Bio:
In only the last few years, traditional fiddler and banjoist David Bragger has become an ubiquitous figure in traditional American folk music.
He is a musician, documentarian, UCLA ensemble director, 78rpm record collector, musical festival director and folk label founder. He has also nearly finished recording and filming musicians for the largest scale American Folk music project ever to be made. It has been dubbed the “secret project,” as only those who recorded for it know anything about it.
Having learned the “old-time” art of fiddling from traditional masters Tom Sauber and Mel Durham, Bragger has been passing down these archaic musical secrets and sounds to students and fans worldwide. His 2016 debut CD Big Fancy put him on the traditional music map overnight and he was immediately recruited to perform fiddle, banjo, mandolin and guitar on the 70’s Laurel Canyon-esque solo album “Millport” from Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin. He was also tapped to play fiddle with Social Distortion. In 2018, Bragger and fiddler Susan Platz released the very first American old-time fiddle duet CD King’s Lament–Old-time Fiddle Duets which is currently going into its second printing. Bragger was also the featured soloist on fiddle and banjo for last year’s Lion’s Gate western film Gone are the Days. Bragger has also been tapped to curate and write liner notes for 78rpm record compilations put out by the mega-UK label JSP. He just completed the Texas Hillbillies 4-CD set and is currently working on the Mississippi String Band compilation set. Most recently Bragger has been seen fiddling with Grammy-winner Dom Flemons.
These “appearances” and “cameos” are squeezed into Bragger’s free time when he’s not performing, teaching old-time music at UCLA and running his label “Tiki Parlour Recordings.”
Five years ago, Bragger spearheaded the idea to bring the greatest living traditional masters to Los Angeles for concerts, workshops and recording. He founded the space known as The Old-Time Tiki Parlour and flew out the great, eccentric traditional musician Dan Gellert. When Ry Cooder caught wind of this, he showed up to the Parlour as Gellert’s transportation! Bragger and his partner Rick Hocutt recorded and filmed Gellert for a week. The result was the Dan Gellert CD & DVD release, which is now a modern classic of the old-time music genre. In the last few years, Bragger’s vision has come true. He created an independent label devoted solely to hardcore traditional music where every release is 100% produced by traditional musicians (recording, mastering, filming, editing, artwork, design, etc.) All releases showcase raw traditional American music by today’s masters, folk art by traditional musicians and extensive liner notes.
Currently the Tiki Parlour has sixteen releases, with more more scheduled. Among the latest are Holy Smoke! and The Old Texas Fiddle Vol. 3. Holy Smoke! features Bragger with one of his mentors, the great Italian old-time fiddler Rafe Stefanini. Novelist and American music writer Tom Piazza calls it “one of the best banjo-fiddle duet records I’ve heard.” The oldest banjo publication in existence, The Banjo Newsletter, considers it “one of the most important recordings of 2019, or any other year for that matter.”
Tiki Parlour is releasing CD & DVD Sets featuring Bluegrass banjo master Bill Evans, reclusive old-time fiddler Scott Prouty, North Carolina master Kirk Sutphin and old-time fiddle legend Brad Leftwich. Tiki Parlour is also releasing a book of fiddle duet transcriptions that correspond to double fiddle release by David Bragger and Susan Platz.
Lessons/Workshops:
David Bragger is a full-time instructor of old-time music on fiddle, banjo, mandolin and guitar. He teaches private lessons in-person and online, as well as workshops at music festivals and camps, including the Los Angeles Old-Time Social, the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, the Rocky Mountain Old-Time Music Festival, the Portland Old-Time Music Gathering, the Berkeley Old-Time Music Convention, the Santa Barbara Old-Time Fiddlers’ Convention and the Topanga Banjo & Fiddle Contest.
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).