Bio:
Flutist, composer, author and educator Fernando Brandão has performed extensively as a bandleader, sideman, chamber musician and as a soloist with several ensembles and prominent orchestras both in his native Brazil and the US. Using concert, alto, bass flutes and pífanos, Fernando performs across an eclectic repertoire of traditional and contemporary choros, sambas, bossas, frevos, ijexás, baiões, maracatus and other styles, allying jazz improvisations to an authentic Brazilian sound. He leads his own ensemble with formations that varies from Trio to Nonet, the bands Alma (contemporary South American music) and Bohemia Carioca (gafieira), and he is an active member of the groups Pablo Ablanedo Octet and Trio Choro Brasil.
He has produced and co-produced 5 CDs, and his latest, Sem Tradução (Without Translation) features nine original songs with lyrics by carioca poet Pedro Lago, by Fernando Brandão, Rosangela Santiago and Robson Santiago, both from Bahia. It also features Marcella Camargo as the lead singer and 14 prominent musicians from the Boston area. His vocal and instrumental compositions are centered mostly around Brazilian styles, and feature traditional and contemporary language and arrangements. His compositions have been recorded by Choro das Três, guitarist Almir Cortes and New World Guitar Trio.
As bandleader and soloist, he has been featured at the First Cambridge Jazz Festival, the Beantown Jazz Festival, the Isabella Gardner Museum, Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Jordan Hall, Pickman Hall, Berklee Performance Center, National Repertory Orchestra Festival in Colorado, White Mountains Jazz and Blues Festival in New Hampshire, Artes de las Americas Festival in New Mexico, The 1st Upstate New York Jazz Festival, Schubert Festival, Music of Latin America Festival, First Night of Boston, National Flute Association, and several universities and colleges across New England and the US. In Brazil, he has been featured at Festival Villa-Lobos, Bienal de Música Contemporânea, Casa do Choro, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Sala Cecília Meirelles, Sala Guiomar Novaes, Teatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro, All of Jazz in São Paulo, MASP in São Paulo, MAM in Rio de Janeiro, Palácio das Artes Belo Horizonte, among other venues.
He has also played or recorded with Pablo Ablanedo Octet, Sergio Brandão and Manga Rosa, Brasileirinho, Guinga, Ivan Lins, Rosa Passos, Joyce Moreno, Oscar Castro-Neves, Toninho Horta, Filó Machado, Altamiro Carrilho, Leni Andrade, Kris Adams, John Stein Quartet, Matthew Nicholl and Michael Farquharson, Rogério Souza, Kiko Horta, Jurandir Santana, Marcos de Carvalho, Lupa Santiago, Paulo Sérgio Santos, Maria Teresa Madeira, Bill Pierce, George Garzone, Choro Democrático, Bruno Räberg Nonet, Leandro Braga, Noel Devos, Quarteto de Cordas de São Paulo, Emmanuel Music Orchestra with conductors Craig Smith, Seiji Ozawa, and pianist Russell Sherman as soloist.
Mr. Brandão is a Professor at Berklee College of Music and a faculty member of the Community Music Center of Boston, both where he’s been teaching for over 20 years.
A leading educator in Brazilian music, he has given many lectures about its music styles, history and composers, and he is the author of the play-along book Brazilian and Afro-Cuban Jazz Conception, published by Advance Music.
He was the first prize winner of several national music competitions in Brazil, and the 1991 Pappoutsakis Flute Competition in Boston.
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).