Basin Street Records
Matrix Page
Curation & Recommendations...of and for musicians, writers, academics, painters, choreographers, filmmakers, theater directors, sound and set designers, chefs...
CURATION
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from this page:
by Matrix
Network Node
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Name:
Basin Street Records
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City/Place:
New Orleans, Louisiana
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Country:
United States
Life & Work
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Bio:
In September 1997, Basin Street Records embarked on its inaugural venture by promoting the live recording of Kermit Ruffins' performance with The Barbecue Swingers at Tipitina's. Through an intensive six-week campaign of plastering posters on telephone poles and distributing flyers on car windshields, the efforts culminated in a packed house at the iconic Tipitina's on November 7, 1997—a venue that had previously launched the careers of esteemed artists like Professor Longhair, the Neville Brothers, and the Radiators. The label's maiden release, "The Barbecue Swingers Live at Tipitina’s," hit the shelves in February 1998.
March 11, 1998, marked a pivotal moment for Basin Street Records as they signed Los Hombres Calientes, led by Irvin Mayfield, Bill Summers, and Jason Marsalis at the time. A mere week later, recording for their debut album commenced, and within a month, the record was available for purchase at the French Quarter Festival. Basin Street Records dominated CD sales at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival that year, a trend that continued annually, establishing the label as a consistent top-seller at the Jazz Fest.
The label has actively shared in the triumphs of its artists, earning OffBeat's prestigious Best of the Beat Award for Best Record Label an impressive eleven times (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017). Basin Street Records also claimed the title of Music Business of the Year at the Best of the Beat Awards in 2003, 2004, and 2013.
The accolades extended to our artists include three Grammy wins and four nominations, four appearances as finalists for Billboard Music Awards (with one victory), multiple nominations for WC Handy Blues Awards, two #1 hits on the national jazz radio charts, and several records securing positions in the top 10 on national radio charts. Notably, the collaborative effort, "A Beautiful World," featuring Kermit Ruffins and Irvin Mayfield, soared to the top of the Billboard Jazz Sales Chart in November 2017.
Basin Street Records has consistently maintained a focus on New Orleans-based Jazz, Blues, Funk, Rhythm and Blues, and Rock. We express our heartfelt gratitude for supporting our artists by purchasing their music!
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
**Kermit Ruffins:**
Trumpeter/singer and the beloved hometown hero, Kermit Ruffins, known as "New Orleans’ Ambassador of Good Times" according to Downbeat Magazine.
**Los Hombres Calientes:**
Bill Summers and Irvin Mayfield, master percussionists, explore the boundaries of world music. Billboard Music Award winner and Grammy Award nominee.
**Jason Marsalis:**
Jazz genius on drums and mallets, Jason Marsalis is an NEA Jazz Master from the renowned Marsalis family.
**Irvin Mayfield:**
Grammy and Billboard Award-winning trumpet player, Irvin Mayfield, is a passionate advocate for Jazz and New Orleans.
**Dr. Michael White:**
New Orleans' finest clarinetist, Dr. Michael White, carries on the traditions of a city steeped in history. He was named the NEA National Heritage Fellow and the LA Endowment for the Humanities’ 2010 Humanist of the Year.
**Headhunters:**
The band behind Herbie Hancock’s most successful work.
**Henry Butler:**
The beloved New Orleans pianist, Henry Butler, is a ten-time nominee for the Blues Foundation’s "Pinetop Perkins Piano Player of the Year" award.
**Jon Cleary:**
Grammy-award winning pianist and an all-around funky guy, Jon Cleary is hailed by Bonnie Raitt as "the ninth wonder in the world."
**Theresa Andersson:**
Swedish transplant Theresa Andersson delights as a dextrous one-woman band, according to Spin.
**Jeremy Davenport:**
Catch Jeremy Davenport performing at the Davenport Lounge in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
**Rebirth Brass Band:**
A Grammy-award winning brass band, the Rebirth Brass Band has dominated the New Orleans brass scene for over 30 years.
**Davell Crawford:**
Elusive and unpredictable piano and vocal phenom, Davell Crawford, is known as the "Prince of New Orleans." Bill Taylor of Blues Access says, “Plain and simple, Davell Crawford is one of the most talented musicians alive!”
**Saràyah:**
The hot new pop artist emerging from New Orleans!
**Bonerama:**
Described as "unlike anything you’ve heard before," Bonerama consists of veterans from the New Orleans music scene playing brass, funk, and rock.
**Lena Prima:**
Award-winning singer and artist Lena Prima, daughter of New Orleans legend Louis Prima.
**Kevin & The Blues Groovers:**
A young man with the soul of an old bluesman, Kevin & The Blues Groovers bring a fresh perspective to the blues genre.
Clips (more may be added)
ˈmātriks / original meaning: WOMB or SOURCE / derived from "mater", Latin for "mother" (we're real mothers for ya!)
Sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes, stoked, steamed and sensual in the broadest sense of the word, limned in prosody and cadenced melody ::: bewitching (and bewitched) Bahia is where the magic (mathematical and otherwise) and enchantment upon which this matrix is based, begins.
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.)
Caetano Veloso
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.
In a small world great things are possible.
Raymundo Sodré
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 under the dictatorship. 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).
"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 ↓ .
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.
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).
Matrix founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.