Greg Spero
This Brazilian cultural matrix positions Greg Spero globally... Curation
CURATION
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from this page:
by Matrix
The Integrated Global Creative Economy
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Name:
Greg Spero
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City/Place:
Los Angeles, California
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Country:
United States
Current News
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What's Up?
"Any notion that supremely talented musicians cannot be savvy, intentional entrepreneurs is upended by the idea of Greg Spero."
“As paradigms change in major entertainment industries, there are billions of dollars at stake and kings to be made. The Quincy Jones for this new age is out there, and it’s not hard to envision that person as a tech-and-business-savvy musician/producer like Spero"
- Matt Silver, WRTI.org
"For Greg Spero, the cross-fertilization of jazz with pop, heard so clearly on Spirit Fingers, carries on through 12 Spero compositions ripe with melody, beat and an uncanny spirited attitude."
- John Ephland, Down Beat Magazine
"If you’re in a mood for music that recalls the high fusion era of albums like Stanley Clarke’s Journey To Love or
Di Meola’s Elegant Gypsy, this will definitely do it for you."
- Phil Freedman, Stereogum
"...'inside,' a rolling, cinematic composition whose main attraction is the polyrhythmic groove..morphs and changes like a weather system."
- Nate Chinen, WBGO, NPR
"...'being' is a chameleonic groove anchored by impeccable arpeggios that rise and fall against a dense, driving rhythm. SPIRIT FINGERS is a well-oiled machine...effortlessly balancing whimsical notions and melancholic chords with fiery percussive statements that capture the complex and bittersweet moments of life."
- Karas Lamb, Revive-Music
"Spero’s ambition is powerfully manifested in his new band SPIRIT FINGERS (formerly known as Polyrhythmic), a dynamic ensemble of uber-talented young musicians whose energy, passion and innovative approach stake out exciting new territory for exploratory music on their eponymous debut..."
- Jon D'Auria, Bass Player Magazine
"...Spero's adventure has reached escape velocity...this is a seriously good album."
- Brian Morton, The Wire
"Greg Spero, an undeniably gifted pianist... assembled for his project amount to a veritable supergroup in terms of their prodigious talent...Imbued with preternatural levels of skill and a high replay value, this is one album where the much hackneyed term "fusion" seems an absolutely appropriate term."
- Roger Farbey, AllAboutJazz
“…Pianist Greg Spero has a way with plaintive loopingpatters..and is adeot at building solos of great melodic richness. The group really dazzles when piani, bass and guitar combine for some truly jaw-dropping unision lines.”
- Mike Flynn, Jazzwise Magazine
Life & Work
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Bio:
Greg Spero is a musician on a mission. A multifariously creative force who’s built an entire ecosystem that empowers self-expression, Spero creates music and tech that embodies limitless possibilities. A Los Angeles-based pianist/keyboardist, producer, arranger, composer, bandleader, YouTube educator, label-owner and internet entrepreneur, he’s devoted a good deal of his time to building vehicles that connect fellow artists with audiences.
“We all have this ability to be infinitely expansive, to be everything that we want to be,” he says. “It’s a matter of how we manifest our goals.”
What sets Spero apart isn’t so much his expansive vision as his combination of musical prowess and entrepreneurial acumen. As a recent piece for the Philadelphia public radio station WRTI declared, "Any notion that supremely talented musicians cannot be savvy, intentional entrepreneurs is upended by the idea of Greg Spero."
Familiar to a diverse array of listeners through his collaborations with the pop star Halsey and the funk/fusion Miles Electric Band, Spero has also composed music for film, theater and television, written songs with Rolling Stones bassist Darryl Jones, and co-produced tracks with Ski Beatz. In recent years he’s focused on Spirit Fingers, his powerhouse quartet featuring a cadre of the era’s definitive players, including bassist Hadrien Feraud (or Max Gerl), Italian guitarist Dario Chiazzolino, and drummer Mike Mitchell (aka Blaque Dynamite, a key Kamasi Washington collaborator). AllAboutJazz summed up the combo by describing Spero as “an undeniably gifted pianist” who has assembled “a veritable supergroup in terms of their prodigious talent...Imbued with preternatural levels of skill and a high replay value."
The group released an eponymous debut album on Shanachie Entertainment entitled Spirit Fingers, a project centering on a piece hailed by WGBO’s Nate Chinen as “a cinematic composition whose main attraction is the polyrhythmic groove [that] morphs and changes like a weather system.”
Seamlessly synthesizing his improvisational jazz aesthetic with his love of hip hop, modern classical music and pop, the album confirmed Spero’s reputation as an innovative artist who has forged a highly personal rapprochement between jazz and popular music. Co-produced by Makaya McCraven, the 2020 follow-up release, PEACE, adds the sultry, confidently blues-tinged vocals of Judi Jackson and alto sax master Greg Ward into the mix while displaying “an impressively expanded sonic palette,” according to Downbeat. Spero’s new album, 2022’s The Chicago Experiment, is a collaboration showcasing his hometown comrades Makaya McCraven, Marquis Hill, Joel Ross, Irvin Pierce, Jeff Parker, and Darryl Jones. Building on the Windy City’s long, vaunted history as a hotbed for blues, jazz, and experimental music, the Ropeadope album follows in the footsteps of a series of city-centric projects launched two decades ago by Questlove, Christian McBride, and Uri Caine’s The Philadelphia Project.
Since releasing his first album at 17 with his first band Bucket Shop, 2002’s Fossil Fuels in the House that Mouse Built, Spero has recorded a series of uncategorizable projects, like his mashup of Miles Davis and Radiohead, Radio Over Miles. A blazing live album featuring drummer Makaya McCraven and trumpeter Corey Wilkes, the project was praised by veteran music writer Steve Holtje as “adventurous and distinctive.”
Recognized as a rapidly rising star on the Chicago scene, he was named “Best Jazz Entertainer” in the 2013 Chicago Music Awards. Instead of building on that momentum Spero pivoted in a different direction, plunging into a full-time commitment as pianist/keyboardist and sound designer for Halsey during her ascendance to pop stardom from 2014-18. Spero’s key role in her evolving sound culminated with a heralded Saturday Night Live performance, after which he zagged back to jazz.
Always seeking outlets for creative expression, Spero responded to the isolation imposed by the pandemic by launching Tiny Records (an imprint of Ropeadope Records). The label’s L.A. studio became the home for Tiny Room Sessions, live streaming performances that pair top-shelf jazz instrumentalists with artists such as Lido, J’Von, Transviolet, Terreon “Tank” Gully, and MonoNeon, whose re-imagined, jazz-infused songs are expanding the frontiers of popular music. Their Tiny Room Sessions singles have been picked up by jazz stations across the world, from WGCX and WRTI to SourceFM, Radio France, NPR and JazzFM.
In another innovative pandemic-inspired initiative to open new channels for artists Spero launched a tech startup called weeBID, the first fan-initiated crowd-funding platform. With early supporters like Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock, the company reverses the crowd-funding dynamic by allowing an artist’s fans and supporters to solicit new work or projects. A model with the potential to transform the relationship between artists and fans, weeBID was described by Philadelphia public radio station WRTI as a paradigm shifting platform in an industry with “billions of dollars at stake and kings to be made. The Quincy Jones for this new age is out there, and it’s not hard to envision that person as a tech-and-business-savvy musician/producer like Spero.”
In many ways weeBID resolves the tension that defined Spero early career as he sought to choose between his abiding love of music and his need to express himself and his fascination with the communicative power of technology. Born February 22, 1985, Spero grew up in a Chicago-area family defined by thwarted musical ambitions. His mother taught piano and during his early childhood his father was a touring rock musician “trying to make a living,” Spero recalls. “My grandpa was a pianist/singer/songwriter, and great-grandfather was a pianist who led a band on a cruise ship. Music is in my whole lineage, and each one got a day job and gave up the dream.”
Drawn to technology, he taught himself to code in HTML in middle school, which led to a thriving trade as a teenager designing websites for business owners in the community. By the time he was attending the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign majoring in jazz piano performance, music composition and graphic design he had to “start employing people to keep up with the business I was receiving,” Spero said. “At school I worked with the entrepreneurship center to learn how my passion for creativity could have even more impact by using technology to build companies.”
His skills as a web designer led to his connection with pianist/keyboardist Robert Irving III, who’d spent years as Music Director for Miles Davis. Looking for a mentor, he approached Irving and offered to build his website, an overture that led to Spero joining the talent-laden Miles Electric Band and a friendship that continues today. But by the age of 22, convinced he’d never make a living playing music, he was focusing instead on his booming tech business, a pursuit that left him increasingly unfulfilled. Spero desperately started to seek out a master musician for guidance “and the top of the pyramid was Herbie Hancock.”
An encounter with the maestro led him to embrace Nichiren Daishonin Buddhism, and renewed his focus to music. Returning to the States after a transformative backpacking trip to rural Thailand, Spero closed down his web business and plunged headlong back into jazz, woodshedding for 10 hours a day for several years. When word reached Hancock that he’d taken up chanting, he became a musical mentor as well. Spero has thrived ever since, steadily expanding his creative purview as a player, producer and composer. He’s shared his musical insights widely via his Weekly Piano jazz masterclass YouTube channel, with sessions focusing on practice rituals, his training methods for rhythmic precision, and his investigations of innovators like Hancock, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, Oscar Peterson via rigorous transcription.
His holistic approach to creativity has also led him back to tech. Diving back into the world of business with Tiny Room and weeBID doesn’t conflict with his commitment to creative expression. They reflect his passion for unleashing “the infinite potential of every human,” he says. “It gives me great joy to facilitate people realizing that for themselves. Taking personal responsibility for your music or whatever you do is the essence of freedom, but we can all use some help.”
Clips (more may be added)
There are certain countries, the names of which fire the popular imagination. Brazil is one of them; an amalgam of primitive and sophisticated, jungle and elegance, luscious jazz harmonics — there’s no other place like it in the world. And while Rio de Janeiro, or its fame anyway, tends toward the sophisticated end of the spectrum, Bahia bends toward the atavistic…
Have you ever noticed how different places scattered across the face of the globe seem almost to exist in different universes... As if they were permeated throughout with something akin to 19th century luminiferous aether, unique, determined by that place’s history...
It’s like a trick of the mind’s light (I suppose), but standing on beach or escarpment in Salvador and looking out across the Baía de Todos os Santos to the great Recôncavo, and mindful of what happened there (the Bahian Recôncavo was final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other place throughout the entirety of mankind’s existence on this planet), one must be led to the inevitable conclusion that one is in a place unique to history, and to the present.
Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin.
Brazil was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil’s national music — the pandeiro — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people).
Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil’s culturally fecund nordeste/northeast (where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa — Lagoon of the Canoe — and raised in Olho d’Águia — Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil’s aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David.
Three cultures — from three continents — running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Pandeirista on the roof.
That's where this Matrix begins:
Wolfram MathWorld
The idea is simple, powerful, and egalitarian: To propagate for them, the Matrix must propagate for all. Most in the world are within six degrees of us. The concept of a "small world" network (see Wolfram above) applies here, placing artists from the Recôncavo and the sertão, from Salvador... from Brooklyn, Berlin and Mombassa... musicians, writers, filmmakers... clicks (recommendations) away from their peers all over the planet.
This Integrated Global Creative Economy (we invented the concept) uncoils from Brazil's sprawling Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, Arabic, European, Asian cultural matrix... expanding like the canopy of a rainforest tree rooted in Bahia, branches spreading to embrace the entire world...
Recent Visitors Map
Great culture is great power.
And in a small world great things are possible.
Alicia Svigals
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (NEW YORK CITY): Apotheosis of klezmer violinists
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers (BOSTON): Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory ... Former personal recording engineer for Prince; "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (LONDON): Premier cellist in UK; brother of Andrew (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (RIO DE JANEIRO/CHICAGO): Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze (LOS ANGELES): manager, Kamasi Washington
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
"Very nice! Thank you for this. Warmest regards and wishing much success for the project! Matt"
—Son of Jimmy Garrison (bass for John Coltrane, Bill Evans...); plays with Herbie Hancock and other greats...
I opened the shop in Salvador, Bahia in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for magnificent Brazilian musicians.
David Dye & Kim Junod for NPR found us (above), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (he's a huge jazz fan), David Byrne, Oscar Castro-Neves... Spike Lee walked past the place while I was sitting on the stoop across the street drinking beer and listening to samba from the speaker in the window...
But we weren't exactly easy for the world-at-large to get to. So in order to extend the place's ethos I transformed the site associated with it into a network wherein Brazilian musicians I knew would recommend other Brazilian musicians, who would recommend others...
And as I anticipated, the chalky hand of God-as-mathematician intervened: In human society — per the small-world phenomenon — most of the billions of us on earth are within some 6 or fewer degrees of each other. Likewise, within a network of interlinked artists as I've described above, most of these artists will in the same manner be at most a handful of steps away from each other.
So then, all that's necessary to put the Brazilians within possible purview of the wide wide world is to include them among a wide wide range of artists around that world.
If, for example, Quincy Jones is inside the matrix, then anybody on his page — whether they be accessing from a campus in L.A., a pub in Dublin, a shebeen in Cape Town, a tent in Mongolia — will be close, transitable steps away from Raymundo Sodré, even if they know nothing of Brazil and are unaware that Sodré sings/dances upon this planet. Sodré, having been knocked from the perch of fame and ground into anonymity by Brazil's dictatorship, has now the alternative of access to the world-at-large via recourse to the vast potential of network theory.
...to the degree that other artists et al — writers, researchers, filmmakers, painters, choreographers...everywhere — do also. Artificial intelligence not required. Real intelligence, yes.
Years ago in NYC (I've lived here in Brazil for 32 years now) I "rescued" unpaid royalties (performance & mechanical) for artists/composers including Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd (for his rights in Bob Marley compositions; Clement was Bob's first producer), Led Zeppelin, Ray Barretto, Philip Glass and many others. Aretha called me out of the blue vis-à-vis money owed by Atlantic Records. Allen Klein (managed The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Ray Charles) called about money due the estate of Sam Cooke. Jerry Ragovoy (Time Is On My Side, Piece of My Heart) called just to see if he had any unpaid money floating around out there (the royalty world was a shark-filled jungle, to mangle metaphors, and I doubt it's changed).
But the pertinent client (and friend) in the present context is Earl "Speedo" Carroll, of The Cadillacs. Earl went from doo-wopping on Harlem streetcorners to chart-topping success to working as a custodian at PS 87 elementary school on the west side of Manhattan. Through all of this he never lost what made him great.
Greatness and fame are too often conflated. The former should be accessible independently of the latter.
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 founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian.
Salvador is our base. If you plan to visit Bahia, there are some things you should probably know and you should first visit:
www.salvadorbahiabrazil.com
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