Bio:
Born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1970, Glenn Patscha relocated to New Orleans in 1989 to study piano with Ellis Marsalis and Harold Battiste at The University Of New Orleans. He went on to play and record with many New Orleans icons young and old such as Earl Palmer, Victor Goines, Danny Barker, Brian Blade, Nicholas Payton, Jeremy Davenport and Leroy Jones.
In 1998, a recording and touring stint with Marianne Faithfull reignited an interest in composing and songwriting. After moving to New York City in 1998 Patscha started the critically acclaimed band Ollabelle. T Bone Burnett signed the band to his Columbia Records imprint DMZ in 2003.
Since living in New York he has recorded and performed with Levon Helm, Sheryl Crow, Bettye Lavette, The Holmes Brothers, Cubanismo, Madeline Peyroux, Roger Waters, Lizz Wright, Ryan Adams, Willie Nelson and Loudon Wainwright among many others. He has also scored the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning film “Sangre De Mi Sangre” with Brian Cullman, award winning Finnish Film “Kukkulan Kuningas - On Thin Ice“ and a number of short films by photographer Mary Ellen Mark and Documentarian Martin Bell.
Recently Patscha has produced recordings for The Holmes Brothers and Marc Cohn. He has also recorded a beautiful debut album with his new band The Big Bright with Fiona McBain (Ollabelle) and Liz Tormes.
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).