CURATION
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from this page:
by Matrix
Network Node
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Name:
Imani Winds
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City/Place:
New York City
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Country:
United States
Life & Work
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Bio:
Over the course of their 20+ year career, Grammy nominated quintet Imani Winds has discovered what audiences value most from their concerts: a sense of connection - with the music, the performers, the composers, the artistry and beyond. Extolled by the Philadelphia Inquirer as “what triumph sounds like”, Imani Winds has created a distinct presence in the classical music world through their dynamic playing, culturally relevant programming, virtuosic collaborations and inspirational outreach programs.
The concept of connectivity has led them to program not only music from the traditional chamber music canon, but also concerts that reach beyond the usual boundaries of the recital stage. Passion for Bach and Coltrane, a concert-length work composed by Imani Winds member Jeff Scott, is an exploration of the two genius’ commonality featuring wind quintet, string quartet, jazz trio, and orator. During their multifaceted, two-year residency at the University of Chicago, Imani Winds created a concert specifically to highlight the rich history of the institution and the city, with a focus on today’s social issues featuring a world premiere by Pulitzer Prize winner and Chicago native Henry Threadgill.
Upcoming seasons include premieres of three new works: Jessie Montgomery’s piece inspired by her great-grandfather’s migration from the south to the north of the United States; music from Andy Akiho designed to be played not only on a concert stage but also outside of an immigrant detention center, and Miguel del Aguila’s piece about the brief Afro-Brazilian nation-state in 1600’s Brazil.
The wide range of programs offered by Imani Winds demonstrates their mission to expand the wind quintet repertoire. From Mendelssohn, György Ligeti, and Igor Stravinsky, to Astor Piazzolla, Elliott Carter and John Harbison, to 21st century greats like Frederic Rzewski, Jason Moran and Simon Shaheen, Imani Winds actively seeks to engage new voices into the modern classical idiom.
Imani Winds’ touring schedule has taken them across the globe. At home, the group has performed in major concert venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Disney Hall and Kimmel Center. They are frequently engaged by foremost chamber music series in Boston, Washington D.C., Houston, Philadelphia and New York, and have also played virtually every major university performing arts series including those in Amherst, Stanford, Ann Arbor, Austin, Seattle, Urbana and countless others. Festivals include Chamber Music Northwest, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Banff Centre, Virginia Arts Festival, Angel Fire and Ravinia Festival. In recent seasons, the group has traveled extensively internationally, with tours in China, Singapore, Brazil, Australia, England, New Zealand, and throughout Europe.
Imani Winds seamlessly navigates between classical, jazz and world music idioms. Through jazz legend Wayne Shorter’s Terra Incognita – his first-ever composition for an ensemble outside of his own – Imani Winds went on to perform lengthily with Shorter at major European and North American festivals such as the North Sea and Montreal Jazz Festivals. On Shorter’s acclaimed release on Blue Note, Without a Net, Imani Winds are prominently featured. The groups’ Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center residency culminated in a recital in New York’s Alice Tully Hall with renowned clarinetist/saxophonist/composer Paquito D’Rivera. The ensemble has also worked with luminaries such as bandoneonist Daniel Binelli, the Brubeck Brothers, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, clarinetist David Shifrin, and pianists Gilbert Kalish, Stephen Hough, Anne-Marie McDermott and Shai Wosner. Their ambitious project, "Josephine Baker: A Life of Le Jazz Hot!" brought chanteuse René Marie with them to New York, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.
Imani Winds enjoy frequent national exposure in all forms of media, including features on NPR’s All Things Considered, appearances on APM's Saint Paul Sunday and Performance Today, BBC/PRI’s The World, as well as frequent coverage in major music magazines and newspapers including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The group maintains an ongoing relationship with Sirius-XM and has been featured multiple times on various channels.
Imani Winds first came to prominence at the 2001 Concert Artists Guild International Competition, where they were selected as the first-ever Educational Residency Ensemble, in recognition of not only their musical abilities but their connection with audiences of all ages. To this day, Imani Winds’ commitment to education runs deep. The group participates in residencies throughout the U.S., giving master classes to thousands of students a year. In the summer of 2010 the ensemble launched its annual Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival (IWCMF). The Festival brings together young instrumentalists and composers from across North America and beyond for intense workshops in entrepreneurism as well as explorations and performance of traditional and new chamber music compositions. Festival participants have gone on to successes around the world, ranging from winning positions in orchestras, founding their own music educational programs, winning college professorships, and forming their own chamber music ensembles.
Imani Winds have six releases on Koch International Classics and E1 Music, including their Grammy Award nominated recording, The Classical Underground. They have also recorded for Naxos and Blue Note and released "The Rite of Spring" on Warner Classics which was on iTunes Best of 2013 list. In 2018 they were featured on pianist, Edward Simon’s latest recording project: Sorrows and Triumphs.
In 2016 Imani Winds received their greatest accolade to date: they are on permanent display in the classical music section of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Contact Information
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Email:
[email protected]
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Address:
123 West 128th Street
New York, NY 10027
United States of America
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Management/Booking:
Booking Manager
AMG - Artist Management Group
Bill Capone
130 West 57th Street
Suite 6A
New York, NY 10019
United States of America
Phone: 212.337.0838
Fax: 212.924.0382
Clips (more may be added)
We use the mathematics of the small world phenomenon to transform the creative universe into a creative village wherein all are connected by short pathways to all... (Wolfram explains how above)
This Integrated Global Creative Economy uncoils from a sprawling Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, Arabic, European, Asian cultural matrix...
Great culture is great power.
"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"
Our Matrix was conceived under a Spiritus Mundi ranging from the quilombos and senzalas of Cachoeira and Santo Amaro to Havana and the provinces of Cuba to the wards of New Orleans to the South Side of Chicago to the sidewalks of Harlem to the townships of South Africa to the villages of Ireland to the Roma camps of France and Belgium to the Vienna of Beethoven to the shtetls of Eastern Europe...*
Sodré
*...in conversation with Raymundo Sodré, who summed up the irony in this sequence by opining for the ages: "Where there's misery, there's music!" Hence A Massa, anthem for the trod-upon folk of Brazil, which blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south until...
And hence a platform whereupon all creators tend to accessible proximity to all other creators, irrespective of degree of fame, location, or the censor.
Matrix Ground Zero is the Recôncavo, bewitching and bewitched, contouring the resplendent Bay of All Saints (end of clip below, before credits), absolute center of terrestrial gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings (and for the sublimity these people created), the bay presided over by Brazil's ineffable Black Rome (where Bule Bule is seated below, around the corner from where we built this matrix as an extension of our record shop).
Assis Valente's (of Santo Amaro, Bahia) "Brasil Pandeiro" filmed by Betão Aguiar
Betão Aguiar
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
Replete with Brazilian greatness, but we listened to Miles Davis and Jimmy Cliff in there too; visitors are David Dye & Kim Junod for NPR/WXPN
I opened the shop in Salvador, Bahia in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for magnificent Brazilian musicians.
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 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.
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 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.comAcross the creative universe... For another list, reload page.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.
Wolfram MathWorld
Ex Terra Brasilis
Alicia Svigals
Susan Rogers
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Kamasi Washington
Randy Brecker
Roberto Mendes
Luciano Calazans
Gustavo Caribé
J Velloso
Lázaro Ramos
Fernando Guerreiro
Maria Marighella
Russell Okung
Bule Bule
Caetano Veloso
RÁDIO MATRIX