What's Up?
Beth's CD "Weaving the Worlds" is available directly from Beth. Please email Beth for ordering information.
Life & Work
Bio:
Beth Bahia Cohen is a violinist of Syrian Jewish and Russian Jewish heritage. Inspired at a young age by the sounds she heard at family gatherings, she went on to study with master musicians from Hungary, Greece, Turkey, and the Middle East. She plays the violin, viola, Greek lyras, Turkish bowed tanbur and kabak kemane, Norwegian hardingfele, and Egyptian rababa.
"I have spent much of my musical life exploring how the violin is played in several different cultures, discovering bowed stringed instruments that existed before the European violin arrived, learning how endangered most traditional music is, and creating a large palette of musical colors from which to make my own music. I would love my students to be inspired to do their own journeys of discovery, to get to know other musical languages if they're interested, and to discover their own music."
"Freelancing in all manner of gigs—from symphony, opera, and ballet orchestras to Broadway shows to Greek weddings, Hungarian tanchazes, Turkish Sufi whirling dervish ceremonies, and more—has shown me how important it is to have a transparent and easeful technique on the instrument, to be impeccable in every situation, to be open and respectful wherever we find ourselves."
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Performances with Led Zeppelin, Itzhak Perlman, Eubie Blake, Phillip Glass, numerous orchestras, and Greek, Turkish, Hungarian, and Klezmer ensembles, among others.
Recordings include Errol Morris soundtracks, PBS Nova and American Experience shows, the film music of John Kusiak, and work with Dunya, EurAsia Ensemble, Ziyia, and Weaving the Worlds (solo), among others.
Scholarship recipient from places such as the National Endowment for the Arts/Artists International, American Research Institute of Turkey, and Radcliffe Bunting Institute.
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).