Chris McQueen via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Chris McQueen:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Chris McQueen
- City: Austin, Texas
- Country: United States
Current News
- 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...
My 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.
Contact Information
- Email: chris(at)chrismcqueen(dot)com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: mcqueenerpants
- ▶ Instagram: mcqueenerpants
- ▶ Website: http://www.chrismcqueen.com
- ▶ Website 2: http://www.guitarnoteatlas.com/
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/0JOv5l7cHWPKET8uO6FbF9
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
