Gerald Clayton 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 Gerald Clayton:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
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Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Gerald Clayton
- City: Los Angeles, California
- Country: United States
Current News
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What's Up?
Piedmont Blues is a live concert presentation led by celebrated jazz pianist / composer / bandleader Gerald Clayton that explores the essence and impact of the Piedmont blues. The project features The Assembly — a nine-piece band led by Clayton and including vocalist René Marie and tap dancer Maurice Chestnut. The presentation has been conceived and developed by Clayton working in close collaboration with award-winning theater director Christopher McElroen. Entwined throughout the live concert is an assemblage of projected film, new and archival photography, and folklore underscoring the verdant cultural landscape of the Piedmont region. Included amongst the footage are performances by some of the last of the living original Piedmont blues musicians: NEA National Heritage Fellow bluesman John Dee Holman, as well as Piedmont songsters Algia Mae Hinton and Boo Hanks (the latter passed in April 2016).
Using songs, lyrics, and imagery from the Piedmont blues, Piedmont Blues makes a testimony of the struggle endured by African Americans in the Southeast during Jim Crow and chronicles the efficacy of the Piedmont Blues as a salve for suffering.
Taking its name from the Piedmont plateau region — the area that lies between the Atlantic Coastal Plain and the Appalachian Mountains from central Georgia to central Virginia centered in the Carolinas — the Piedmont blues is distinguished by its ragtime rhythms, fingerpicking guitar style, and understated vocals. From the late 1920s through the early 1940s, artists such as Blind Boy Fuller, Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Blake, and Sonny Terry made the Piedmont blues popular through a series of top-selling recordings. Women were also masters of Piedmont guitar style, including Etta Baker and Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten, whose “Freight Train” is one of the best-recognized tunes of the genre. The tobacco factories and warehouses of Durham, North Carolina — home to the American Tobacco Company (the world’s largest cigarette manufacturer) — were the epicenter for the Piedmont blues — the landscape from which the music was invented.
“My first connection to the Piedmont tradition came when I heard Elizabeth Cotten’s ‘Freight Train,’” says Clayton. “What struck me was the humility in her expression. There was no interest in showing off. Not trying to wow the listener, or even herself. It was the most honest delivery of the melody and its lyrics I could imagine. On the surface her sound described elements of ragtime, folk, and even country music, but at its core it sounded like a proper blues song. There's a tone of sadness throughout — the lyrics speak of a yearning towards death as a long awaited escape from life's woes. This sense of profound reflection and the desire to transcend pain and suffering described in this song sits at the essence of all blues expression.”
Clayton’s approach to translating the Piedmont blues focuses on extracting harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic ideas directly from traditional Piedmont blues tunes and stitching them together into new compositions for his nine-piece jazz ensemble. Using this process, Clayton is aiming to produce a series of songs that knowingly nod to the past, but insist on being fundamentally contemporary.
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Gerald Clayton searches for honest expression in every note he plays. With harmonic curiosity and critical awareness, he develops musical narratives that unfold as a result of both deliberate searching and chance uncovering. The four-time GRAMMY-nominated pianist/composer formally began his musical journey at the prestigious Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, where he received the 2002 Presidential Scholar of the Arts Award. Continuing his scholarly pursuits, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Piano Performance at USC’s Thornton School of Music under the instruction of piano icon Billy Childs, after a year of intensive study with NEA Jazz Master Kenny Barron at The Manhattan School of Music. Clayton won second place in the 2006 Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Piano Competition.
Expansion has become part of Clayton’s artistic identity. His music is a celebration of the inherent differences in musical perspectives that promote true artistic synergy. Inclusive sensibilities have allowed him to perform and record with such distinctive artists as Diana Krall, Roy Hargrove, Dianne Reeves, Ambrose Akinmusire, Dayna Stephens, Kendrick Scott, John Scofield Ben Williams, Terell Stafford & Dick Oatts, Michael Rodriguez, Terri Lyne Carrington, Avishai Cohen, Peter Bernstein and the Clayton Brothers Quintet. Clayton also has enjoyed an extended association since early 2013, touring and recording with saxophone legend Charles Lloyd.
2016 marks his second year as Musical Director of the Monterey Jazz Festival On Tour, a project that has featured his trio along with Ravi Coltrane, Nicholas Payton, Terence Blanchard and Raul Midón on guitar and vocals.Clayton’s discography as a leader reflects his evolution as an artist. His debut recording, Two Shade (ArtistShare), earned a 2010 GRAMMY nomination for Best Improvised Jazz Solo for his arrangement of Cole Porter’s “All of You.” “Battle Circle,” his composition featured on The Clayton Brothers’ recording The New Song and Dance (ArtistShare), received a GRAMMY nomination for Best Jazz Instrumental Composition in 2011. He received 2012 and 2013 GRAMMY nominations for Best Jazz Instrumental Album for Bond: The Paris Sessions (Concord) and Life Forum (Concord), his second and third album releases.
Capturing the truth in each moment’s conception of sound comes naturally to Clayton. The son of beloved bass player and composer John Clayton, he enjoyed a familial apprenticeship from an early age. Clayton honors the legacy of his father and all his musical ancestors through a commitment to artistic exploration, innovation, and reinvention.
In the 2016-17 year, Clayton turns his imaginative curiosity toward uncovering the essence of the Piedmont Blues experience and expression in early twentieth century Durham. A Duke University commission, Clayton’s evening-length composition will explore a mixed media performance that features some of the most resonating voices in contemporary music.
Contact Information
- Contact by Webpage: http://geraldclayton.com/contact
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Management/Booking:
Management | Booking
Chris Mees
B Natural, Inc.
O: + 1 914.968.2925
C: + 1 347.622.1775
E: chris@bnatural.nyc
European bookings
Jutta Unger
Cologne on Pop GmbH
Heliosstr. 6a
D-50825 Koeln
Fon +49 221 998 911 00
Fax +49 221 998 911 99
info@ungermusic.de
www.c-o-pop.de
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: geraldclayton
- ▶ Instagram: geraldclayton
- ▶ Website: http://geraldclayton.com
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCNvDr3MUfQX1ytBXnvtFOmg
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/4sfEFaf1chf9SCdAEQRR8U
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/1TVg4II9xfNCzya1NZbxgE
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/7Gz8HtQfjCxFNNFD67MuI2
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/6yb84Nl6LUx5S4LfwIn8Eh
- ▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/3Uan5b7UprLANnEUYTwyvh
- ▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/2zKTklChb1bbhquiKiVnnY
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.
