Bio:
Giba Gonçalves was born in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil and began his career as a dancer and percussionist in groups including Ilê Aiyê, Olodum, Muzenza and Tupi Nago. He joined the band KAOMA and toured the world for two years before performing at concerts around Europe with a variety of other bands.
In 1997, Giba moved to Paris where he became leader of Tambourlode, and founded Batala, a batucada style band playing samba-reggae with more than 80 percussionists. Giba composes all the music for Batala, which has since grown around the world to almost 47 bands and over 1500 drummers worldwide.
While Giba was in France, his friend Alberto Pitta, the ex-artistic director of Olodum, started the educational project Instituto Oya de Arte e Educaçao in Salvador. This project included Bloco Cortejo Afro, a school for dance, percussion, printing, textile design, fashion design and capoeira. Giba Gonçalves is the musical director of the band Cortejo Afro, who play a distinct mixture of African rhythms and electronic beats and pop, known as the “Afro-Bahian musical revolution”.
Giba Gonçalves has also composed music for film/documentary “Code Unknown” by Michael Haneke, starring Juliette Binoche (MK2 Productions). In 2000, he was assistant musical director of “Festival Latitudes Villette Brésil,” and the show, “Solstices, Carnavalcade de St. Denis” (France).
Nowadays, Giba Gonçalves is busy developing the Batala project around the world and contributes to advancing all forms of Bahian culture.
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⤷ A technological matrix uncoiling from the vast African, Indigenous, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, European and Asian cultural matrix of Bahia and Brazil...
⤷ Creators in reach of all humanity via integration into a worldwide "small-world" matrix structure (see Wolfram above)...
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers (BOSTON): Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory ... Former personal recording engineer for Prince; "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"
"Very nice! Thank you for this. Warmest regards and wishing much success for the project! Matt"
—Son of Jimmy Garrison (bass for John Coltrane, Bill Evans...); plays with Herbie Hancock and other greats...
Dear friends & colleagues,
Having arrived in Salvador 13 years earlier, I opened a record shop in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for Bahian musicians, many of them magisterial but unknown.
David Dye & Kim Junod for NPR found us (above), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (he's a huge jazz fan), David Byrne, Oscar Castro-Neves... Spike Lee walked past the place while I was sitting on the stoop across the street drinking beer and listening to samba from the speaker in the window...
But we weren't exactly easy for the world-at-large to get to. So in order to extend the place's ethos I transformed the site associated with it into a network wherein Brazilian musicians I knew would recommend other Brazilian musicians, who would recommend others...
And as I anticipated, the chalky hand of God-as-mathematician intervened: In human society — per the small-world phenomenon — most of the billions of us on earth are within some 6 or fewer degrees of each other. Likewise, within a network of interlinked artists as I've described above, most of these artists will in the same manner be at most a handful of steps away from each other.
So then, all that's necessary to put the Bahians and other Brazilians within possible purview of the wide wide world is to include them among a wide wide range of artists around that world.
If, for example, Quincy Jones is inside the matrix (people who have passed are not removed), then anybody on his page — whether they be accessing from a campus in L.A., a pub in Dublin, a shebeen in Cape Town, a tent in Mongolia — will be close, transitable steps away from Raymundo Sodré, even if they know nothing of Brazil and are unaware that Sodré sings/dances upon this planet. Sodré, having been knocked from the perch of fame and ground into anonymity by Brazil's dictatorship, has now the alternative of access to the world-at-large via recourse to the vast potential of network theory.
...to the degree that other artists et al — writers, researchers, filmmakers, painters, choreographers...everywhere — do also. Artificial intelligence not required. Real intelligence, yes.
—Sparrow
Years ago in NYC I "rescued" unpaid royalties (performance & mechanical) for artists/composers including Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd (for his rights in Bob Marley compositions; Clement was Bob's first producer), Led Zeppelin, Ray Barretto, Philip Glass and many others. Aretha called me out of the blue vis-à-vis money owed by Atlantic Records. Allen Klein (managed The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Ray Charles) called about money due the estate of Sam Cooke. Jerry Ragovoy (Time Is On My Side, Piece of My Heart) called just to see if he had any unpaid money floating around out there (the royalty world was a shark-filled jungle, to mangle metaphors, and I doubt it's changed).
But the pertinent client (and friend) in the present context is Earl "Speedo" Carroll, of The Cadillacs. Earl went from doo-wopping on Harlem streetcorners to chart-topping success to working as a custodian at PS 87 elementary school on the west side of Manhattan. Through all of this he never lost what made him great.
Greatness and fame are too often conflated. The former should be accessible independently of the latter.
Wolfram Mathematics
Alicia Svigals
Susan Rogers
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Kamasi Washington
Randy Brecker
Matt Garrison
RÁDIO MATRIX
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