What's Up?
“The music from the trumpet at his lips is honey mixed with liquid fire. The rhythm from the trumpet at his lips is ecstasy distilled from old desire.”
— Langston Hughes
Life & Work
Bio:
Anthony Hervey is a jazz trumpeter, singer, composer, teacher, and occasional actor from South Florida. He began playing trumpet at the age of 11 after his Mother urged him to play. He reluctantly agreed. Shortly after, he heard a 20 second clip of Freddie Hubbard playing trumpet which ignited his life long passion for Jazz music, setting him on journey to become the best trumpeter he could possibly be. At the age of 18 he was admitted to the Juilliard School, graduating with his B.M. in 2019 and his M.M. in 2020. Hailed as a “beautiful trumpet player of the first magnitude” by Wynton Marsalis, Hervey has performed at Jazz festivals and concert halls around the world with some of the best that Jazz has to offer, including Wynton Marsalis, Sean Jones, Nicholas Payton, Christian McBride, and Chick Corea.
In 2019, he made his international debut as a bandleader at the Bern Jazz Festival in Switzerland. This past February, he opened for the Branford Marsalis Quartet at Rose Theater with a co-led Jazz quartet, Citizens of the Blues. He is also on Christian McBride’s recent Big Band Album, “For Jimmy, Wes, and Oliver”, which was released on Mack Avenue Records. On another note, Hervey is prominently featured acting and playing trumpet in the horror anthology series, Monsterland, airing on Hulu. Hervey is an artist with firm musical roots who strives to understand the past while also giving meaning to Jazz in our present time. He views music as a force that can uplift and inspire. In the same way music has changed his life and brought him joy, he strives to spread that joy and change the lives of others.
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).