Bio:
Giorgi Mikadze is Georgian pianist, composer and arranger.
Born in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, Giorgi first sat down on the piano bench at the age of five. Playing the music seemed to come effortlessly to him and by the time he was 12, he was performing piano concertos with symphonies in his native Tbilisi, Georgia.
Giorgi absorbed his classical music studies and began composing at 14. In high school, he became more fascinated with jazz, after discovering Errol Garner, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock. He has won numerous classical piano competitions and has received awards in many different countries.
Giorgi’s concerts have been broadcast on radio stations and television in Europe, Asia, and Americas. He has appeared at major festival venues such as: Newport Jazz Festival, Montreux Jazz Festival, Tbilisi Jazz Festival, Young Euro Classic, Bean Town Jazz Festival, Kavkaz Jazz Festival, Black Sea Jazz Festival, “Autumn Tbilisi” Festival, and Berklee's high school jazz festival. He recently finished American concert tour with Lee Ritenour and recorded album with Jack DeJohnette.
His current jazz composition work explores the microtonalities of traditional Georgian folk music and reimagines those structures in innovative new musical motifs.
Currently, Giorgi is directing his project VOISA which is fulfilled together with his all-star band and ensemble BASIANI which has an enormous experience performing old and historic Georgian songs and chants. The Project represents the transformation of traditional Georgian culture in the midst of globalization and represents a cultural dialogue – combining Georgian folk music, jazz, funk, fusion, hip- hop, R&B, electric-acoustic music and micro-tonal directions. It is an unprecedented musical product that caters to a wide range of musical tastes.
Noted for his supreme technical skills as a pianist and composer, Giorgi has performed with the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestras, Berklee Symphony Orchestras and MSM Jazz Philharmonic Orchestra. He has also composed for plays at the Rustaveli National Theatre.
Giorgi was a musical director for Berklee’s tribute to Quincy Jones and a Berklee Commencement Concert. He has played together with number of renowned artists, including: Jack DeJohnette, Roy Hargrove, Dave Liebman, Lee Ritenour, Meshell Ndegeocello, Chris Potter, Matt Garrison, Nils Landgren, Tia Fuller, Patti Austin, Jojo Mayer, David Fiuczynski, Brett Dennen, Siedah Garrett, Stefon Harris, Melwin Davis, Tom Kennedy, Phil Wilson and Mulatu Astatke.
Giorgi won prizes in many national and international competitions and was awarded a full-tuition scholarship at the International Festival-Institute in Round Top Texas, Berklee College of Music and Manhattan School of Music.
He has also won scholarships from the president of Georgia, Eteri Andjapharidze, Giya Kancheli, Emmanuel Zambelli and 18th street arts center.
Giorgi graduated from Berklee in May 2014, and holds Master of Music from Manhattan School of Music. In summer of 2017, he was invited as a visiting professor at Berklee College of Music where he was teaching 7 different courses that included jazz ensembles, theory, ear training, and private piano lessons. With his groups, Mikadze plays a repertoire that includes his genre-hopping compositions and clearly shows how he’s become in-demand as a sideman and musical director.
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).