What's Up?
Guitar Note Atlas -- an interactive map of the guitar designed to help players of all levels better visualize the layout of the notes on the fretboard -- designed by Snarky Puppy guitarist Chris McQueen and available for the iPhone and iPad -- is available via the link below...
Life & Work
Bio:
Chris McQueen has been playing, writing, and recording music since 1994. He plays guitar in the 3-time Grammy winning band Snarky Puppy, as well as the gritty instrumental quartet Forq, and world music group Bokanté. He has also worked as sideman for Lizz Wright, Banda Magda, Lucy Woodward, Nikka Costa, Myron Butler & Levi, Alejandro Escovedo, and other artists in Texas and New York. He has been featured in several rock musicals over the last decade, most recently David Bowie’s Lazarus at New York Theatre Workshop (featuring Michael C. Hall) and The Rocky Horror Show at The Dallas Theater Center. He also designed and built the Guitar Note Atlas, an app for iPhone and iPad to help guitar and bass students learn the fretboard.
Chris grew up in Austin, TX and started playing guitar and recording songs on a 4-track Tascam around age 10. At 13 he joined RedHeaded Stepchild, a western swing kid band, and started gigging around Austin and learning how to solo from bandmate and guitar prodigy Will Knaak. This interest in improvisation led Chris to jazz; he joined and wrote for his high school jazz band, and later attended the University of North Texas to study with Fred Hamilton. He eventually played in the One O’Clock Lab Band and wrote a piece that was recorded for Lab 2006.
Chris remained in the Dallas area for four years after college, co-leading the regionally popular rock band Oso Closo with singer/songwriter Adrian Hulet, and studying music with Bernard Wright and other members of the Dallas R&B/jazz/Gospel scene. Oso Closo performed on stage in The Who’s Tommy at the Dallas Theater Center and released two albums. After Oso Closo broke up, Chris and fellow band member Danny Garcia joined with singer/songwriter Cade Sadler to form Foe Destroyer, which produced one album, toured for several years, and performed on stage in Dallas and NYC in the musical Fly By Night.
Chris lives in Austin, TX with his wife Erin. Aside from gigging and recording he writes sheet music for Snarky Puppy and others, and he created arrangements and sounds for the new musical Bunkerville. He has also been working on an upcoming solo album, and he plays in an original acoustic guitar duo with fellow Austinite Matt Read that released its debut album Western Theatre last year. He has been producing videos for Guitar Note Atlas, which will be receiving a major update this year and finally coming to Android devices.
Chris projects also include instrumental quartet Forq, indie rock band Foe Destroyer, and West African-inspired band Bokanté. He’s done several rock musicals, including David Bowie’s Lazarus at New York Theatre Workshop, The Rocky Horror Show (Dallas Theater Center), Fly By Night (Playwrights Horizons & DTC), and The Who’s Tommy (DTC).
He developed an iPhone app called Guitar Note Atlas allowing guitarists to quickly see how to finger things on the fretboard, and also for non-guitarists to study scales and modes.
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).