Paulinho da Viola, Brazilian Samba, at Carnegie Hall Paulinho da Viola, limber and elegant at 70, is a messenger of samba de morro, the music of the 1930s from the hills around Rio, in its calmest form. At Carnegie Hall on Wednesday he represented an almost precommercialized culture, an idea of Brazilian popular music that hardly acknowledges the happening of bossa nova in the "50s, let alone pagode and samba-reggae or any other digital-age development. A losing battle, you might think. But among famous performers of any kind - he played for 10,000 people in Rio a few weeks ago - Mr. Da Viola is at the dramatically low end of the anxiety scale. He took his time tuning his instruments, the acoustic guitar and the ukulelelike cavaquinho; he delivered, in clear, measured Portuguese, practiced reflections on what he was about to play, invoking the masters of samba and its more complex instrumental cousin, choro - Cartola, Pixinguinha and Jacob do Bandolim, with whom his father served as a guitarist from the 1930s to the "60s. The silences ticked by. And when settled and ready he sang in a soft and kindly voice, strumming with understated swing, singing poems with powerful, stealthy metaphor. He hasn't played that often in New York recently - a few times during the "90s but not since then - and had never played at Carnegie before, but you wouldn't have known it to see him. His set trod lightly through his greatest hits with an enervating 20-minute choro detour before the end. The concert often felt like no big deal, which set its wicked chills in relief. Those came in aesthetically far-apart places. They were in clearly sad or clearly sunny two-beat samba played with a mixture of traditional instruments - cavaquinho, guitar, flute, saxophone, the tambourinelike pandeiro, the surdo bass drum - along with piano, electric bass and drum set. These were songs that much of the crowd grew up with, in his versions or others: "Dança da Solidão," with its juicy verses of loneliness ("solitude, word carved into the heart/resigned and mute/in the rhythm of disillusion"), which was done beautifully in the 1990s by Marisa Monte; "Sei lá Mangueira"and "Foi Um Rio Que Passou em Minha Vida," anthems adopted and ritually sung by two different Rio samba schools; and "As Rosas Não Falam," Cartola's ballad, covered by dozens or hundreds of Brazilian pop singers, sambistas or no. But the chills lay also in two songs that stuck out from the rest. The first was "Sinal Fechado" ("Red Light"), from 1969, a semi-dystopian love song, mournfully sung, about two friends who can't communicate. They're on the move, and when they start to speak they forget their thoughts. One is looking for a place to sleep; the other explains, obliquely, "I'm rushing to take my place in the future." It ends with the repeated phrase "don't forget," which sounded cryptically political during Brazil's military dictatorship and does still. And the second was "Roendo as Unhas," ("Biting My Nails,") which reveals either great faith in his art or a temporary loss of it. It anthropomorphizes a samba that not only doesn't care if its author writes rhyming lyrics but also doesn't care if he's "biting his nails at dawn" or "sitting on the curb wanting nothing" or even if he disappears. It doesn't have a chorus or a bridge; it repeats a strange descending four-chord cycle in a compulsiveness at odds with his serene voice. But by the end of the concert, with "Eu Canto Samba," he returned to his proper message. "I sing samba," he purred, serene. Because only then do I feel happy.