I CURATE
WELCOME TO THE INTEGRATED GLOBAL CREATIVE ECONOMY
→ from Brazil: 
vai em português galera!
From the duct flute player below to Quincy Jones to you. And vice versa... pathways throughout a creative world united via the enchanted mathematics of the small world phenomenon, that "magic" which positions billions of us around the planet within some 6 or so steps of each other, those inside this matrix tending to within potentially discoverable steps of all others within, & without.
"At the handle of my hoe..."
Here the matrix was born. And so our official theme: A Massa by Raymundo Sodré & Jorge Portugual
Image: Sebastião Salgado
Sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes…
Stoked and steamed and sensual in the broadest sense of the word…
Limned in prosody & cadenced song…
Conceived in a conundrum wrapped in a smile inside an irony…
Dear friend,
The Recôncavo of Bahia, Brazil (the fertile crescent around the great Bay of All Saints) was final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Africans fleeing into the sertão (backlands) were joined by Indigenous fleeing slavery and the possession of their lands, and by Sephardim fleeing the Inquisition in Europe. Three cultures from three continents running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Nowhere else but here.
And it is exactly here that our story begins...
You're on a matrix (the transcendent artists below are within it) — in the word's original sense of "source" — of recommendations-in-series concatenating around the planet — this matrix (as odd as this might sound) having begun life as a record shop in Brazil. I'm below left, in the shop, with David Dye for World Café/U.S. National Public Radio...
"Matrixed!"
—founding member Darius Mans (economist, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) / Ex-president & president-elect of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
"I'm truly thankful ... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)"
—Nduduzo Makhathini (piano, Blue Note recording artist)
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (klezmer fiddle; founder of The Klezmatics)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (composer; piano)
"Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (cello)
Our logo is a cane cutter, designed by Walter Mariano of the Federal University of Bahia
I opened the shop in Salvador, Bahia in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for magisterial Brazilian musicians. Our online shop/matrix "radio" — featured in The Guardian — www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/apr/17/10-best-music-radio-station-around-world — was set up and organized on the laptop barely visible there behind me. The interview itself is online at www.npr.org/2013/07/16/202634814/roots-of-samba-exploring-historic-pelourinho-in-salvador-brazil.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar found us (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 — or tend to — at most a handful (or so) 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 (guitar & leather hat, below), 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 30 years now) I "rescued" unpaid royalties (performance & mechanical) for artists/composers including Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, 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 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.
Beyond beaches and carnival and tragedies urban and ecological, Brazil contains an Incandescent Country analogous in many ways to the Mississippi Delta and Deep South. This is the Brazilian Nordeste (Northeast), a place unique in the world, into which entered through the great Baía de Todos os Santos (Bay of All Saints) more enslaved human beings than any other port-of-call throughout the history of mankind. From coastal rainforest into a harsh interior humanity bled into a hot cauldron of Indigenous and Sephardic peoples likewise running from destruction.
And in astounding irony amidst this suffering, music was born: the primordial samba — chula — which journeyed south to Rio de Janeiro to evolve into the national music of Brazil; hinterland manifestations danced in pairs upon pounded earth by the light of lanterns and the moon (“chula” is a Portuguese-language word meaning something of no value, now transmuted into a term of pride).
No time machine is necessary to hear this abiding art. It’s still out there. People who were raised in it, before the arrival of electricity, radio and records, still live. Paramount among these are João do Boi (John of the Ox; clip below) and Raymundo Sodré (image above). Sodré was yanked from poverty and rocketed to national fame in Brazil: a major label deal, a huge hit blasting from every radio from the Amazonian jungle to the urban jungles of Rio and São Paulo. The hit in question was A Massa, Sodré’s defense of the “little” people, the powerless, Sodré’s people. During the dictatorship Sodré career was destroyed. He fled the country to avoid death. He returned nine years later.
Sodré and João are among the last in a great lineage of masters of the moving music of the Recôncavo and the Brazilian Nordeste’s hardscrabble backlands...
Music which is a powerful, passionate distillation of the genius of a multi-stranded culture born in strife and struggle, in a little-known and less understood part of Brazil. Music to assuage suffering by (dis)virtue of the evil that men do.
Music that the entire world could use right now.
Question: Why do matrix media page headers bear an aleph, first letter of the Hebrew alphabet?
Answer: The Matrix was inspired in (the kabbalah-inspired fiction of) Borges' (marvelous short story) El Aleph, that in the pillar in Cairo's Mosque of Amr, where the universe in its entirety throughout all time is perceivable as an infinite hum from deep within the stone...
This "all-seeing" Brazilian "aleph" doesn't hum, however...it dances and sings...
...potent forces derived from its native ground, the Recôncavo proper, where Bahia's primordial samba is danced to upon pounded earth, under moonlight broken by banana, palm and mango leaves, lifting the souls of its participants almost like something religious, which it was, and gods aside, is (João do Boi, black hat right below, with family & friends in São Braz, Bahia):
