Bio:
AMIT CHATTERJEE is a guitarist, vocalist, sitarist and composer. Born and brought up in India in his early years, and living in the United States since his teens, he has gained a reputation at being equally adept at modern Western musics (jazz, funk, blues, rock and pop) and North Indian Classical music. The legendary keyboardist and composer Joe Zawinul publicly said of Amit, “a genius…one of the greatest musicians I have ever had the pleasure of working with.” Amit's music reflects a colorful, inspired and powerful expression born of a natural synthesis of his vast experience and knowledge in the musics of two worlds – a music with profound roots in both worlds, but with no borders between them.
Amit has performed and recorded with luminaries from a wide range of the musical spectrum. He worked as guitarist and vocalist for Joe Zawinul for 11 years, and also performed in international performances of Zawinul’s symphonic masterpiece “Stories of the Danube” and is featured as a soloist on the recording of the work on Phillips Classics. Other stellar musicians with whom Amit has worked include: Peter Erskine, Jim Beard, Victor Bailey, Manolo Badrena, Badal Roy, Eric Johnson, David Liebman, The Netherlands Metropole Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Czech State Philharmonie, Mike Clark, Michael Wolff, Nitin Sawhney, Trilok Gurtu and many others. He has been on several American Grammy nominated recordings.
Presently Amit continues performing as a special guest with artists throughout the world, as well as with his own band “Amit Chatterjee Alliance.”
Amit also performs as a sitarist from time to time, giving concerts of Indian Classical Music in the traditional forms. He has recorded five CDs of North Indian Classical Music.
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).