Bio:
Dan Nimmer was born in 1982 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An old soul in a young body, Mr. Nimmer plays with the spirit, the passion and the soul of someone who has been on the planet much longer. With prodigious technique and an innate sense of swing, his playing often recalls that of his own heroes, specifically Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly, Erroll Garner and Art Tatum.
As a young man, Mr. Nimmer's family inherited a piano and he started playing by ear; he was, if you will, "called" by the instrument.He studied classical piano and eventually became interested in jazz. At the same time,he began playing gigs around Milwaukee.
Upon graduation from high school, Mr. Nimmer left Milwaukee to study music at Northern Illinois University. It didn't take him long to become one of Chicago's busiest piano players. He was working a lot on the Chicago scene so Mr. Nimmer decided to leave school and make the big move to New York City where he was immediately emerged into the New York scene.
In 2005, after being in New York for about a year and playing with many different musicians, Mr. Nimmer got hired by Wynton Marsalis to become a member of his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Wynton Marsalis Quintet, both in which he has been member ever since. In addition to Wynton Marsalis, Mr. Nimmer has performed and or recorded with Jimmy Cobb, Norah Jones, Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, Chick Corea, George Benson, Houston Person, Eric Clapton, Tom Jones, Jon Faddis, Benny Golson, Brian Lynch, Lewis Nash, Peter Washington, Fareed Haque and many others.
Nimmer has appeared numerous times on television including the The Tonight Show w/ Jay Leno, The Late Show w/ David Letterman, The View, Good Morning America, The Early Show, The Kennedy Center Honors, Live From Abbey Road, and Live From Lincoln Center PBS. You can also see him in Apple's video iPod commercial "Sparks". He has released five of his own albums on the Venus label (Japan).
He has played at the White House, The Royal Albert Hall (London), Salle Pleyel (Paris),Disney Hall (LA), the Hollywood Bowl and many other renowned venues and festivals around the world.
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).