What do Jimmy Cliff, Jimmy Page, and Dionne Warwick all have in common? For one thing, they've all lived in Bahia. And so have, and do, untold numbers of other wonderful creators whose magisterial work has never reached beyond very limited surroundings. That's why all this began. If all creators can potentially have global reach, Bahian creators can too.
In this matrix it's not which pill you take, it's which pathways you take, pathways originating in the sprawling cultural matrix of Brazil: Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, European, Asian... Ground Zero is the Recôncavo, delineated by the Bay of All Saints, earthly center of gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings — and the sublimity they created — presided over by the ineffable Black Rome of Brazil: Salvador da Bahia.
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano Veloso, son of the Recôncavo, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
Over the past 12 months, I’ve been moving further and further away from a “musician” kind of identity, and further into a…"what would happen if…” identity. There isn’t a page for that yet on iTunes..so while they work on that, let me explain what’s goin’ on here with this new non-category:
First, an idea struck: 12 Little Spells… I wanted to release one more song-ey album/tour project to tide us over before I disappear into the belly of developing the next full thing*… Then, all the sudden, this 12 Little Spells idea just started taking shape in my imagination all quick-like… and made various parts of my body tingle: hands, legs, solar-plexus, ears, feet, arms… (no I don’t use drugs)… This tingling had a kind of healing sensation, and I wondered:
Can I harness these 12 little sensation-revelations into sounds, words, imagery, and performance that activates this healing, tingling effect in others? I’m gonna go ahead and assume: yes… (all of us creating away here on this live-show and album assume so…we’re audacious like that) Oh, and getting initiated into Reiki definitely helped set up this paradigm… of articulating the idea that nourishing energies moving through one person, can be shared with another… (and someone else might have a profound little thing to say about that and the very nature of being a performer…but…we’ll leave it to them…).
But, like any responsible magic-maker, I can’t tell you anymore. You’ll have to wait ’til we’re in the sound and space together…and just feel it. (and if you don’t feel a damn thing twinkling in your solar-plexus - or anywhere else- at least here’s some dope ass music).
Magically,
Esperanza
*(dance epic-ness to be exact, but more on that next year)
Life & Work
Bio:
Esperanza Spalding is typically referred to as a bassist, vocalist and composer. However like most organisms growing in response to their environment, Esperanza is emerging into something she does not yet understand, nor is able to clarify through reference or language.
Some of the primary cells directing this emergent artistic organism could be named: poetry, magic, staging, theater, opera, sound-spells, improvisation, movement, dance, bio-geometry, reiki, nothing, bad-art, fake-art, listening, smells, dream-talk, dialogue, demonic therapy, cat-tongue. Also: fuck accolades.
Contact Information
Management/Booking:
BOOKING – NORTH AMERICA
Brad Goodman | WME [email protected]
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"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay (they paid).
MATRIX MUSICAL
I built the Matrix below (I'm below left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).