Curation & Recommendations ...of and for musicians, writers, academics, painters, choreographers, filmmakers, theater directors, sound and set designers, chefs...
CURATION
from this page:
by Matrix
Network Node
Name:
João Atala
City/Place:
Rio de Janeiro
Country:
Brazil
Life & Work
Bio:
João Atala, nascido no Rio de Janeiro, é um nômade por natureza. Com dezoito anos de experiência como diretor de fotografia, ele trilha o mundo com sua câmera desde tempos imemoriais. Seu amor pela fotografia é tão antigo quanto suas memórias, a primeira delas sendo uma visão de uma serpente no mato. Sua jornada acadêmica o levou do Rio de Janeiro a San Francisco, na Califórnia, onde mergulhou no mundo do cinema.
Apaixonado pela natureza, pela aviação e pelas pessoas, João é meticuloso em encontrar os motivos certos para orientá-lo em qualquer projeto. Além disso, é membro da prestigiada Academia de Artes e Ciências Cinematográficas.
English:
João Atala, born in Rio de Janeiro, is a nomad by nature. With eighteen years of experience as a director of photography, he has been traversing the world with his camera since time immemorial. His love for photography is as old as his memories, the first of which is a vision of a snake in the bush. His academic journey took him from Rio de Janeiro to San Francisco, California, where he immersed himself in the world of cinema.
Passionate about nature, aviation, and people, João is meticulous in finding the right reasons to guide him in any project. Additionally, he is a member of the prestigious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Uncoiling from the greatest cultural confluence on the planet, limned in cadenced prosody & song...
...the enchantment and magic (mathematical and otherwise) upon which this matrix is based begins in the bewitched, bewitching, stoked, steamed, sensuous, irony-limned conundrum called "Bahia, Brazil".
Matrix Ground Zero is the Recôncavo, contouring Bahia's fraught Bay of All Saints, absolute center of terrestrial gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings (and for the sublimity these people created), the bay presided over by Brazil's ineffable Black Rome: Salvador.
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano Veloso, son of the Recôncavo, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
The Matrix is a small world network in which creators may recommend other creators and be recommended by other creators. And where, like stars coalescing into a galaxy, creators in the Matrix mathematically gravitate to proximity to all other creators in the Matrix, no matter how far apart in location, fame or society. This gravity is called "the small world phenomenon".
While the Matrix's utilization of small world gravity is unprecedented (position everybody in the creative universe within discoverable range of everybody else in the creative universe), small world networks are all around us, even inside us: our brains contain small world networks. Humanity itself is a small world network, wherein over 8 billion human beings average 6 or fewer steps between any two given people, anywhere. Those steps are seldom all transitable though. In the Matrix they are. In a small world great things are possible.
Conceived in conversation with Raymundo Sodré (75 years old now ~ born among the trod-upon folk of the Brazilian hinterlands ~ rocket-like career smashed under Brazil's dictatorship) — during a discourse connecting the quilombos and senzalas of Cachoeira and Santo Amaro to the wards of New Orleans to the South Side of Chicago, to the sidewalks of Harlem to the villages of Ireland to the Roma camps of France and Belgium, to the Vienna of Beethoven to the shtetls of Eastern Europe — and wherein Sodré opined for the ages something now inscribed on the wall of Plato's cave: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
I built the Matrix in the place 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, with Mateus Aleluia... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter; designed by Walter Mariano of the Federal University of the Recôncavo of Bahia).
Developed here in the Historic Center of Salvador ↓
"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).