Bio:
In October of 1979, when we first met in a borrowed Berkeley living room to begin a workshop in Balinese music, none of us were thinking of anything but the challenge at hand: learning gamelan. We had the idealism of beginners, a fresh love for Balinese music, and — overfilling the cramped space — a fine set of instruments just off the container ship from Bali. Among us was I Wayan Suweca (co-founder of the group with Rachel Cooper and Michael Tenzer), whose supreme skill and artistic fire made us putty in his hands. Soon, by some alchemy of culture contact and group experience, something marvelous began to grow.
Gamelan Sekar Jaya is seen in Indonesia not only as a flowering of traditional Balinese arts in a distant land, but also as a laboratory for the creation of new ideas, many of which have an impact on artistic development in Bali. Through our Master Artists in Residency program, GSJ serves as an incubator for the world’s top creative minds in both traditional and innovative Balinese arts.
In 2000, during Gamelan Sekar Jaya’s fifth tour to Bali, the Governor of Bali awarded GSJ the Dharma Kusuma, Bali’s highest award for artistic achievement, never before awarded to a foreign group. The name “Sekar Jaya” is now a household term in Bali.
Locally, GSJ is a thriving multi-generational community that provides invaluable cross-cultural benefits to its members, the larger Bay Area community, and beyond. Through performance, educational programming, and community outreach, the group introduces thousands of people each year to the beauty and complexity of Balinese arts and culture. GSJ’s community, and the spirit of cultural exchange at its core, is also of great importance to the Indonesian population of northern California.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
“The success of this group has far exceeded its founders’ wildest dreams as the ensemble has become an honored participant in the evolution of Bali’s musical culture.”
- The Boston Globe
“Most of Bali’s population of 2.8 million has seen Sekar Jaya in live performance and television broadcasts, and the group continues to receive special coverage from the Indonesian electronic and printed media…their cross-cultural works not only have been accepted eagerly by American and Indonesian audiences; their innovative compositions have directly stimulated creativity on the part of Balinese musicians themselves.”
- Andy Toth, Ethnomusicologist and former US Consular Agent in Bali
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).