What's Up?
Hanging in .... teaching and playing music as much as possible and thankful to be well.
Life & Work
Bio:
Quick Fix:
- Drummer and percussionist in Jazz, "Latin", Brazilian, and multiple other genres, and mixes thereof.
- I had the pleasure of performing with many Brazilian and Latin-American artists over the years, including Luciana Souza, Paquito d'Rivera, Dave Samuels, Romero Lubambo, Oscar Castro-Neves, Felipe Salles, Fernando Brandão, Mili Bermejo, Jurandir Santana, Receita De Samba, Ebinho Cardoso,
- Faculty at Berklee College of Music, teaching hands-on instrumental classes as well as Liberal Arts, and Ear Training. Brazilian music and culture figures big in all these activities.
Big Fix Bio:
Based in Boston for three decades, Bertram Lehmann's supple and fluid style of drumming has made him a sought-after player within a multitude of musical contexts in the region and beyond, performing Jazz, Latin, and World music.
In addition to his appearances and/or recordings with acclaimed artists such as Paquito D'Rivera, Randy Brecker, Dave Liebman, Anat Cohen, Antonio Sanchez, Romero Lubambo, Danilo Perez, Claudio Roditi, Tiger Okoshi, Oscar Castro-Neves, Eddie Gomez, Kenny Werner, the NDR Bigband and Dave Samuels' Caribbean Jazz Project, he has toured internationally in Russia, India, Bermuda, South Korea, Ecuador, Ghana, Mexico, Turkey, Spain, Israel, Virgin Gorda, and Germany.
Some of the distinguished national and international venues Bertram has performed at include Lincoln Center, Birdland, Symphony Space, Metropolitan Museum, Brooklyn Academy of Music, National Sawdust, and The Jazz Gallery in New York City; Symphony Hall, The Opera House, Paramount Theater, Boston Globe Jazz Festival, Beantown Jazz Festival, Celebrity Series of Boston, The American Repertory Theater, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and many other venues elsewhere, such as the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 'Jazz Yatra' Festival (Mumbai), the Tchaikovsky Conservatory (Moscow), 'Panafest' (Accra), Chicago World Music Festival, Kumho Art Hall (Seoul), Istanbul Jazz Center and ‘Istanbul Jazz Festival’, 'Savannah On Stage' Festival; The Kennedy Center and The Blues Alley (Washington, D.C.), as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In the New England Region and beyond, Bertram Lehmann is renowned for his long-standing associations with artists such as Grammy-winning Brazilian vocalist/composer Luciana Souza, Latin-ensemble Mango Blue, Indo-Jazz band Natraj, jazz-diva Rebecca Paris, and South American jazz-vocalist Mili Bermejo’s groups, as well as virtuoso Cuban pianists Tony Perez and Osmany Paredes.
Most recently he appeared on recordings by Mehmet Sanlikol (‘The Rise Up’, feat. Dave Liebman and ‘Othello in the Seraglio – an Ottoman Coffeehouse Opera’, DVD/Amazon Prime), Felipe Salles’ Interconnections Ensemble (‘The Lullaby Project’ and “The New Immigrant Experience’, earning 4 and 4 ½ stars each in Downbeat Magazine reviews), Imagine 5 (self-titled debut release), Florian Poser (‘The Gaze’), and the forthcoming release of Astor Piazzolla’s “Six Tango Etudes for Flute”, by Lisa Bento-Rey.
He is an Assistant Professor in the Percussion, Ear Training, and Liberal Arts departments at Berklee College of Music, and also teaches at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Additionally, Bertram has presented clinics/presentations Longy School of Music, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Boston, Five Towns College, Wellesley College, the University of New Hampshire, SOAS/University of London, Moscow Conservatory, at Dong-Ah Institute of Media and Arts, and Keimyung University in South Korea, at the Universities of Bremen and Oldenburg (Germany), Fundacio l'Aula de Musica (Barcelona), and the 'Centro Cultural' in Quito, Ecuador.
Some other of the more than 60 CD recordings featuring Bertram Lehmann on drum set and/or hand percussion are by Mehmet Sanlikol and WhatsNext (‘Resolution’ feat. Dave Liebman, Anat Cohen, Antonio Sanchez, ‘Whatsnext’), the Fernando Brandão Group (‘Sem Tradução’), the Klaus Spencker Trio (‘Crossing Borders’), Felipe Salles (‘The Ugandan Suite’ feat. Dave Liebman , ‘Departure’ feat. Randy Brecker, 'South American Suite'), Ian Ethan (‘Earth Suite’), Phi Scarf-Lewis Porter Group (‘Three Minutes to Four’), Wolfgang Torkler Trio (‘Trio’), DŰNYA ('Lale ve Kiliç/The Tulip and the Sword', ‘A Story Of The City: Constantinople – Istanbul’), Julie Lavender (‘Rising – A Modern Cantata For A World to Come’), Numasbala (‘A Ver’), Pablo Ablanedo Octet(o) (‘Recontradoble’), Mango Blues ('Immigrant Blues'), Dave Fiuczynski ('Kif Express'), Natraj ('Deccan Dance' ,'Song of the Swan'), Mili Bermejo Quintet ('De Tierra'), Katie Viqueira ('Amores Torcidos'), Peter Janson (‘Beautiful Day'), as well as the 'Berklee Herb Pomeroy Tribute Concert', a live-recording featuring Joe Zawinul, Gary Burton, John Abercrombie, among others.
Bertram is an endorser of AQUARIAN Drumhead products, VIC FIRTH drum sticks, Black Swamp Percussion, Murat Diril Cymbals, and DEMSticks.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"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.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below 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. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... 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).