What's Up?
zero idea what am meant to do here. I am a writer/journalist/compere. Very difficult to get anything music wise in mainstream press
website is www.janecornwell.com
Life & Work
Bio:
Jane Cornwell is an author, journalist and critic and raconteur writing mainly about jazz and global music, arts and culture, and also about travel and luxury travel.
Jane writes for major newspapers, magazines and online platforms in the UK and Australia. She is a contributing editor of Songlines magazine and is an interviewer and onstage MC for the likes of Womad, Womadelaide and the EFG London Jazz Festival.
She writes books, press releases and sleeve notes. Sometimes she goes on the radio.
In 2019 she completed a highly regarded Masters degree in Global Creative and Cultural Industries (Distinction) at SOAS, University of London – a course designed to deepen understanding of the Cultural Industries and how they are organised, financed, regulated and have been understood in theory. Her dissertation on the resurgence of jazz music in London – ‘Jazz Refreshed? A Contemporary Jazz Phenomenon’ – involved intensive research, extensive interviews, robust arguments and new ideas.
Publications:
The Whirl: Men, Music & Misadventures
A sexy and witty memoir about men, music and misadventures.
London-based journalist and music critic Jane Cornwell has always thrown herself head and heart first - along with everything else - into relationships. A fascination for other cultures, and the music and men of other cultures, has resulted in adventures as audacious and comic as they are enlightening and erotic. Travelling the world in search of love, great music and good stories, Cornwell collects relationships the way the rest of us pick up souvenir tea towels or snow domes. She writes of the young Greek bartender on Skyros during the island's bacchanalian goat festival; the Jamaican gangster who got her stoned on a beach cliff top in Negril; the Congolese ex-con in Paris who wooed her with perfume and lingerie; the young Afro-Cuban dancer in Santiago de Cuba who persuaded her to buy him jeans, trainers and a mobile phone; her nearly romp with a security guard in a Colombian love hotel, and many, many more...
This is also one woman's journey through music. From acid-house raves in London to salsa in Cuba, from reggae to pan pipes, Sufi trance to Womad, it's a tribute to music's power to heal, inspire and transport. It's a look at rituals and subcultures: Afro-Cuban Santeria. The whirling dervishes of Turkey. Congolese sapeurs in Paris. The New Age scene in Los Angeles. Stand-up comedy. Internet dating.
A fearless and funny quest for love, connection and a faithful man who can dance, THE WHIRL is a truly sexy memoir for the adventurer in all of us.
'Funny, smart, throbbing with music, life, sex and rhythm... gorgeous!' —Natalie Imbruglia
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).