Bio:
Music is definitely part of Darrell Green’s family pedigree — his father was a bass player — but this jazz drummer also has his own preternatural sense of groove. Over a career that’s spanned more than two decades, Green has become a master technician and prolific sideman, sharing stages with everyone from Blue Note vibraphonist Stefon Harris to saxophonist Red Holloway. Though jazz is his primary focus, Green is conversant in every genre from straight-ahead jazz to Latin and West African music.
Oakland-raised Green has been playing drums for as long as he can remember. In fact, his first birthday present was a toy drum. When he was 7 years old, Green landed his first professional gig at Cosmopolitan Baptist Church. Four years later he matriculated in the Young Musicians Program at UC Berkeley and apprenticed under Kent Reed. “He would take me to his gigs. I would help him set up so I got exposed to the real life of a musician,” says Green. During high school Green was a section leader in both the Young People’s Symphony Orchestra and the Bay Area Wind Symphony. Additionally, he played drums in the Castlemont High School Jazz Band and backed the Castleers choir. After high school, Green attended the California Institute of the Arts on a scholarship, where he majored in jazz studies with an emphasis on African percussion.
Throughout college Green drove up to the Bay Area every weekend to play a trio gig at San Francisco’s Club Deluxe, which featured Marcus Shelby on bass and Howard Wiley on saxophone. In 2001 he began touring with Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, and also formed a trio with guitarist Julian Lage and bassist David Ewell. Two years later, Green joined the Dave Ellis Quintet and performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival. He consolidated his career as a gun-for-hire, and started getting calls from heavyweights like Harris and Dr. Lonnie Smith whenever they came to town. He developed a style that’s rooted in modern post-bop, but retains elements of his gospel and classical lineage. As a soloist, Green became known for his bedrock groove and inexhaustible creativity.
In 2005 Green landed a scholarship at the Manhattan School of Music, where he began a comprehensive study of jazz performance. Shortly thereafter he began working with David Weiss, saxophonists JD Allen and Sherman Irby, and the Myron Waldon/Daron Barrett Quartet. He became a sought-after musician for both session work and live shows.
Green has toured with James Hurt, James Zollar, Brad Leali, Jesse Davis, and Stacy Dillard. And with Pharoah Sanders, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Sherman Irby, Steve Turre, Faye Carol, Lavay Smith and the Red Hot Skillet Lickers, and Jeremy Pelt. He is one of the most in-demand drummers in New York , Europe, and Japan.
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).