CURATION
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from this page:
by Matrix
Network Node
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Name:
Leyla McCalla
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City/Place:
New Orleans
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Country:
United States
Life & Work
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Bio:
The Capitalist Blues is Leyla McCalla’s way of processing the current political environment, where many of the issues are financial, but they’re rarely simply financial. “It feels like everyone’s in a pressure cooker in this country,” she says.
The album is McCalla’s third, after Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes (2013) and A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey (2016). Those albums and her time as a member of the African-American string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops presented her vision in songs that revealed the realities that people lived, often expressed in metaphors. She explored Haitian Creole identity issues in songs with arrangements that focused on the song. She often sang and accompanied herself on cello, banjo, or guitar.
The New York-born McCalla has lived in New Orleans since 2010, and A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey broadened not only her examination of Creole identities but her sound as she brought in a number of musicians to add fiddle, clarinet, piano, electric guitar, and additional voices.
Her growing relationship to the city’s musical community led her to consider her relationship to New Orleans on The Capitalist Blues, and for the first time, it led her to record with a band. It wasn’t by design. Producer Jimmy Horn asked her sing on a session with his acclaimed New Orleans R&B band, King James and the Special Men, at a time when she had new songs but was unsure what forms they should take. While singing with the Special Men, she realized that working with Horn and his band in New Orleans might be the right way into the new material. The collaboration marks the first time someone other than McCalla has produced her work. The Capitalist Blues shows a more physical, danceable side to McCalla’s music. The title track is a swinging blues, and it’s easy to hear the classic New Orleans R&B in “Me and My Baby,”and the calypso in “Money is King.”
The album also puts McCalla’s voice in a number of new contexts as the size and composition of the band behind her varies from track to track. “There’s more arrangement,” she says, so her voice stands out in the way fans of her previous albums might expect on the spare “Pennha,” but she’s clearly part of a rowdy group on “Me and My Baby.”The pressures people deal are subtext on some songs, but they’re tangible and personal in others. “Heavy as Lead” addresses the threat caused by lead in the soil—a problem that became very real for McCalla when her daughter tested positive for elevated lead levels. The Capitalist Blues is superficially different from McCalla’s previous albums, but she hears the connections between them all.
She still sings a number of songs in Haitian Creole, which she thinks of a “language of resistance,” and she further explores the connection between New Orleans and Haiti. Her interest in social justice issues remains, and many of the themes are extensions of ones she examined on A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey. The lineups are very different, but the songs come from the same place.
“To me, it’s all folk music,” McCalla says. The album is striking as McCalla employs a broader musical palate than on her previous albums, one that often involves a full band and percussion. One instrument noticeable in its absence is the cello, which has been McCalla’s signature instrument throughout her solo career and her time with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. “I’ve come to a place where I feel like making art is not tied to being a cellist,” she says.
Clips (more may be added)
"In a small world great things are possible." Creators in the Matrix mathematically gravitate toward all other creators in the Matrix, steps away...
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.)
Caetano Veloso
THE MATRIX MISSION: What do Jimmy Cliff, Jimmy Page, and Dionne Warwick all have in common? They've all lived in Bahia and Dionne is moving back (visitors include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spike Lee, Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, David Byrne and Sting, among others). But so have lived and now live untold numbers of Bahian creators whose magisterial work has never had the major media means to reach beyond limited surroundings. In order that the creators of Bahia might have global reach, ALL creators must have global reach.
QED: 'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya! (thank you Johnny "Guitar" Watson)
Susan Rogers
"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
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze: manager, Kamasi Washington
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad: Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd-Webber: UK's premier cellist; brother of Andrew Lloyd Webber (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals: World's premier klezmer violinist
Developed here in the Historic Center of Salvador da Bahia ↓ .
Bule Bule (Assis Valente)
"♫ The time has come for these bronzed people to show their value..."
Recommend somebody and you will appear on that person's page. Somebody recommends you and they will appear on your page.
Both pulled by the inexorable mathematical gravity of the small world phenomenon to within range of everybody inside.
And by logical extension, to within range of all humanity outside as well.
8 billion human beings tend to within six degrees of connection to each other.
In a small world great things are possible.
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).
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).
Matrix founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian. If you create too, join them in the Matrix.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.