By FERNANDA SANTOS


SALVADOR, Brazil - Carlinhos Brown - a singer, songwriter and percussionist who is one of Brazil’s best-known artists - once made music banging on the water barrels that he used to carry home to his mother, who earned a living washing clothes. Back then, his neighborhood, Candeal Pequeno, or Little Candeal, had so many fruit trees that a child would go hungry only if he could not climb.

But as Salvador grew, Candeal became so big so fast that it could no longer sustain itself. Sewage flowed openly on the streets where children played. Unpaved roads flooded when it rained, dumping mud, garbage and disease into homes. Many of the houses went dark at night.

With money and prestige, Mr. Brown said, came the realization that to help his neighborhood, he would have to do more than write lyrics portraying its plight.

“Poverty is not an excuse for anything,” Mr. Brown, 46, said on a recent gray afternoon here. “Poverty is an opportunity.”

Fifteen years ago, he founded a music school for children who were once like him: poor and short on hope, but full of dreams. He named it Pracatum, after the sound made by the hand drums used in percussion bands.

So began Candeal’s profound transformation, made all the more remarkable because it was fostered by a black man in an overwhelmingly black city where blacks are rarely agents of change.

Mr. Brown coaxed local residents to join a civic association he had founded, then pressed politicians, philanthropists and dignitaries like King Juan Carlos of Spain, who visited Candeal in 2005, and the United States ambassador to Brazil, Clifford M. Sobel, who went there in February. “The day my street was paved, I realized that we could accomplish anything,” said Maria Jose Menezes dos Santos, 68, an active member of the association.

While Pracatum School churned out a cast of talented musicians, the association went to work fixing up Candeal. It persuaded the city’s health department to open a clinic there, the neighborhood’s first. It raised money to build and renovate more than 200 homes. It got the mayor’s office to install sewer lines and refurbish a public water fountain that many families use to this day to wash their clothes.

“People used to look for ways to move out of here because of what this place was like,” said Mario Sena, 27, a Candeal resident who was one of the first to enroll at Pracatum in 1994 and is now in charge of the school’s music studio. “Now, nobody wants to leave. Candeal is poor, but it has dignity.”

Pride in where they came from is what Mr. Brown said he had sought to instill in Candeal’s people.

“All I’ve done is use my name to get people to listen,” Mr. Brown said. “I’m not better or smarter than anyone. But whenever I find a door closed, I kick the door open.”


PHOTOGRAPHS BY MÁRCIO LIMA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Carlinhos Brown opened a music school in Salvador, Brazil, leading to a transformation of the area.