What's Up?
“…Awesomely the real deal.”
– Peter Hum, Ottawa Citizen
Life & Work
Bio:
Born in Los Angeles in 1968, guitarist and composer Anthony Wilson is known for a body of work that moves fluidly across genres.
The son of legendary jazz trumpeter and bandleader Gerald Wilson, his musical lineage has deeply influenced his creative trajectory, compositional choices, instrumental groupings, and the wide-ranging discography that blooms out of them.
His first album — Anthony Wilson (1997) — featured a nine-piece “little big band” and received a Grammy nomination for Best Large Ensemble Jazz Recording. It was followed by Goat Hill Junket (1998), and Adult Themes (2000). His fourth recording with the nonet, Power of Nine (2006), was recognized as one of the top ten jazz albums of the year by the New Yorker. Wilson’s acclaimed trio albums Our Gang (2001), Savivity (2005), and Jack of Hearts (2009) reimagine and reframe the Hammond organ-based genre of post-bop, soul-inflected jazz. In 2011, Wilson released Seasons, a live record and short film documenting the compositional process and premiere performance of his extended song cycle of the same name, written for and performed on a quartet of luthier John Monteleone’s handcrafted guitars called “The Four Seasons.” That same year, Wilson released Campo Belo, a collection of original instrumental songs recorded in São Paulo, Brazil.
Traveling into, through, and beyond genres, Frogtown (2016) marked a turning point for Wilson as a composer and his debut as a songwriter and singer. Renowned producer Mike Elizondo teamed with him to realize this collection of layered, intimate musical stories and portraits. Songs and Photographs (2019), in which his distilled, personal musical compositions enter into a dialogue with his 35mm photography. The work develops from two intertwined paths, one sonic and one visual, that increasingly play complementary roles in Wilson's creative process.
An inventive soloist and sensitive accompanist, he has been a core member of Diana Krall’s quartet since 2001, after joining her for a series of concerts in Paris at the Olympia Theater, which became the Grammy award winning recording and concert film Live in Paris (2002).
Over the past two decades, Wilson has joined a diverse roster of jazz masters on their recordings and performances, including Charles Lloyd, Ron Carter, Mose Allison, Bobby Hutcherson, Madeleine Peyroux, Joe Sample, Al Jarreau, and Harold Land. And while his footing is firmly rooted in the jazz idiom, Wilson pivots with ease into other genres, having contributed his instrumental texture, improvisational authority, and orchestration to albums by pop music legends Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson, Leon Russell, Aaron Neville, and Barbra Streisand.
Wilson was awarded the Thelonious Monk Institute International Composers’ Award in 1995. He has also received commissions from Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, the International Association of Jazz Education, the Henry Mancini Institute, and the Jazz Coalition Commission Fund. In 2018, he was selected as a MacDowell Fellow.
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).