Bio:
Born and brought up in Mumbai India, Gino has been fooling around with the drums since he was 8 years old and took it up seriously at the age of 15. He is the son of Louiz Banks, India 's legendary jazz pianist and composer. He toured Australia and China with his fathers' indo-jazz fusion band SANGAM playing percussion when he was just 9 years old.
Gino is a versatile musician, this trait leads him to perform and record with artists and bands of all types of genres. Artists like his father Louiz Banks, Ustad Zakir Hussain, Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia, Pt. Shivkumar Sharma, Ustad Rashid Khan,the late great U.Srinivas, Fazal Qureshi, Taufiq Qureshi, Bikram Ghosh, Pt. Vikku Vinayakram, Sridar Parthasarathy, Sanjay Divecha and Karl Peters; to Bollywood sessions and gigs with A.R. Rahman, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Salim-Sulaiman, Vishal-Shekhar, Amit Trivedi, Pritam, and Hariharan; to fusion groups ARKA, Niladri Kumar, Rakesh Chaurasia's RAF, Ravi Chary Crossing, Mekaal Hasan Band, Ananthaal, Dhruv Ghanekar, Amaan & Ayaan Ali Khan, Stephen Devassy and Bala Bashkar; to pop/rock/blues bands like Indus Creed, Blackstrat Blues, Soulmate, Gary Lawyer, Baiju Dharmajan, Suneeta Rao, Skinny Alley, Joe Alvares and Shefali Alvares. He has performed with international musicians like Dave Holland, Chris Potter, Mike Stern, Guthrie Govan, Tony Lakatos, George Brooks, The Maske Trio, Leni Stern, Angela Hagenbach, Carl Clements and The Dallas Horns As well as with Dance Troupes like Pt. Birju Maharaj's Kathak Group, Aditi Bhagwat and Terence Lewis Contemporary Dance Company and many more.
Working on his own music as a composer as well as collaborating with extremely talented musicians like Sheldon D'Silva, Sangeet Haldipur, Rhythm Shaw, Kush Upadhyay, Mohini Dey, Satyajit Talwalkar, Ojas Adhiya, Giridhar Ghatam Udupa and many more
An in-demand session artist, he is also a producer, arranger and runs his own studio production called Double Shift Productions.
He has also had the Honor and Privilege of playing a few tracks on the Miles From India Album produced by Bob Belden, nominated for a 2009 Grammy in the Contemporary Jazz Category with Times Square Records, NYC; a fusion of great Indian classical musicians and Miles Davis alumni musicians.
Contact Information
Management/Booking:
GIGATAINMENT
Neil Banks
+91 9920114728 [email protected]
CHUBU MUSIC PVT. LTD.
Director : Lorraine Banks
Co-ordinator : Seema Raut
Tel : + 91 (022) 2642 6898
Tel /Fax : + 91 (022) 2644 2774
Seema + 91 98203 29746 [email protected]
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).