Bio:
Edmar Colón is a saxophonist, pianist and composer from Coamo, Puerto Rico, currently living in Boston.
Colón was awarded the prestigious Presidential Scholarship and graduated from the Berklee College of Music with a dual major in Performance and Classical Composition. As part of his undergraduate studies, Edmar was a student at the Berklee Global Jazz Institute directed by Danilo Pérez and Marco Pignataro. He went on to complete his Master’s degree in Global Studies at the Berklee Global Jazz Institute.
Edmar has toured and played in venues and events such as the Detroit Jazz Festival, Puerto Rico Heineken Jazz Festival, Toronto Jazz Festival, Panama Jazz Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, and Monterrey Jazz Festival, among others. He recently played in the Kennedy Center for the Arts Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival, Abbey Lincoln tribute tour with Grammy-award recipients Terri Lyne Carrington, Esperanza Spalding, Dianne Reeves and Dee Dee Bridgewater. Colón has performed with artists such as Joe Lovano, John Patitucci, Danilo Pérez, Danny Rivera, Hal Crook, Kenny Werner, Lionel Louke, John Michel Pilc, Patti Austin, Ledisi, Judith Hill, David Sanchez, Arturo Sandoval, George Garzone, Luis Enrique and Ivan Lins, among other notable artists of various musical genres.
In 2016, Colón was awarded the Latino 30 Under 30 Award New England from the El Mundo newspaper. He was also awarded first prize at the "Keep An Eye" International Jazz Awards in Amsterdam as a part of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute. In 2017, he was honored in the annual Patron Saint festivities of his hometown of Coamo, Puerto Rico.
As a writer in the last two years Edmar has worked with some of the biggest names in Jazz. In 2018 Colón was the copyist for Wayne Shorter’s newest orchestral work, an opera. During the same year Edmar was commissioned to write a 30 minute long orchestral piece for the Detroit Jazz Festival Symphony Orchestra. Also in 2018, he wrote the orchestrations for the piece “12 Little Spells” of Esperanza Spalding’s most recent album by the same name. On December of that year, Edmar worked as copyist/arranger for the Kennedy Center Honors award ceremony honoring Wayne Shorter. In addition, the young saxophonist worked as the arranger/orchestrator for Terri Lyne Carrington’s upcoming album.
Today, Edmar Colón is working on an orchestral commission by the National Symphony Orchestra for a number of concerts celebrating the centenary of Nat King Cole, as well as working on original material with a new working band for his debut album as Saxophonist and Composer.
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).