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CURATION
from this page:
by Matrix
Network Node
Name:
Alain Pérez
City/Place:
Madrid
Country:
Spain
Hometown:
Trinidad, Cuba
Life & Work
Bio:
Alain Perez was born on April 20th, 1977 in Trinidad, Cuba.
He began as a vocalist in the Cielito Lindo group at 8 years old.
In 1988 he began his studies at the Manuel Saumel conservatory: classic guitar lessons, piano lessons and other subjects related to music.
1995 saw his first international presentation as vocalist in the Latin Jazz group Irakere, with Chucho Valdez.
He's gone on to also master the bass and now performs widely with his big band.
Mi Padre mi Madre la familia, los músicos de mi pueblo mí barrio, Cuba y toda su gente, Cielito Lindo, Chucho Valdez y el Irakere, Isaac Delgado, Arsenio Rodríguez, Chapotín, Benny More, Miguelito Cuni, Miguelito Valdez, Machito, Mario Bauza,Graciela, Celeste Mendoza, Celia Cruz, La Lupe, Maria Teresa Vera, Elena Burke, Omara Portuondo, Orquesta Aragón, Juan Formel y los Van Van, Oscar de León, José Alberto el Canario, Rolando Laserie, NG la Banda, Opus 13,Pablo Milanes, Silvio Rodríguez, Trío Matamoros, Sindo Garay, Ñico Saquito, Ignacio Piñeiro, Compay Segundo, Conjunto Casino, Roberto Faz, Barbarito Diez,Tito Gómez, Camaron,Caracol, Enrique Morente, Diego el Cigala,Guadiana, Los Muñequitos de Matanza, Yoruba Andabo, Afrocuba de Matanza, Clave y Guaguancó, Carlos Embale, Tata Guines, Changuito, Giovanni Hidalgo, Jerry González , Chano Pozo,Israel López Cachao, Jaco Pastorius, Feliciano Arango,Carlos del Puerto, Tito Puente, Eddy Palmieri, Fania All Star, Rubén Blades, Juan Luis Guerra, Cheo Feliciano, Héctor Lavoe,Santos Colon, Chico O’farrill,Antonio Carlos Jobim,Ivan Lins,Gal Costa, Elis Regina,Rosa Passos,Caetano Veloso,Ana Belen,Joan Manuel Serrat,Victor Manuel,Fito Páez, Ignacio Cervantes, Ernesto Lecuona, Leo Brouwer, Carlos Fariñas, Joaquín Rodrigo,Paco de Lucia, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Astor Piazzola, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Chopin, Joseph Haydn, Isaac Albéniz, Manuel de Falla,.Granados, Bola de Nieve, Gonzalo Rubalca, Peruchin Pedro Justiz, Frank Emilio,Bebo Valdez,Oscar Peterson,Art Tatum,Glenn Miller, Thelonious Monk,Duke Ellington,George Gershwin,Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis,Jhon Coltrane,Clifford Brown,Freddie Hubbard, Joe Pass,Pat Mehteny, Jimmi Hendrix, BB King, Jhon Scofield,Herbie Hancock,Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea,Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong,Frank Sinatra,Los Beatles Steve Wonder, Ray Charles,Herat Wind & Fire,Kool & The Gang, Sting, Tina Turner, James Brown, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Queen,Metallica,Phil Collins, En fín, música Oriental, Asiática y Africana, la naturaleza el mundo!
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Bewitching, bewitched Bahia, Brazil, sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes, stoked, steamed and sensual in the broadest sense of the word, limned in prosody and cadenced melody, is where the magic (mathematical and otherwise) and enchantment upon which this matrix is based, begins...
...a matrix conceived in conversation with now 75-year-old Raymundo Sodré — man of, and for, the trod-upon folk of the Brazilian backlands; his career destroyed during Brazil's dictatorship — during a discourse ranging from 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... wherein Sodré opined for the ages what is now inscribed on the wall of Plato's cave: "Where there's misery, there's music!"...
...a matrix wherein it's not which pill you take, it's what pathways you take, pathways originating in the sprawling cultural matrix of Terra Brasilis: Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, Arabic, European, Asian... Matrix Ground Zero being the Recôncavo, contouring the Bay of All Saints, Earth's absolute center of gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings (and for the sublimity these people created), the bay presided over by Brazil's inffable Black Rome: Salvador da Bahia.
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano Veloso, son of the Recôncavo, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
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... 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).
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.
"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).