Claudia Villela via Matrix

Claudia Villela

Connections Out

Network Node

Name: Claudia Villela
City/Place: Santa Cruz, California
Country: United States
Hometown: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Connections Out

from this node by: Matrix

Current News

What's Up? "The closest the jazz world is likely to ever come to a female Bobby Mc Ferrin, the Brazilian -born genius with a blistering voice."
—Jazz Times

"... Remarkable, beautiful, towering voice..."
—New York Times

Life & Work

Bio: While growing up in Rio, Villela literally soaked up music from the air, falling asleep at night to the sounds wafting over from the samba school behind her grandmother’s house. Singing professionally as a teenager, she performed at college festivals and worked as a back-up singer. At the same time, she was strongly drawn to medicine, and eventually decided to merge her two passions, graduating with a degree in music therapy from the Brazilian Conservatory of Music in 1983.

Not long after her move to California, Villela started singing with the Stanford University Chorus, and then joined the De Anza College Jazz Singers. Eventually she won a scholarship that enabled her to study with the great jazz vocalist Sheila Jordan at the Manhattan School of Music. As Villela sees it, her music therapy background gave her the flexibility to make the musical transition from Rio to the Bay Area.

Developing a distinctive synthesis of jazz and Brazilian musical forms, she began attracting attention from musical heavy weights like tenor sax titan Michael Brecker, bass virtuoso Harvie Swartz (now Harvie S) and revered Brazilian guitarist Toninho Horta, who all play on her captivating, hard-to-find 1996 album Supernova. The same year, her breathtaking album Asa Verde earned her a nomination for Jazz Singer of the Year by the National Association of Independent Record Distributors (NAIRD).

The year 2003 marked the release of InverseUniverse (Adventure Music), a program of dazzling original pieces created with her longtime collaborator, Rio-born guitarist Ricardo Peixoto. The exquisite harmonica contributions of guest star Toots Thielemans fulfilled Villela’s ambition of working with jazz’s foremost aficionado of Brazilian music.

After making a compelling case for herself as an inspired composer, she delivered a breathtaking session of spontaneous invention with the lavishly praised 2004 duo session featuring piano guru Kenny Werner, DreamTales (Adventure Music). Werner admitted to skepticism when Villela approached him about going into the studio without any songs prepared, but came away from the session a believer. In the fall of 2008, she received a high profile commission from New York University commissioned to set poems by several Latin American poets to music.

In recent years, Villela’s international reputation as a performer and composer has continued to grow through appearances at the world’s most prestigious jazz festivals and clubs.

Contact Information

Email: [email protected]
Contact by Webpage: http://www.claudiavillela.com/contact

Media | Markets

▶ Buy My Music: (downloads/CDs/DVDs) http://www.claudiavillela.com/store
▶ Website: http://www.claudiavillela.com
▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/@claudiavillela1
▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCUZgG9zke7T2Yw9uExpKMvg
▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/5FaaOYNrAeMU6uaX7PFZpi
▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/3qoDzN2dd0VcfCipJHq3UX

Clips (more may be added)

0:36:05
Mondays with Kuumbwa – Episode 51 – Claudia Villela & Romero Lubambo Encore
By Claudia Villela

35 views

Next

Connections In ViaConnect to Claudia Villela to appear here:

What's Been Happening?

A category was added to Claudia Villela:

Santa Cruz, California
- Jun 11
A category was added to Claudia Villela:

Brasil, Brazil
- Jun 11
A category was added to Claudia Villela:

Rio de Janeiro
- Jun 11
A category was added to Claudia Villela:

Jazz Brasileiro, Brazilian Jazz
- Jun 11
A category was added to Claudia Villela:

Multi-Instrumentista
- Jun 11
A category was added to Claudia Villela:

Cantora, Singer
- Jun 11
A video was posted re Claudia Villela:

Mondays with Kuumbwa – Episode 51 – Claudia Villela & Romero Lubambo Encore
Vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Claudia Villela and guitarist Romero Lubambo performing live (sans audience) at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center.
- Jun 11
Claudia Villela is matrixed!
- Jun 11

Claudia Villela

Connections Out

Human creativity is everywhere. From Brazil it's all being connected in a manner allowing one to move from any creator to any other creator in just a few steps. Artificial Intelligence & algorithms not necessary. Real intelligence, yes.

Raymundo Sodré Global

A Massa (do povo carente) / The Masses (of people in need)

A Massa (do povo carente) / The Masses (of people in need)

Add to my Playlist

A Massa - Raymundo Sodré (7,025 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Sina de Cantador - Raymundo So... (6,881 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Magnetismo - Raymundo Sodré ... (6,342 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Sacando a Cana - Raymundo Sodr... (5,950 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Mêrêrê - Raymundo Sodré (5,459 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Jardim do Amor - Raymundo Sodr... (4,673 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Debaixo do Céu - Raymundo Sodr... (4,149 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Desejo de Amar - Raymundo Sodr... (3,859 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Oração pra Yá Oxum - Raymundo ... (3,739 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Yá África - Raymundo Sodré (3,508 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Meu Rio, Cadê o Papel - Raymun... (3,177 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Casa de Trois - Raymundo Sodré... (2,896 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Mulher é Laço que Prende o Coração do Vaqueiro - R... (2,556 plays)

Share | Report | 60,213 plays | 11,778 views

THE MATRIX IS THE MOTHER SHIP (it carries people to culture; per above, it carries culture too)

THE MATRIX IS CULTURAL DIFFUSION ON A PLANETARY SCALE (Bahia is Ground Zero)

THE MATRIX IS THE INTEGRATED GLOBAL CREATIVE ECONOMY (matrixed economist, Dr. Darius Mans, presents the Africare Award to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — Brazil's current president — in 2012)

SPARROW/PARDAL ROBERTS

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; recorded "Purple Rain", "Around the World in a Day", "Parade", and "Sign o' the Times"; now director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory)

SUSAN ROGERS

Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched! — Julian Lloyd Webber (most highly renowned cellist in the United Kingdom; brother of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats...)

JULIAN LLOYD WEBBER

This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :))) — Clarice Assad (pianist, composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world)

CLARICE ASSAD

Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!! — Alicia Svigals (world's premier klezmer violinist; founding member of The Klezmatics)

ALICIA SVIGALS

Thank you for your note below and we appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow. — Banch Abegaze (manager, Kamasi Washington)

KAMASI WASHINGTON

This Matrix was built by an ex-royalty "rescuer" (Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and many others) so that deep Brazilian culture, much of it otherwise impossible to find if one is not right there where it is made, might also (via an alternative to major media) be discoverable from all around the world. To do this it integrates this immensity into a system whereby ALL CULTURE EVERYWHERE — from small villages in Africa to Grammy-winning artists in Los Angeles — writers, filmmakers, painters... — can be found from anywhere on the planet.

(Clip by Jorge Pacoa)

Danilo Brito Brazil

The Matrix uncoils from the Recôncavo of Bahia, Brazil, final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history and from where some of the most physically and spiritually uplifting music ever made (samba and its precursor chula, per the Saturno Brothers above) evolved...

Chris Speed Avant-Garde Jazz

WHAT IS THE RECÔNCAVO? The peninsula upon which Salvador is situated is like the thumb of an open and grasping hand, what is normally thought of as the Recôncavo then being defined by the curved index finger. This way of definition developed when agricultural products were brought to Salvador by boat, sometimes making their way first down the Paraguaçu river after having been carried overland from the sertão (backlands) to Cachoeira, the river debouching into the Bay of Saints at Maragogipe. The city of Bahia (as it was usually called then) was crouched on the bay, comprised of a commercial district much smaller in area than today (landfill has increased it greatly), the area around the upper section of the elevator, and what is now called Pelourinho.

John Santos San Francisco State University Faculty

Much of the remainder of the peninsula was given to sugarcane plantations, and dotted within the Atlantic rainforest were countless quilombos (Afro-Brazilian villages founded during the age of slavery); both are attested to today in commonly used city names. The neighborhood of Garcia was once Fazenda Garcia (fazenda being a farm or plantation), and this denomination is still used today to distinguish one end of Garcia (fim-de-linha) from the other (the Campo Grande end). Neighborhoods Engenho Velho de Federação and Engenho Velho de Brotas are so called for the old mills (engenhos velhos) which pressed the caldo (juice, so to speak) from the cane so laboriously hacked out of the fields. The neighborhood of Cabula is named for an nkisi (deity) of candomblé angola (the first candomblé -- a West African religious belief system -- to arrive in Bahia)...whose rhythms comprise the basis for samba, meaning that the rhythms to which so many in the world inexpertly swayed as Stan Getz's saxophone soared and João and Astrud Gilberto sensuously intoned -- this paragon of suave Brazilian sophistication -- was born in the rough senzalas (slavequarters) of Bahia. Ironically enough, the barefoot senzala version was/is far more sophisticated than the sophisticated version.

Cinho Damatta Brasil, Brazil

But times have changed, and Cabula is now a crowded, non-descript middle-to-working class Salvador city neighborhood (plenty of candomblé around though), and Engenhos Velhos de Federação and Brotas are swarming working class neighborhoods (ditto the candomblé); the senzala samba, the samba chula and samba-de-roda have disappeared. A simplified version -- Bahian pagode -- is heard everywhere in Salvador, but the real-deal stuff has died out here in the big city. It remains, however, a potent force on the remainder of its native ground, the Recôncavo proper, where it is danced to upon pounded earth, under moonlight broken by banana, palm and mango leaves, lifting the souls of its participants almost like something religious, which it was, and gods aside, is.

Augustin Hadelich New York City

Connect to anybody in here. You appear on their page. Anybody in here connects to you, they appear on your page...

Manoel Cordeiro Belém do Pará

...plugged into a superpower: the small world phenomenon.

Kotringo Tokyo

By the same mathematics positioning some 8 billion human beings within some 6 or so steps of each other, people in the Matrix tend to within close, accessible steps of everybody else inside the Matrix.

Bernardo Aguiar Pandeiro Instruction

And by extension, to within discoverable reach of everybody everywhere on the planet.

Ajeum da Diáspora Restaurant

A little bit about how the math works:

EM PORTUGUÊS / IN ENGLISH

BUT WHY BRAZIL???

Carlos Henriquez Composer

"The time has come for these bronzed people to show their worth..."

(Music by Assis Valente. Clip by Betão Aguiar. The Matrix was built in Salvador's Centro Histórico above, incorporating these marvelous people.)

Jean-Paul Bourelly Record Producer

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.

Mike Compton Bluegrass

Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin.

Carlos Aguirre Argentina

Brazil was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil's national music — the pandeiro — the hand drum in the opening scene above — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people).

Maria Marighella Atriz, Actor

Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil's culturally fecund nordeste/northeast, where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa (Lagoon of the Canoe) and raised in Olho d'Águia (Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil's aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David.

Michael Cleveland Folk & Traditional

Three cultures — from three continents — running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Pandeirista on the roof.

Philipp Meyer Austin, Texas

Nowhere else but here. Brazil itself is a matrix.

'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother"
A real mother for ya!

Copyright ©2023 - Privacy - Terms of Service - Contact -

Open to members of the worldwide creative economy.

Name

Email Address

You'll use your email address to log in.

Password

Passwords must be at least 6 characters in length.

Password Again

Enter your password again for confirmation.

Profile Address

This will be the end of your profile link, for example:
http://www.matrixonline.net/profile/yourname

Timezone

Language

Human Verification

Please type the characters you see in the image. May take several tries. Sorry!!!