CURATION
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from this page:
by Matrix
Network Node
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Name:
Jean-Paul Bourelly
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City/Place:
Davis, California
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Country:
United States
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Hometown:
Chicago, Illinois
Life
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Bio:
His musical output spawns a diverse array of variations of funky otherness. Often fiery solo exchanges, harmonic textures, and sound constellations, characterized by a spontaneous flow of rhythmic energy.
Jean-Paul Bourelly is an innovative and experimental guitarist composer who excels at blending and bending various musical styles into cohesive expression.
His music is informed by the migrant community of Haiti and the southern culture of Chicago's south side that he grew up in.
Raised by first-generation Haitians, Jean-Paul grew up amidst an unusual blend of Haitian meringue, folkloric, and hard-edged urban blues of Chicago's South Side. Along with his own singular musical vision, inspired by Howlin Wolf, Jimi Hendrix and a splash of Carlos Santana, Bourelly began to formulate his unique musical synthesis.
At the age of 18, after a one year scholarship studying with the great alto saxophonist and educator Bunky Green, he moved to New York.
During his early years he worked with notable jazz figures like drummer Elvin Jones, Pharoah Sanders, AACM founder Muhal Richard Abrams, Roy Haynes and recorded with Miles Davis. Early notice include being heavily featured on the Abrams release Blues Forever which won DownBeat record of the year.
He also made many collaborations with various members of a new generation of experimenters in genre-crossing music like Olu Dara,Henry Threadgill, Steve Coleman and Graham Haynes.
From this formative stage, moving independently came nature to him. He started his own group the BluWave Bandits. After the release of Blues Forever by Abrams and Cassandra Wilson’s Point of View (JMT), Bourelly quickly came to the attention of several record labels.
JP released his first recording entitled Jungle Cowboy (JMT) preceded by Trippin (Enemy) and five consecutive records on the Japanese label DIW: Saints and Sinners, Blackadelic Blu, Rock the Carthartic Spirits, Vibe Music and Fade to Cacophony.
JP's early NewYork concept was based on expanding the borders of funk music by employing polyrhythms taken from sources far and wide. This assertive sound brought his music to the attention of the international press like the New York Times, Straight No Chaser, Le Monde and Melody Maker Magazine. Along with engagements at the original Knitting Factory and tours in Europe he was an important figure on scenes like the Black Rock Coalition and Mbase.
Reconnecting with Haitian musicians from the popular folkloric group Foula, he formed Ayibobo which merged his Haitian and his jazz improvisational sensibility. This was a first sign of him discovering his sound within an African space.
In Berlin, he renewed his focus on the sound which today may be called Afro Futuristic. This was affirmed by his collaboration with historian Paul Gilroy on the Black Atlantic project (Berlin HKW 2004). This work would take him towards a wider perspective, an ideal of a possible Black Atlantic sound, something that could encompass the totality of his style.
In 1995 Jean-Paul formed Boom Bop with griot singer Abdourahmane Diop and jazz legend Archie Shepp.
The group was formed from an urge to explore the mystical rhythmic and sonic ties that lie within the blood memory of the Black Atlantic experience and post industrial culture. This quest opened a new context for his expressively bluesy guitar. Based off of common themes of urban living between Dakar, Berlin and New York, Boom Bop opened ears to a kaleidoscope of sound, more voluptuous, more daring than casual world music offerings of the time.
Since the establishment of his creative music hub JPGotMangos, it was possible to produce more music independently.
In 2012 he thought he was reaching back to his BluWave sound by forming Stone Raiders, Power Trio with Rolling Stones bassist Darryl Jones and Living Colour drummer Will Calhoun.
One can never really go back again and Stone Raiders stumbled then surged forward when RoCking grooves, intersected with funky otherness at StoneRoc and Peavine. Truth to Power is the record. Check out the guitar burn on “Toxic U Love Episode II". It also features the debut of eternally funky bassist Darryl Jones on vocals.
JP continued to reveal Afro blues in abstract, deconstructing polyrhythms, while using analog as well as digitalized atmospheres, interrogating the new frontier of frequencies in electronic music with his musical laboratory Spontaneous Situation at the Werkstatt der Kulturen (2009- 2010), following by several Spontaneous offshoots including the Spontaneous Youth Arkestra (2013) and his Music Talk show event The Spontaneous Townhall Meetings (2014, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse).
On his 2014 release of 3KINGS “Famous Guys”, JP introduces a second dimension to his playing with rhythmic tapping. This rhythmic underpinnings teased out from his 7 stringed guitar that is navigating, subverting and finally transforms, otherwise traditional, Cameroonian High Life grooves.
Clips (more may be added)
Integration is a superpower...
This technological matrix originating in Bahia, Brazil closely integrates creators around the world with each other and the entire planet. It is able to do so because it is small-world (see Wolfram):
Bahia itself, final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other place on earth throughout all of human history, refuge for Lusitanian Sephardim fleeing the Inquisition, Indigenous both apart and subsumed into a brilliant sociocultural matrix comprised of these three peoples and more, is small-world.
America is small-world. Mozambique is small-world. Central Asia is small-world. Ukraine is small world...
Human society, the billions of us in all the complexity of our relationships, is small-world. Neural structures for human memory are small-world. Neural structures in artificial intelligence are small-world...
In a small world great things are possible. In a small-world matrix they are universal.
Alicia Svigals
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (NEW YORK CITY): Apotheosis of klezmer violinists
"I'm truly thankful ... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)"
—Nduduzo Makhathini (JOHANNESBURG): piano, Blue Note recording artist
"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"
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (LONDON): Premier cellist in UK; brother of Andrew (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (RIO DE JANEIRO/CHICAGO): Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze (LOS ANGELES): manager, Kamasi Washington
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
"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.
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.
* I renegotiated sync rates for Earl and for The Flamingos. Now when I hear "Speedo" in a movie soundtrack (Goodfellows and others), or "I Only Have Eyes for You" (a million films), I remind myself that the artists (and now their heirs) were/are getting double what they were getting before.
Matrix founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian.
Recent access to this matrix and Bahia are from these places (a single marker can denote multiple accesses).
Across the creative universe... For another list, reload page.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.
For a complete list of everybody inside, tap TOTAL below:
TOTAL
Nduduzo Makhathini
Susan Rogers
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Kamasi Washington
Randy Brecker
Matt Garrison
RÁDIO MATRIX