The relentless syncopations of maracatu music took me by surprise when I first heard them in Brazil. In Rio and Recife, hundreds of young men beat such rhythms on bass drums, and hipsters gravitate to the heavy, percussion-driven sounds along Ipanema’s beach. But the music is virtually unknown here.

When I returned to New York, I looked for maracatu, and was told nobody played it. Not quite true, it turns out. At just that time, in the fall of 2002, two groups were forming that were dedicated to rhythms from the same Brazilian state, Pernambuco.

“If you go to Pernambuco, in the northeast of Brazil, there are more than 100 rhythms,” said Scott Kettner, the founder of a group called Maracatu New York. Three years ago, Mr. Kettner, an American performer who studied the music in Brazil, moved back to New York. “I couldn’t find anybody who knew anything about maracatu,” he told me. He decided to change that by creating the first group in America dedicated to the music.

I found out about Mr. Kettner’s group in the fall of 2002 from a flyer advertising a new type of Brazilian music instruction. In a class that welcomed a variety of students – including my rhythmically challenged self – Mr. Kettner introduced the music on the gongue and agogo bells, snare drum, xecare, and alfaya bass drum. He also taught the folklore behind maracatu, telling how Portuguese slave-owners encouraged the slaves to elect a king to maintain order among them in Brazil. The parties that followed were where maracatu songs developed.

While my stint with maracatu ended with a nasty case of cowbell induced tendonitis, the group has gone on to perform regularly around the city, at Lincoln Center Out of Doors and venues such as the Knitting Factory and Satalla. Their repertoire includes traditional maracatu songs as well as other northeastern Brazilian rhythms.

Last year, a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council allowed Mr. Kettner to bring his teacher, master percussionist Jorge Martins, from Recife to conduct workshops on traditional maracatu. This year Mr. Martins will perform in the city in October; in a bit of cross-cultural exchange, Maracatu New York will parade with his group in Recife’s Carnival this year.

Inspired by the exchange that created bossa nova, Mr. Kettner recently formed another group to explore the relationship between northeastern rhythms and jazz. “Samba met jazz and you have bossa nova,” he said. “Dizzy Gillespie went to Cuba and came back and look at what he did, he changed history.” With the new group, Nation Beat, he said, “We’re actually taking the traditional maracatu rhythms and infusing them with jazz and funk.”

While Mr. Kettner instructed his students in a Brooklyn loft space, another northeastern popular music, forro, was being introduced to East Village crowds. A heavily syncopated music with 2/4 rhythm played with accordion, zabumba bass drum, and triangle, forro is a happy partner dance- like a country ho-down with a lot more hip- swaying.

According to popular legend, Forro originated when there was a dance party at an American army base near Recife. Invitation to the parties was open, or “for all.” “For all” became “forro” – a dance party open to everyone.

A few months ago, forro in the Dark, the first group to play the music regularly to sold-out crowds in the East Village, disbanded. Its accordionist, Rob Curto, formed Forro SoXote. (The name is a play on one of three Forro rhythms, “xote,” which means “shot of a drink” in Portuguese and refers to the quick step.)

Mr. Curto, 34, is a jazz-trained American who went to Princeton but fell in love with northeastern rhythms in Brazil. At Guernica in the East Village, where SoXote plays on Wednesday nights, the crowd is about evenly split between Americans and Brazilians. And almost everyone is on the dance floor.

“It’s not like this sort of loud lounge Brazilian thing, and it’s not salsa,” Mr. Curto said, at pains to distinguish the music from expectations. “There’s just something inviting about the music and the vibe. What’s cool for me is just the way I’m playing this music that’s not known here that well and people are coming down and learning to dance and really having a good time.”