What's Up?
These days I am splitting my time between the Washington, DC Region (in Arlington, VA, just up the hill from the Iwo Jima Memorial) and Salvador. I'm busy writing songs and making shows while also providing business and non-profit consulting services in Brazil and the US. I've developed a show about Burl Ives called Me & Uncle Burl. Way back in 1975 when we were together at Western Illinois University (WIU), Burl and his wife Dorothy asked me to do this, sometime in the future after both had passed on, as a way of honoring and preserving Burl's legacy. Me & Uncle Burl is focused on promoting the importance of music and cultural education, and the songs in the show are about kindness, unity, humility, responsibility, integrity, diversity, and democracy. To this point in time, we've been presenting the show in Brazil (where levels of polarization and disenfranchisement resemble those in the US) and we're now in the process of making plans for performances and video production in the Washington DC Region. Burl was scheduled to go to Brazil in 1985 to present a show called the "Imagination Celebration" which featured young and deserving talent in each of communities / regions the show visited. Sponsored by the Kennedy Center and the Organization of American States (OAS), Burl never made the trip to Brazil due to poor health and advancing age. Me & Uncle Burl features "Uncle Burl / Tio Burl in Portuguese" at 75-years of age and showcases unknown and known performers from the State of Bahia, Brazil, from both urban and rural environments. The platform created by "Uncle / Tio Burl" (www.uncleburl.com) is also be used to establish Brazil's first Community Foundation in the State of Bahia (80% of Bahia's population is of African descent and wide scale poverty continues to be an obstacle to success and sustainability). Unfortunately, there's a sad history of corruption and it's difficult to find non-profits in Brazil that meet international standards for transparency and reliability. Over the years, we've had some projects rejected by the Inter-American Development Bank and other funding sources in Brazil because the proposed recipient organizations couldn't pass the litmus test for reliably receiving and administering funds. The longterm goal is to create a "model" Community Foundation in Bahia which can be replicated across Brazil and Latin America.
Life & Work
Bio:
Doug Adair has carried real American music even further south than its origins, to the great cradle of another nation's musical origins: Bahia, Brazil.
Doug is proprietor of the legendary music spot Hot Dougie's Rendezvous in Salvador, Bahia and a sócio of ORS Multimídia Interativa.
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).