked up with Barry White to tour with the singer’s Love Unlimited Orchestra. Lazar’s arrival back in Toronto in the ’70s coincided with the early blossoming of a local Latin presence with heavily political videos from Central America being shown in art spaces, and art from South America and from Cuban refugees appearing in galleries.
Lazar grew ever closer to the city’s Latin heart while performing with the Toronto jazz-fusion band Manteca in the early ’80s.
“It’s all about the drum,” he said. “I’m a Canadian with a Middle Eastern background. But as a kid I got into James Brown and when you get into that you get into Afro-music, then the Brazilian thing. It is very addictive.”
Following Manteca, Lazar founded Coconut Groove, prominent in the city’s dance scene in the late ’80s. Samba Squad itself appears in more than just one iteration around town. The more percussion-centre version is “the street version of the thing,” says Lazar. “There’s also a club version.”
Purists aren’t happy with the squad’s Brazilian credentials; some places won’t book the band, and Lazar understands. “I don’t sell Samba Squad as a Brazilian thing,” he explains. “My dream was never to copy Brazilian music. . . . But if you want to have a show, if you want to dance and lots of rhythm, we’ll be OK then.”
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