Bio:
Alicia Hall Moran, mezzo-soprano, is a multi-dimensional artist performing and composing between the genres of Opera, Art, Theater, and Jazz. Ms. Moran made her Broadway debut in the Tony-winning revival The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, starring as Bess on the celebrated 20-city American tour. "Moran finds the truth of the character in her magnificent voice," Los Angeles Times.
A unique vocalist performing across the fine arts and in her own contemporary work, Ms. Moran's creativity has been nurtured by, and tapped by celebrated artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Adam Pendleton, Joan Jonas, Ragnar Kjartansson, Simone Leigh, Liz Magic Laser, curator Okwui Enwezor, and choreographer Bill T. Jones, musicians like Bill Frisell, Charles Lloyd, and the band Harriet Tubman, diverse writers from Simon Schama to Carl Hancock Rux, as well as institutions at the forefront of art and ideas worldwide.
Ms. Moran's artist residencies include Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, MASSMoCA, and National Sawdust center for original music. She's been commissioned by ArtPublic/Miami Art Basel, Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, Histories Remixed/Art Institute Chicago, and Prototype Festival: HERE Performing Arts/Beth Morrison Projects, steadily rewriting a template for the classical-pop hybrid singer, with quiet yet critically-acclaimed works such as HEAVY BLUE, her first album, the motown project, The Five Fans, Breaking Ice: The Battle of the Carmens, and Black Wall Street, a personal historical take on the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 which premiered at River To River Festival after developing at National Sawdust and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture/Women In Jazz--institutions dedicated to keeping creativity and risk-taking alive at the critical level Ms. Moran inhabits.
In partnership with husband and collaborator Jason Moran, she was awarded a 2017 Art of Change fellowship by the Ford Foundation, and has generated work for the Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, Walker Art Center, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, and most recently, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Center in Chicago, and Elb Philharmonie in Hamburg, among many others.
Ms. Moran's transcendant vocal performances travel fluidly from jazz clubs (such as Village Vanguard, The Stone, Jazz@Lincoln Center, Highline Ballroom, San Francisco Jazz, Kennedy Center, etc.) through solo turns with symphony orchestra (including National Symphony Orchestra Pops, Chicago Philharmonic, Austin Symphony, 1B1 Orchestra/Norway, Roanoke Symphony, Dayton Philharmonic) and new contemporary orchestral works by composers including Gabriel Kahane (Oregon Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Grant Park Symphony, etc.) and Bryce Dessner (world tour), to the opera stage and operatic turns for film and theater. Her second album, HERE TODAY, was released December 21, 2017.
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).