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ROLLING STONE 100 GREATEST DRUMMERS OF ALL TIME
G STONE 100 GREATEST DRUMMERS OF ALL TIME
“My worst nightmare Chris Dave is his drummer,” Questlove told an interviewer in advance of D’Angelo’s 2012 live comeback. “You need the most dangerous drummer alive on that tour.” While not a household name, the unassuming 42-year-old R&B specialist known as Daddy is legendary among those in the know. Much like a Cadillac hood ornament or a Tiffany logo, a Chris Dave credit on a session is a mark of pure class; he appears on some of contemporary pop’s most high-profile albums, including Adele’s 21 and D’Angelo’s Black Messiah…
Life & Work
Bio:
Chris Dave was born in Houston, Texas and began his music career in the late 1980s. He started out by playing in church and credits jazz music as his strongest influence. He states that although his father plays drums, he has never actually seen him play. As a teenager, he was exposed to jazz legends like Miles Davis and John Coltrane when listening to music with his father. Chris Dave blossomed on the drums, eventually graduating from Houston’s prestigious High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.
He studied at Howard University in Washington D.C. where he met acclaimed producers and former Prince associates Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Through this relationship, Chris Dave’s professional career began as he started working with R&B band Mint Condition.
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).