Edmar Colón via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Edmar Colón:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Edmar Colón
- City: Boston, Massachussetts
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Coamo, Puerto Rico
My Life & Work
-
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.
Contact Information
- Email: edmarcolon1@gmail.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Instagram: edmarcolon
- ▶ Website: http://www.edmarcolon.com
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
