Bio:
Giba Gonçalves was born in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil and began his career as a dancer and percussionist in groups including Ilê Aiyê, Olodum, Muzenza and Tupi Nago. He joined the band KAOMA and toured the world for two years before performing at concerts around Europe with a variety of other bands.
In 1997, Giba moved to Paris where he became leader of Tambourlode, and founded Batala, a batucada style band playing samba-reggae with more than 80 percussionists. Giba composes all the music for Batala, which has since grown around the world to almost 47 bands and over 1500 drummers worldwide.
While Giba was in France, his friend Alberto Pitta, the ex-artistic director of Olodum, started the educational project Instituto Oya de Arte e Educaçao in Salvador. This project included Bloco Cortejo Afro, a school for dance, percussion, printing, textile design, fashion design and capoeira. Giba Gonçalves is the musical director of the band Cortejo Afro, who play a distinct mixture of African rhythms and electronic beats and pop, known as the “Afro-Bahian musical revolution”.
Giba Gonçalves has also composed music for film/documentary “Code Unknown” by Michael Haneke, starring Juliette Binoche (MK2 Productions). In 2000, he was assistant musical director of “Festival Latitudes Villette Brésil,” and the show, “Solstices, Carnavalcade de St. Denis” (France).
Nowadays, Giba Gonçalves is busy developing the Batala project around the world and contributes to advancing all forms of Bahian culture.
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).